When it comes to maximizing corporate investment in expense management systems, counsel the purveyors of those systems, travel managers should look inside their own organizations. And they should look often.
Things change, they say, and that's the way it is right from the beginning. "If you think you have all you need at the end of the implementation, you're missing something," says Craig Fearon, senior product director of expense applications for Cybershift. (The company's expense management system is Necho, acquired in November 2005.)
Most new users reach the saturation point before they reach the end of the manual when first installations are made. That's okay. It would be difficult at that point to envision all of the ways they might use those new systems. There's too many capabilities and too many possibilities for putting them to use — and changing circumstances will change needs anyway.
It's a time when new corporate users are excited about the new tool but time-constrained as well, says Kathy Schindler of Infor, an enterprise software provider. She estimates that as much as 40 percent of the information about using a new system is left until later when a refresher of some kind can be scheduled.
A lot of education does occur during that initial deployment, points out Mike Hilton, executive vice president of worldwide marketing and co-founder of Concur Technologies. But travel managers and administrators usually start small and then come back to learn more when they're ready for the next step. Often that occurs when the company is ready to expand globally, he adds, but it doesn't matter when or why — Concur has a comprehensive learning team that is always available. So, he adds, does the client corporation.
You've Got People
Remember that: from the beginning, a successful implementation involves representation — and exchange of ideas and observations — from all affected areas. "If an implementation project is being driven from the travel department, be certain to involve AP (accounts payable)," says Fearon. "If AP is driving the project, the travel manager should insert himself into that project." Cybershift's implementation team practices what Fearon preaches: "We see ourselves as more of a finance solution than a travel solution and we tell our AP clients to be sure to involve the travel department."
Travel managers will find that they will become "very friendly with the AP staff," he predicts. "They will already have experience with how expenses are approved, reimbursed, audited and processed through back office functions ... and there's a lot for the AP staff to learn as well about travel." They don't know, for instance, how travel is booked, or that there are significant differences in how air, rental car and hotel reservations are made and paid.
When it comes to finding internal partners for learning how to increase control of T&E expenditures, different viewpoints can be pivotal — and sometime crippling — considerations. It's important to keep differing perspectives from killing a partnership and the benefits it can deliver, says Charles Brossman, a business travel veteran signed on by Ariba as its ambassador to the managed travel community. The people at Ariba, and most of their customers, see procurement as the driver of T&E management, especially when it comes to automation. The company is just beginning to go beyond its primary market — the corporate finance department — to reach out to the business travel community.
His company's perception may be that it is leading — or luring — the travel department into new territory. But Brossman knows that's not completely true. Many such relationships have already been forged in managed travel, albeit at times reluctantly. And once established, it's not always a comfortable alliance. Many travel managers will have to get over their fear of losing their jobs as these new partnerships develop, he observes.
"In our opinion, travel has got to become part of the procurement process," says Brossman. It's a matter of being able to calculate and compare the value delivered by a company's various expense categories. A company's procurement department "probably already has specialists in other areas," he explains. "It gives you the ability to show value because they're all using the same metrics.
"How many systems are you logging into to approve, measure and report expenses?," he asks. The benefits formula is simple. The more disparity between these systems, the more costly the processes become. Conversely, the more standardization among them, the more compliance from employees empowered to spend company money.
Complimentary Perspectives
There are a lot of people who should be on the team, each with his or her own perspective to offer. Including the purchasing card manager is key, says Brossman. That gives the company the ability to see data from the requisition alongside data from the payment side and makes reconciliation a more exact and effective audit tool. "If you see a requisition and not a payment," he says, "you can go to the user and say 'Have you not received the product or are you getting a refund?'"
Each side in the travel-procurement alliance has something to contribute. While the purchasing department (especially accounts payable) concentrates expense automation, travel managers tend to look to travelers and concentrate on their satisfaction, points out Fearon. They will know better than anyone how to make their travelers comfortable with the part of the system they will use. Converting them from manual entry of expenses to the idea of using an automated system shouldn't be difficult, he observes dryly: "They've always looked at that task as a necessary evil." But there are probably details that the travel manager knows better than anyone about how travelers are likely to function throughout the process, and what must be done, for instance, to encourage them to use a payment card as much as possible.
