Carlson Wagonlit Travel today announced that its board of directors has appointed executive vice president and CFO Douglas Anderson as president and CEO of the company, effective immediately. Anderson fills the spot vacated by Hubert Joly, who became Carlson Cos. president and CEO March 1. Anderson was selected following a three-month CWT board search of internal and external candidates.
Immediate priorities for the new CEO include carrying out the company's growth strategy for the next three years and making provisions for the economic slowdown, which has decelerated CWT's recent growth, Anderson said.
Anderson, who is based in Paris, came to CWT in March 2007 following executive roles at UPS Logistics Group and Geneva-based SITA Group. He was the main architect of the travel management company's CWT 2010 three-year growth plan, which was unveiled earlier this year
(BTNonline, Feb. 14). "With about two weeks to go before joining CWT, I was asked by Hubert to start thinking about managing the development of the CWT plan for '08,'09 and '10," Anderson today told
Business Travel News. "I spent a lot of my first six or seven months working on that."
While CWT's revenue and volume have increased in the first two months of 2008, year over year, the end of 2007 saw a softening in the United States, and this year the Europe, Middle East and Africa region began to slow. The March Easter holiday also negatively affected last month's revenues. "The water level isn't rising as fast as it was in the past," Anderson said.
In light of market conditions, Anderson who describes himself as an "operational CFO," plans to "capture economies of scale that are available in the operating model." One way of doing that is to hold operating costs "flat or in slight decline," he said. "During the next 12 months, as things slow down a bit, I'll be looking to accelerate those initiatives because that will be important for us going forward, as we don't have as much top-line growth as we've had the last couple of years."
To offset the slowdown, Anderson plans to more closely manage and monitor front-end operational contact centers using new technology and implementing standard processes and then leverage those consistencies downstream to the mid-and back office operations, such as billing and invoicing through automation. "When there is less rework, customers get more happy and the cost structure becomes more manageable," he said.