Optimum service
by Peter Wiseman, HRG Business Manager
Our client is a state Government who asked us to devise and implement a Travel Management System (TMS).
The Government is responsible for providing services such as hospitals, schools and policing to the local population as well as for the negotiation and implementation of supplier arrangements including travel at a Whole of Government (WoG) level.
The client has 13 core departments responsible for delivering core services which were already mandated to use HRG for travel management services. In addition, several hundred smaller Government-owned corporations could choose to use HRG under the WoG arrangements or operate independently.
The Government spends the equivilent of $100M per annum on travel, 80% spent on travel within the state and the remainder travelling interstate. International spend is relatively small at approx. $5M per annum.
The Government ran a RFI process to the open market and invited a shortlist of six companies to a closed tender process – HRG was the only travel management company to participate in the tender process, the other five companies were technology specialists. Following a competitive RFT process HRG was awarded the contract to develop a Travel Management System (TMS).
Separate RFT processes were also conducted by the Government for a hotel broker and a travel management company, HRG was awarded these contracts following competitive tender processes.
Being a Government organisation meant the client was required to abide by rules and governance in relation to the spending of public monies. This involves complex approval rules, audit and information security requirements including approval on all expenditure prior to it being committed – which is difficult to achieve with low cost carriers which operate under an instant purchase model.
To add further complexity, the Government has thousands of different entitlements and allowances based on the profile of the individual, where they are travelling and when they depart and returnhome.
The TMS was required to manage and automatically calculate these entitlements in line with the travellers itinerary, including paying, reconciling and reporting on all entitlements.
The client wanted to develop and implement a system that seamlessly integrated the total end-to-end process of travel, utilising technology to automate and eliminate many manual processes.
The client was also focussed on eliminating the overall cost of shopping for travel itineraries, seeking approval, paying, reconciling and acquitting the trip and finally reporting on WoG and departmental spend as required. Manual steps within the Government, eliminated because of the technological capabilities of the TMS, continue to be tracked and reported where necessary for audit purposes.
The Government estimated that actual dollar savings in excess of $25M would be achieved in the first five years of the TMS being extended across departments. In addition, further savings would be achieved through the removal of duplicated and manual processes throughout the entire process.
The TMS was required to integrate with the Government‘s travel management company and hotel broker suppliers.
HRG teamed up with one of the world‘s leading expense management systems – Spendvision, to ensure integration with our our online booking tool, HRG Online.
A comprehensive design, development and testing phase run over a number of years resulted in the TMS being approved by the client and it went live in February 2009.
Dedicated teams from both the Government and HRG worked jointly on the project to provide the client with a streamlined programme to assist travellers and travel bookers in arranging work-related travel bookings.
The system is a one stop shop for booking air travel, accommodation and vehicle hire online and at the same time adheres to Whole-of-Government policy that is built into the system and updated centrally to ensure the system is current at the time of booking.
Booking through the system also provides access to WoG supplier arrangements across domestic and international air travel, car hire and accommodation. The system also manages policy, the approval process, entitlements and expense reconciliation.
Extensive travel management reports are available giving individual agencies a range of travel data not previously available.
The TMS is being rolled out to all core agencies and the adoption rate in Whole of Government is currently 62% of domestic bookings. The target is to achieve 100% of the Government’s travel requests to go via the system by the end of 2011.
One of the major learnings from the process has been the importance of the design stage in a technical solution so that the scope of the project and expected outcomes are understood and agreed by all parties.
Managing the transition to the system in terms of training and communication of the benefits as well as responding to feedback form users has also been key to the ongoing success of the project.
"We sought both a technology and a travel management partner to implement an end-to-end travel management solution. In HRG we found a partner who was able to meet these expectations.
"HRG’s TMS is the first, and still the only, end-to-end travel management tool and the first to be implemented across a whole of government. Our overall end-to-end travel process including booking, approval, travel entitlements and payment process has been reduced from 120 minutes to 12 minutes. The cash benefits have been closely measured and have reduced direct costs by a conservative estimate of eight per cent with a payback period of less than one year."