Building a
data warehouse and self-designed reporting capability for years has been a goal
for progressive travel management teams. A self-built, centralized repository would
give travel managers the ability to mash and distill information insights from
different data sources, independent of travel management companies and other
service providers.
The drawback to such an effort, dating to its pioneers like
Seagram in the mid-1990s, has been the cost and complexity of the undertaking.
Building a warehouse drains huge resources and, once up and running in the past
required a full-time analyst to interrogate the system, extract data and
present it in a meaningful format. Alternatively, travel managers have bought
off-the-shelf products from specialist travel reporting providers and
configured the products themselves, albeit within tightly constrained
boundaries.
Now, in the new world of big data and cloud computing, it
appears that those barriers to entry are finally being dismantled. U.K.-based
financial services and banking giant Barclays has used the technology platform
of cloud IT provider PI to design itself a complete reporting system that
houses its TMC booking data, supplier contracts, service-level agreements and
human resources data. The platform, called Atlas, combines these feeds to
produce three sets of highly graphical dashboards: “Business Summary” enables
individual Barclays businesses to understand their total spend and other
top-line measurements, “Traveller Behaviour” steers travelers toward better
booking habits and “Deal Performance” offers detailed supplier-contract
analysis.
Beyond the three dashboards, Atlas generates other reports,
including one that addresses a topic gaining attention in the corporate travel
world: tracking the number of days employees spend outside their country of
residence for tax-compliance purposes. Barclays and PI have split the
intellectual property rights on some of these reports, including from the Deal
Performance dashboard, and are working to offer them commercially to other
travel managers.
Ed Waite, a vice president of 10 years’ standing with the
Barclays Travel Services team who is responsible for global travel budgets,
data and travel analytics for the company, said the relationship with PI, which
began in June 2013, has enabled his team’s data visions to become reality.
“When we started, we didn’t have a robust system for
organizing data,” he said. “No one system could contain everything we wanted to
include. We had also decided strategically to have an independent data system.
If the agency provides it for you, you know you are going to depend on them.
The objective was to move to cloud-based reporting, and that’s why Atlas was
developed. PI does the technology development, but the design—what we want it
to do, how we want it to look—is determined by us, and we have every piece of
information in one place.”
PI CEO Keesup Choe said highly manipulable cloud technology,
requiring no programming skills, enables travel managers to choose the extent
to which they design their reporting. “What’s off the shelf is our platform,”
he said. “You don’t need an analyst to use it, just like you don’t need an
analyst to do your shopping on Amazon. As the vendor, we almost don’t need to
know what you want to do with it. Barclays wanted everything tweaked its own
way. Others don’t want that.”
Waite said the Business Summary Atlas dashboard introduces
businesses to controlling their travel spend, and Traveller Behaviour is about
“diving deeper and establishing patterns.” Both help heads of business at
Barclays understand their travel profile and costs with just a few key
graphics. Business Summary reports on spend and summarizes both travel policy
and opportunities for savings. Traveller Behaviour examines how employees in
that business are booking travel: Are they buying in advance? Who books only
the day before departure or persistently strays outside policy?
Waite believes a detailed understanding of how travelers in
different businesses behave allows greater flexibility in policymaking.
“Traditionally, companies have said there is one policy everyone must adhere
to, but these days it has to be more customized,” he said. “The dashboards help
you to group people visually. Dashboards and graphs get more interest with
senior people, especially if they come with a recommended course of action.”
“Action” has become a key word for Waite. “My ethos is: Is
it actionable data? Can I influence people to move from offline to online? Can
we drive them from the highest-fare tickets to the lowest? If it is not
actionable, it is not worth reporting on.”
The same acid test applies to the third dashboard set: Deal
Performance, which links a database of supplier contracts to booking data fed
in weekly by Barclay’s retained TMC. Matching the two enables the Barclays
travel team to compare the prices travelers should achieve against what they
actually achieve. One example is business class: Barclays’ travel policy calls
for the use of the cheapest available fares in the authorized class of travel
and to ensure the most cost-effective itinerary. The company wants to know
whether the discounted fares it has negotiated in business class are available
when its travelers try to book them or if they find only full-fare class seats
on offer. If the negotiated fares are regularly unavailable, Barclays would be
empowered to raise the matter with the airline in question.
Deal Performance also tracks whether travelers are paying higher
or lower than the negotiated fare and compares fares paid to different
carriers. Segment-level data is useful for analyzing market share, Waite said.
“We can also look at the program as a whole: Are there any routes where volumes
are increasing and therefore meriting our increased attention? Maybe it will be
time to negotiate a deal if we don’t have one or renegotiate if we do.” Another
type of alert built into the dashboard is warnings—for example, 60 days
ahead—that deals are set to expire.
As well as the three dashboard sets, Atlas includes a tool
for tracking the number of days Barclays travelers spend in countries other
than where they reside. “Short-Term Business Visitors,” to use the terminology
of tax authorities, in many countries are liable for taxes if they pass a
threshold for the number of days they spend there during the course of a year.
That can apply even if those days accrue through brief visits. Accounting firms
and traveler-tracking tool providers have launched products to log STBVs and
create alerts for employees nearing thresholds, but Barclays has created its
own solution.
Waite said recording when travelers enter and leave a
country is harder than it looks. “You can overestimate how long was spent there
if you round up to whole days,” he said. “If you add two 14-hour flights to
your calculation, that’s a whole day added to your trip. We get an extra day
back per person. The other problem is that looking at travel agency data is not
always straightforward because the TMC doesn’t necessarily book the round-trip
on a single itinerary and the computer doesn’t always link the two one-ways.”
He added that the system has received positive feedback from HM Revenue &
Customs, the United Kingdom’s tax authority
Not all companies will consider it important to have their
own STBV tracking tool, but the point is that technology is evolving to allow
travel managers to create the tools they need. Is corporate travel on the cusp
of a new wave of creativity? PI’s Choe thinks so.
“In the past, projects were not about what the customer
wanted but what was feasible given the technology it had,” Choe said. “We said,
‘Don’t worry about the technology,’ and that’s what is liberating for companies
like Barclays with great vision but which are limited by the technology.”
A U.S. expatriate, Choe bought into the management of London-headquartered software company PI (previously PI Benchmark) in 2009 and converted it into a provider of cloud solutions. Travel is one of the smaller of several specialist sectors for PI, including retail and healthcare, but it also is one of the fastest growing. “Travel is important to us because it doesn’t seem like it is fantastically well-served by our competitors in other sectors like Oracle or IBM,” Choe said.
This report originally appeared in the May 4, 2015, issue of Business Travel News.