Oil and gas giant Shell International has built its own business intelligence platform that allows travelers and their managers to view travel footprints at individual, team and enterprisewide levels.
According to corporate travel program manager and project leader Frerik Wassink, the emphasis is on producing actionable data that "inspires" rather than compels travelers to change their behavior.
The intention is to steer travelers toward meeting travel program goals that align with the company's strategic objectives, including cost containment and maximizing health, safety and security. The former is achieved through benchmarking prices, advance-purchase period for airfares and the proportion of hotel bookings at preferred properties. The latter is achieved by monitoring the proportion of hotel bookings made through the company's approved travel management company, since using designated booking channels helps find travelers during emergencies.
Accessible through the company intranet, the Shell platform is dubbed MyTravel. Only the travel team can access all data at the individual level. Travelers can see their own footprints (all data collected about them on the platform) and a summary for the company, while managers can see the footprints of individuals who report to them. Everyone who uses MyTravel can drill down as far as their raw passenger name record data "so they can verify everything," said Wassink. "That was important, because if people could only see aggregated figures, they might doubt them."
The data is presented in both numerical and graphical form via a series of tabs, such as spend and savings potential, including the advance booking and preferred supplier key performance indicators. Other indicators include use of the online booking tool and lowest logical fares. MyTravel also encourages travel avoidance, though without a specific KPI to support this objective.
"We expect line managers and travelers to look at overall travel spend and see if the travel was necessary," said vice president of corporate travel Thérèse O'Connor, to whom Wassink reports. "For each piece of travel it is clear what the purpose of the meeting was, and by giving them a tool that clearly shows the spend and savings potential, we hope this will encourage them not to travel if that is an option."
Data for health, safety and security includes air and rail distances traveled and the amount of travel-related carbon dioxide emitted. MyTravel also tracks whether reservations are fulfilled by the travel management company, either through direct bookings or the company's online booking tool. The information currently is obtained by analyzing hotel bookings attached to transport bookings: If a booked return journey includes three nights away, for example, has the same traveler also booked three nights in a hotel via the TMC? Such attachment rates, of course, do not tell the whole story because the traveler may not have booked their flight via the TMC either. Wassink's team therefore is working to correlate Shell's card and agency data to provide a fuller picture. Wassink described the project as "work in progress."
MyTravel essentially is a marriage of Shell's agency data and its reporting hierarchy. It is based on an application the company's IT department already had created on a much smaller scale elsewhere in the business for access by a very limited number of managers. Shell also had an existing, more rudimentary travel reporting system accessible only to senior leadership. "We were being asked on a daily basis by people in the organization for travel data," said Wassink. Seeking to introduce a platform with enterprisewide access, Wassink reviewed external business intelligence products before concluding there was potential instead to develop internal technology—a decision aided by a reluctance to share the reporting hierarchy with outside parties.
Another decisive factor was Wassink himself. He joined the Shell travel team in 2010 but had studied engineering and worked in IT and procurement, including logistics experience at SAP.
"My IT background helped me think about what is feasible and what is not and also to talk the language of our IT people," he said. That made him well-positioned to drive forward a project that brought together the travel and IT departments (among others, including corporate communications, for example).
Travel sits within real estate in Shell's organizational structure. Wassink needed to convince real estate senior management to invest in MyTravel, but with a well-built business case it proved a relatively easy sell. "The cost of doing this is a very small fraction of the value that is out there to be gained, but what really swung the deal for us was the health, safety and security aspect," he said. "That is very important for Shell."
Senior management accepted that MyTravel could deliver a return on investment even though it is intended only to influence, not enforce, behavioral change. The platform's slogan is "MyTravel, Your Footprint."
"The intention is to allow travelers, teams and budget-holders to make more informed decisions," said Wassink. "We wanted it to be inspiring. That is important for us because we are in the business of influence rather than talking about compliance and noncompliance and giving green and red lights. If we want to support travelers in optimizing travel themselves, they need data transparency. We are helping people to look at data and draw their own conclusions. We believe people want to do their best but don't always know what to do. We have seen a change in behavior, and that was mainly done without consequence management, which is not the style of our company."
Wassink claimed the introduction of the platform has brought three key benefits. The first is an improvement in the savings and duty-of-care KPIs (although Shell declined to disclose savings or any other MyTravel figures, including costs). Next is improved engagement between the travel department and the rest of the business. "We have become more of a business partner, because now we are sitting in front of teams to discuss their travel footprint with them," he said. Finally, requests to the travel team for ad hoc reporting have reduced significantly, allowing more time for formal analytics.
Few companies have the resources to build a travel business intelligence platform in-house. Nevertheless, Wassink said he believes some of the principles behind MyTravel can be applied more widely. "Stakeholder engagement is critical," he said. "We sometimes joke that everyone in the enterprise is a travel manager, because they all have their say about it. MyTravel ensures everyone is looking at travel through the same lens and linking it to strategic objectives.
"I believe in applying 'system thinking'—thinking about the enterprise as a whole and what travel can add to that," he continued. "Then you can understand the requirements of your travel program and communicate through data that is meaningful. What I typically see is a simple dashboard showing what the company spends, leading to an order to cut travel by 10 percent, which is not very helpful. If you provide inspiring dashboards, people can understand how to act on what they see."
This report originally appeared in the November 2014 edition of Travel Procurement.