Of the 24 major federal agencies that were directed to adopt E-Gov Travel Service--a governmentwide, Web-based service that standardizes travel management practices--10 are fully deployed and last year saved hundreds of thousands of dollars and/or realized millions of dollars in cost avoidance.
The agency savings are catalogued in the Office of Management and Budget's "Report to Congress on the President's Management Agenda" for fiscal year 2008, released on Feb. 12. The report outlines the progress on two dozen e-government initiatives identified by OMB and approved by President George W. Bush's Management Council in 2001.
Another eight agencies now are rolling out ETS--which was designed to replace more than 250 different travel booking, authorization and financial systems--and are partially using the system for their end-to-end travel services. The remaining six agencies are set to begin ETS deployments this fiscal year, OMB wrote. The 24 agencies collectively constitute more than 80 percent of executive-branch civilian travel, excluding the U.S. Department of Defense.
The U.S. General Services Administration, which administers ETS, estimated that the initiative would eventually cut travel-related costs by 50 percent, saving $450 million over 10 years. Before the introduction of ETS, individual agencies operated stand-alone travel information systems that were, in many cases, unable to handle integrated electronic voucher processing. Some agencies relied greatly on ancient, paper-based systems. By last October, however, nearly 900,000 travel vouchers had been processed on ETS, and online bookings exceeded original projections, according to a January report by GSA's E-Gov Travel program manager Timothy Burke. The average savings for an online booking was $21 per transaction, he said.
Additionally, travel reimbursement processing time has been reduced from more than seven days to an average of three days, OMB reported, and more than 60 percent of reservations are made online. Before ETS, the overall governmentwide online adoption rate for travel reservations was about 6 percent.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services was one of the first agencies to adopt the ETS system, migrating in 2005 to Northrop Grumman Mission System's GovTrip, one of three designated ETS providers. The other providers are Carlson Wagonlit Government Travel's E2 Solutions and Electronic Data System's FedTraveler.com. The government decided that ETS should be commercially hosted in order to minimize technology development costs and guarantee refreshed functionality for basic travel services included in the contract, OMB said.
Currently, 11 of HHS's 12 operational divisions are fully deployed on ETS, allowing the agency by this past September to process nearly 14,000 vouchers through the system, according to OMB. For fiscal year 2007, HHS realized a cost avoidance of more than $2.3 million by reducing traveler and manager time that would have gone into performing costly and inefficient paper processing, OMB said.
When compared with its pre-electronic government travel service prices, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs was one of the biggest savers, trimming more than $894,000 in service costs for reservations last year. The agency also said it avoided more than $3.6 million in costs as a result of using the ETS system, which reduced traveler and manager time for planning, arranging, authorizing, approving and processing post-travel reimbursement.
The U.S. Department of State, which began migrating its travel services to Carlson Wagonlit in 2006, saved more than a half million dollars last year in travel management service fees for reservations, according to the OMB report. State also realized an additional $22,000 in cost avoidance by reducing traveler and manager time for trip planning and trip arranging-related expenses. "Additionally, by using the ETS online booking engine, DOS is experiencing better policy compliance through improved pre-travel visibility of travel spending," OMB stated.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which migrated its travel services to Northrop Grumman in 2007, consolidated 427 travel management center orders into a single task order, improving centralized control and management of travel contracts. No dollar savings were disclosed in the report. The U.S. Department of Transportation, however, reported that it saved $402,000 in 2007 in travel management fees.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's success in reducing costs also has been stellar, according to OMB. Last year, HUD decreased its average voucher processing cost to $13.75 from $75.
Of the 18 agencies that have completed or begun their ETS deployments, electronic voucher production from that system in 2007 constituted about 20 percent of the total potential voucher population from those agencies, OMB said in the report.
Even though the U.S. Department of Interior is scheduled to migrate its travel services to Northrop Grumman this year--and therefore does not yet have full end-to-end capability--it nonetheless trimmed $159,000 in travel management service fees in 2007 by increasing its online booking rate to 54 percent.
"DOI is achieving significant savings in airline ticket prices by leveraging the City Pair Program (CPP) fares, along with assuming some risk by purchasing reduced-price tickets that include change penalties," according to OMB. "Combined, DOI can potentially save over $8 million each year by purchasing tickets below the CPP fare."
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security began a limited migration of its travel services to ETS in 2005. Through a combination of advantageous TMC pricing and a substantially higher degree of online booking, DHS saved more than $18,000 in travel management service fees for reservations in 2007, OMB said. By reducing traveler and manager time, DHS also avoided more than $65,000 in costs last year.
"From travel planning and authorization to the review and approval of post-travel reimbursement, this end-to-end service streamlines travel management and will enable the government to capture real-time visibility into the buying choices of travelers and assist agencies in optimizing their travel budgets while saving taxpayers money," OMB said.