Sophisticated Data Management Is Within Reach for Small & Midsize Enterprises

Evolving technology has made travel data management and analysis feasible for small and midsize enterprises. Two travel managers—Standard Insurance senior director of purchasing, supplier management and payables Bryan Redmond and Tableau senior travel manager Jennie Robertson—spoke with BTN associate editor JoAnn DeLuna about the possibilities, the processes and the problems.

BTN: Bryan, you’d like to use business intelligence tool DVI to compare compliance among travelers using corporate cards and those using personal cards. What else do you hope to do with data once DVI starts compiling your travel, credit card, HR and general ledger data in April?

Bryan Redmond: The attraction is to have a true analytical and reporting platform to feed [in the different data sources] and start an analytical deep dive with some dashboard information. We want to benchmark our cost because we don’t know what [spend] is from booking online versus calling into the TMC, which can rebook at no cost, make flight changes at reduced fees, constantly scan hotels and automatically rebook if there’s a lower fare. The other thing is: When [travelers] book outside [designated channels], we can no longer be sustainable with duty of care. We want to be able to capture the percentage of travelers we cannot support at any point.

Jennie Robertson: We do a fair amount now of [what Bryan aims to do]. Our finance planning and analysis group builds their own visualizations using Egencia and Concur data sources. They monitor for anomalies and write up monthly, BTN:uarterly and annual reports highlighting what individual business unit leaders need to focus on. [My colleague] and I do the daily travel policy [checks].

BTN: How will a data tool change how you interact with data?

Redmond: We use Concur Travel & Expense, so on a monthly basis, we get a rolling 24-month data dump of transactions and [import] it into Excel. If we have policy violations or compliance issues like purchases on a personal card or a large cash [claim] over the policy limit, we determine how someone’s behavior has been exhibited over a large period of time. It takes two days to prepare and get that ready to be evaluated and monitored through Excel. It’s really not “intelligent.” It’s more of a data dump and using Excel to massage and manage that the best we can because we don’t have a true analytical tool.

BTN: How much time do you spend analyzing the data once you have it?

Redmond: I’d say eight hours a month. I haven’t wanted the team to invest [more time] in manual processes because we’re not staffed for that and we’re not going to add additional people. We’re hoping that with this new data analytics tool, we’ll be able to capture that and click through a lot easier.

BTN: Jennie, you have a built-in data analytics solution because you manage travel for Tableau, a business intelligence software offering. That’s handy for an SME travel program. What can others do?

Robertson: Travel can sometimes be its own world within a company. So first thing, reach out to someone in finance or IT and ask if you have a self-service business intelligence analytics tool that the company is already using internally. There may be licenses people internally are already using but are not widely known or distributed.

BTN: Does free-and-clear access to a business intelligence tool make it easier, or do you still face challenges just as other SMEs do?

Robertson:  Our TMC is Egencia. There is no [application programming interface], so our reporting team has to pull about 90 reports every Monday from Egencia’s reporting tool, [though the process] is automated by using scripting and different third parties. If I want something today, I have to go into Egencia’s reporting tool, as we only do a weekly refresh of the data. If we had a daily or instant feed, we could build our own monitoring system instead of using Egencia’s reporting tools. They just need updating. Egencia is working toward a single global platform, but right now, for things like out-of-policy notifications, they have two core systems: one for the U.S. and Canada and one for everywhere else. There’s functionality I have in the U.S. that I don’t have in other countries. I have 10 points of sale and each one is on a different site, so if I want to change a policy like increase per diems I have to log in to 10 sites to change them. The API is in Egencia’s pipeline, but I don’t think it’ll happen this year. We figured out a slightly easier way to do it that involves reconfiguring our database to accept [the data] that way, so we don’t have to pull so many reports. We’re doing that this year. It’s a lot of work to get our own data.

BTN: So what advice would you give others looking for data management solutions?

Redmond: Understand the integration piece from end to end and where you’ll get the reporting because you can find yourself in the middle of two unwilling partners. Line up whatever solution and partners you will use. Can they really meet reporting and analytical capabilities?

BTN: Jennie, you’re dealing with something like that now, right? In November, Egencia and Concur will retire the API that feeds Egencia booking data into Concur Expense. How will you manage the change?

Robertson: We haven’t figured out how we’re going to deal with that when they shut off the connector. We haven’t really figured out how important it is, either. It’s hard to say. One thing we’ve struggled with is that there are some cool third-party tools out there like Tripbam and Roadmap that we wanted to consider, but the hurdle was getting our data to them. It’s more challenging with Egencia because they have inventory coming from many different systems and providers; it’s not all consolidated in one GDS. This added complexity makes it more difficult to share data with third parties. [Egencia] doesn’t necessarily have an incentive to get our data over to third parties because they might prefer to provide the service themselves to keep us in their ecosystem, [perhaps through] their own mobile app or a hotel rate shopping tool that will work with Egencia/Expedia inventory. If I had access to the data on a daily or instant basis, I could share it myself, but I don’t at present, at least not in the way that I want to. So for anyone who may be going out to bid for a TMC, it’s important to make sure you own your data, can access it in the manner that works best for you and [can] share it with third parties as you see fit.

BTN: Would you change to a travel management company that can make those connections with third parties?

Robertson: Everyone’s down on their provider because at the end of the day, there are only two [options] if you need an online booking tool that’s truly global and built to scale: Egencia or Concur. I’ve been with both, and it’s not like the grass is greener. It’s just different; it’s blue. Concur is truly an agnostic booking tool, but then you have to deal with working with another third party, a travel agency on top of that. This is another huge challenge: Going global when you’re small. There’s nothing other than Egencia when you’re growing slowly. It’s either managed in your home country and unmanaged everywhere else or [it’s] Egencia because they’re the only ones I’ve ever found that makes any financial sense to launch with 20 travelers. You wouldn’t do that with Concur and a third party. The local agency doesn’t want it at that size. That’s the good thing about Egencia.