Connect with Kevin
Kevin recently joined small, simple, self-service meetings technology provider Bizly as the firm's chief strategy officer. Bizly recently received a cash infusion from from JetBlue
Technology Ventures, Hone Capital
and Zoom CEO Eric Yuan and is looking to internationalize its product to Europe in 2020.
In my global travel and strategic meetings management
program days, being part of procurement and category leadership, I was a big
advocate and champion of the ‘one throat to choke’ strategy when it came to
preferred global supplier sourcing and category management. Many procurement and sourcing professionals
believed for years that strategy was best-in-class, especially when attempting
to globalize corporate travel programs.
Sure, there were pros and cons, but the pros outweighed the cons and
many multinational companies pushed forward, selecting 'global' suppliers only
to watch them succeed in some global regions and get mixed results in
the others.
At that time, the main reasons the pros outweighed the cons
centered around these core beliefs: One supplier could provide service level
uniformity throughout the global regions; a single provider improved data
quality and reporting consistency; costs could be rationalized by using one
supplier, and any pricing or cost anomalies could be more effectively
negotiated.
Many companies discovered the above assumptions were not
achievable without a lot of additional cost, work, resources and more intense
negotiations. There was a gradual realization that no supplier could deliver on
the above expectations on a global scale. Most ‘global’ suppliers had local or
regional affiliates, partners, and other arrangements they cobbled together as
a 'global' solution. Eventually, lack of uniformity in service delivery,
execution gaps, pricing problems, data quality and timeliness issues—along with
a lot of other challenges—became painfully clear to corporate travel
managers.
To their credit, and for lack of better strategies, travel
managers tried to make this strategy work. Some made headway and pseudo-globalized
their travel programs. Today, with technology advancement, improved supplier globalization—including
consolidation of multinational suppliers—we are at an inflection point.
We now live in a world with companies using open application
program interfaces to communicate, transmit and gather data. Because of this, the
theory that one company is best positioned to capture everything is not only
flawed, it’s obsolete. Travel managers can finally stop choking that one throat,
and instead partner with best-in-breed suppliers regionally or even per country,
without sacrificing data collection and consistency. Open APIs enable technologies
to communicate no matter what the language and cultural differences may be.
So what should global buyers be thinking of? Traveler
experience, duty of care and better data are a good start, but they can only be
achieved with global program compliance and adoption. How can you get that in
this new world?
- Source for the program ecosystem; prioritize the
best suppliers per sourcing category and get comfortable with the idea that the
best provider may be headquartered in Poland or Iceland or anywhere.
- Avoid all-in-one bundled pricing strategies,
where you buy a bundle of services, features and functionalities at a savings
but, in reality, only use a few because many features lack relevance or are not
user-friendly (and may drive travelers away from the program).
- Celebrate and embrace technology advances as
they revolutionize the way we interact and conduct business.
The travel manager's primary interest should be
collective supplier data and how to consolidate it for a global view. Analyzing
that global data will prove invaluable in future supplier negotiation
strategies and planning. Where once travel managers had to force travelers
through a single supplier funnel to approximate this result, today's corporate
travel and meetings programs should open themselves to best-in-breed suppliers
that not only serve the local market but can deliver the right data in the
specified format to the client's data aggregator, lead TMC or meetings
management company. With this strategy, everyone wins: travelers, buyers and
the best solution providers for the client's unique program.