Business Travel News CT 100 2008 Resource Guide

BEST PRACTITIONERS Business Travel News: When you were first starting to shape your best practice, what were your sources of influence and inspiration? I know, Margaret, that you were given a directive from your CEO. Margaret Hansen: He had a core team of 13 bright people from around the world and different practices who could really explain the measurements and the calculations and what the righteous thing to do is. There were a lot of subject matter experts out there researching this as a reference. As far as mapping what we did with travel, I did that. They just said what they needed and I figured out how we would bump up to it. BTN: Did you draw on any other sources to help put your ideas together? Hansen: I went around calling everybody I know in travel saying, what are you doing? TRX’s Scott Gillespie gave me his information, but he pulls in factors and uses averages and it just gets lost. For me that doesn’t work, and he and I spar about that in a healthy and fun way. Since that didn’t have what we were looking for and I could not find one source, we created our own. It was so important to our CEO that it had integrity behind it all the way. BTN: Did you have to get his sign-off before you started? Hansen: Yes. He said, go do it. I met quarterly with this core team of consultants that meets about the business strategy and there’s the client work related to sustainability. I’d say about 75 percent of the calls segued into client work. There was one mentor I had, an IT consultant, a German guy, who was brilliant in his research, Mattias. You could see in his flow charts that he was an IT guy. He would be my encourager. At one point, we thought about leaving off hotels because it is such a bloody mess of a category, but he said, “We cannot have that. We measure everything or we measure nothing.” Europe is far more ahead than other areas in the world in this regard. It’s a way of life for them. Americans are so far behind from this perspective. The U.K. has been really aggressive, but look what’s going on in that market. BTN: Janice, did the impetus for your initiative come from matching the government per diem rate? Janice Chang: That was part of it, but certainly with us hotels were a labor-intensive process. We needed to find a way to streamline it. We don’t have a travel budget per se. So there was the economics factor as well. There were several aspects that we looked at, and we decided that this was just something that we needed to do. BTN: Even though it was self-motivated, were you informed by other sources as you put the program together? Chang: Well, certainly, we did look to go the third-party route, but it was cost-prohibitive. We really wanted a customized solution, but there wasn’t something out there that met our needs. We decided that this was something we needed to solve and we did. BTN: Is that the same for you, Pam? Pamela Witherspoon: Yes. The reason the electronic travel authorization was created initially was to gain approvals for travel that was not for employees and to save money. Since then, it has been improved and added on to. BTN: Did you look at other people’s attempts to automate the approval process? Witherspoon: No. We already had the core piece. We just had to reach out to some subject experts. Obviously, the team at BCD was pretty sharp, coming from the Hewlett-Packard side. BCD was a huge part of the thinking on their end and our end. Absolutely, we worked as a team. Hansen: For us, we had no TMC involvement in developing the concept; it was internal. We had a vision of where we wanted to go and what we needed to do. Yet the TMC stepped right up and partnered and jumped through hoops, because you have to take multiple data files and mesh them together the way we are doing it, which isn’t easy, but they have been supportive. In this particular space, we have definitely led. I don’t think the travel management companies, from all of the work I’ve done, know what we do once we calculate. BTN: Was there benchmarking involved in the early stages of your best practice? Hansen: Looking at our own numbers, challenging ourselves, looking at the various calculators, looking at the different resources and the different scientists, what kind of strategies that we wanted to have. Our people bring so much passion to it. Our CEO says, “We’ll do this with passion for ideas and the people in the community with whom we live,” and he means it, he gets together with the core team of 13. They talk about their progress and the overall business strategy. This has a lot to do with client work. BTN: Susan, did you use either internal or external benchmarks to help develop your best practice? Susan Lichtenstein: We used both. We went out to companies like ours and asked what they were doing. Not a lot was being done, which surprised us tremendously. In today’s world, with the Facebooks and LinkedIns, we were surprised that not a lot was being done. We really had to go inside Cisco and see what was successful there, since we are involved in building that technology. Collaboration is key at Cisco. It is one of our key initiatives to collaborate with ourselves and our partners. We called in our communications team and they dedicated a team to us, which is still with us. They assisted in building out our Web sites and our forums. We borrowed an internal consultant to help us with our wiki. We brought in our communications team, our marketing team, our product management team and the travel team on top of it. BTN: Do any of you belong to formal benchmarking groups? Hansen: No. We benchmark internally through some of our suppliers, but we do our own benchmarking. Typically, we focus on professional services with the likes of McKinsey, Booz Allen and Boston Consulting. We’ll always talk to each other because we serve the same demands. Witherspoon: We have a group of professionals like myself based in New York City. These are entertainment accounts, so like Continued on page 22 14 September 8, 2008 www.BTNonline.com Business Travel News http://www.BTNonline.com

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Business Travel News CT 100 2008 Resource Guide The Corporate Travel 100 Ranking The Corporate Travel 100 Alphabetical Listing Best Practitioners Create Models, Tools

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