Amid a recent worldwide travel management company
consolidation effort, office furnishings supplier Steelcase also implemented
its first global traveler-tracking and safety program.
For Grand Rapids, Mich.-based Steelcase, which has about
10,000 employees and earned about $2.9 billion in revenue during the 12 months
ending in February 2013, the move to globalization began about four years ago
under a directive from the company's CFO to reinvent processes across several
departments, said global travel manager Jamie Slagh. While Steelcase's program
was tightly managed within the United States, travelers outside the country
were able to book travel through whichever platforms they wished.
Steelcase selected Carlson Wagonlit Travel as its global
agency and implemented it one country at a time, first in Europe, followed by
Asia. It completed the global rollout in the fall of 2012 and now works with 16
CWT offices throughout the world, she said. During that implementation process,
Slagh's team decided the program needed a duty-of-care component, for which it
turned to International SOS.
"They had been a provider of ours from the security-assistance
standpoint," Slagh said. "We leveraged an even greater partnership
with them and their traveler-tracking tool. Whenever a reservation is made
through CWT, it's electronically sent to ISOS and uploaded into the tool."
Steelcase employees traveling abroad also receive pre-trip
advisories with travel advice, cultural information, vaccination requirements
and any travel warnings relevant to their destinations, using data compiled by
ISOS and sent by CWT. During the trip, travelers also receive emails with any
relevant travel alerts, Slagh said.
Additionally, Steelcase uses ISOS to manage electronic
emergency records for travelers. Those records include contact information,
medication needs, vaccination history and a passport copy for each traveler.
Previously, those records had been kept as hard-copy documents in files at
Steelcase's global headquarters.
Of course, such a program requires high traveler
booking-channel compliance. Steelcase mandates the use of CWT globally, but
Slagh and her team decided not to deploy a single booking tool worldwide.
Instead, each region uses the booking tool that best meets its needs—which, in
some cases, is no booking tool at all.
"In Germany, for example, you need a tool with really
good rail content," Slagh said. "We found that in Asia, they're
really not interested in booking online and want to talk to the agent. The
cultures are different."
As the program rolled out, Steelcase boosted compliance
through training efforts conducted in person as much as was possible,
supplemented by remote conferencing. Displaying the global tracking map of all
current travelers helped them better understand the need for a global platform,
she said. During implementation, Slagh conducted monthly calls with operations
teams in each country to make sure things were going smoothly, moving to
bimonthly or quarterly calls as the process settled.
Slagh now is developing an online training course to help
travelers with the program, showing them how to update their profiles,
educating them about the company's relationships with CWT and ISOS and offering
safety and medical trips for travel. She plans to have the training course
translated into different languages to use it globally.
Though Steelcase's global program still is rather new, it's
had a few chances to prove its mettle. During the Boston Marathon bombing in
April, "we were able to reach out immediately to our travelers and make
sure they were safe," Slagh said. "When you talk about executive
support and buy-in, it was a huge win, because we could show executives that
traveler-tracking map."