Within a corporation, it will be what one manager calls "the power users" to develop the full potential of an automation system. But those, he laments, can be few and far between.
Users with something a little less than "power" status will become at adept at using configurations for existing rules as a template for setting up the rules supporting new policies. That approach can work quite well, according to Schindler, although using templates "tends to put limiting parameters" around a new project.
Tips and tricks are also exchanged within a technology company's community of users. Traditionally this type of exchange has been most active at annual users' conferences. That's being augment at Concur with a new online community launched last year. It's been a hit, racking up about 700 postings so far, says Concur's Hilton: "There's not too many challenges that a client faces that haven't been faced by one of our other clients."
The majority of the postings concern the expense reporting system but the exact subjects cover a wide range: lost receipts, managing personal expenses on the company card, setting up expense reporting procedures for overseas deployments ... with a total of 700 postings the subjects seem endless but there appears to be none that are left unattended.
Although the forums are accessible to anyone who goes to the Concur web site, Hilton acknowledges that they are moderated in the interests of keeping exchanges honest. That's honest, not censored. Not all the feedback is positive, he admits, but that's not edited: "We build trust by exposing everything — and we have less warts than most."
More often, Concur representatives weigh into these online discussions to advise that the topic at hand has been added to the company's list of possible future enhancements. The forum function also is being paired with another feature that encourages customers to suggest what developments they would like to see from Concur, and to weigh in on the value of other users' suggestions. "It's an increasingly valuable tool," says Hilton, adding that "a lot of times customers want to talk to someone about changes in the tax laws."
Some of the business changes that comprise managed travel's hot topics have not yet made it to expense management level. Despite published reports of growing concern over employee retention and the preferences of employees from generations X and Y, there's been little noticeable impact at AstraZeneca, says Mike Herubin, senior manager for expense reimbursement. "We're not yet turning off any rules to assuage Gen X and Y" in the interests of retention, says Herubin.
Perhaps that is because of the opportunity to administer limitations in an impersonal manner through the intervention of automated systems. AstraZeneca, which uses the Infor system, has recently updated its travel policy to set daily spending limits, and a rule will be incorporated into the automated system to support that. Both the new generation of travelers and those who have yet to be familiarized with the new rules will be educated to some degree by the pre-trip approval process. Data feeds from credit card companies will also set off reminders when it comes time to submit expense reports: "We'll pay for room service but not bottled water or a movie," says Herubin.
"We'll track the big spenders and exceptions and [if the situation warrants] find out who and why," he continues. "If management sees a trend they don't like, we can identify travelers who have been regularly exceeded spending limits ... and where firmer measures could be taken."
Telecommunications costs have also been receiving a lot of attention in the general business press but it's yet to be felt in the managed travel arena. "I would have expected it to be a little bit more of a hot topic than it is today," muses Fearon. Necho does have clients who have been managing telecom costs — some for quite a while — but they've abandoned collection of the details, he says. There's not much concern anymore about what the call is for or to whom it is made, he says. These companies are currently focusing instead on gross spend: "Calling home is now more of an acceptable expense, but maybe not calling your friend in Norway."
"One of the most basic problems is that few know how big their bill is," says Hilton. The situation bears striking similarities to the struggle to begin controlling small meeting spend; no one has a clear picture of who is managing telecommunications contracts, how its use is being billed or how travelers are being reimbursed.
Although — as in other distressed periods — corporations are looking first for the travel department to cut spending on air travel and hotels, some companies may soon be pushed to look more closely at their telecommunications expenses, he continues. He thinks that the Fortune 500 companies may be the first to make the move: "It's in the really large companies where a 50 cent expenditure can really mount up — they've already seen that with the cost of parking at the airport as opposed to parking off-premises."
