Irregular 'stock takes' aren't enough anymore
One summer, when I was a teenager, I got a summer job working at a local hardware store. I can't say I enjoyed the job, which consisted mainly of helping customers push their shopping carts laden with paint, two by fours, and other DIY goods to their cars and then off-loading the goods. A few weeks of this activity convinced me that my future did not lie in hardware.
One day, my boss announced to me that it was 'stock taking day'. I was given a large pad of paper, pre-printed with product names and numbers and was told to go out onto the shop floor and write down the quantity of each item sitting on the shelves. I noticed that since customers were still in the shop depleting the inventory, my count could not really be accurate. When I pointed out to my boss the resulting futility of this exercise, unless we closed the shop for 'stock taking', he surprisingly grew angry and shouted at me to take the 'inventory' nevertheless.
I had now acquired two new words to add to my vocabulary: 'stock' and 'inventory'. After a day of taking inventory, I was satisfied to see sheets of paper with each column duly filled in with an impressive array of numbers. Not quite as excited as I was at the beginning of the day, I showed my boss the completed sheets. He then took me into the office where he showed me a computer printout (which I recognised by the dot-matrix fonts and the perforated paper). He then instructed me to write down in yet another set of papers the difference in the quantity on the computer print-out versus the 'inventory' that I had taken. He pointed to a calculator with a paper feed that I could use to do the math and left me to complete the work. Mistakenly believing that I was now a motivated future hardware man, he looked at me wisely and said, "We do stock taking each and every month".
Continued below
Assessing suppliers regularly can have an impact ©kvkirillov/iStockOf course, had I known then what I know now I would have retorted, "Is that why some goods are sold out and others we have boxes and boxes sitting in storage?"
Assessing in real-time
All large retailers had systems that automatically took their inventory using barcodes and check-out tills. The barcode was invented in 1948 by Bernard Silver, a graduate student at Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia. However, it was not until the 1970s when transistors shrunk the readers that the adoption of barcodes and barcode readers for inventory management became practical enough for wide adoption.
Imagine a retail business today that does not practice daily or even real-time inventory management. All advances in supply-chain management and LEAN operations depend on accurate and timely measurement of 'stock'. Imagine if Amazon or Wal-Mart did 
'stock taking' on a monthly basis? 'Stock taking' gives retailers the ability to measure demand, changes in customer preferences, profile client behaviour and, if they had promotions, the ability to do what-if analysis. How much lost revenue and opportunities would these retailers face without real-time inventory management?
Yet in travel, 'stock taking' on an infrequent ad hoc basis is the norm rather than the exception. Rarely do travel management departments perform in-depth measurement of demand, user profiling, demand forecasting, performance against contract and other key activities until a pending RFP. While most travel managers get regular reports on share and trend, these regular reports are rarely sufficient to give them the detailed analysis they need to properly undertake a major air RFP.
How many travel managers work for weeks to get a one-off snap shot of information that they need to conduct the air or hotel RFP?
Analysis methods
Some of the one-off analyses that travel managers scramble to complete before the RFP are.
1 Analyse the contract performance versus last year and versus estimates. This will highlight non-performing contracts when you look at it from the contract side and allow you to actively monitor contracts in real-time.
2 Measure the performance of availability against what the airlines promised would be available. Create targets for availability of given fares based on what is known and experienced of the yield management system's allowances for each fare basis code.
3 Track movements in market share by carrier and route and use this in reviews and negotiations. You can negotiate market share commitments and revenue for lower ticket costs, but you need to track your own performance against that contract to do it effectively. It's no good offering 75% market share on a route if you promised that last year and never made it, and if you only find out that you've come up short when you come to do the next RFP then you're going to have a hard time persuading the carrier that you'll do it next time.
4 Compare quotes made by airlines for comparison against actuals and to conduct 'what if' analysis on various offers (eg 'what would our spend have been if we'd been on this contract last year?').
5 Perform what-if analysis on the impact of policy changes such as changing the criterion for business class travel. This means the RFP can be against new policies going forward rather than just the historical policies.
All of these analyses, and others, can be part of normal operations instead one-off work. Proper data management and systems can automate much of these analyses so that the critical information can form the basis of on-going, effective, proactive travel management. This information arms the travel manager in most areas including budgeting, compliance monitoring, supplier management and many other functions on an on-going basis.
In the same way that real-time inventory management is not just for stock control, on-going and automated data analyses is not just for RFPs but should be an integral part of intelligent travel management based on comprehensive data analysis.