Old Mutual may sound like a long-lost Dickens manuscript – indeed, when the group’s forerunner was founded back in 1845, the 33-year-old Charles was busily dreaming up the opening instalments of Dombey and Son, to be published the following year – but it is in fact one of the world’s top financial companies.
The group has interests in, among other things, savings and investment solutions, asset management and insurance, and it owns a majority stake in Nedbank, one of South Africa’s leading bank franchises.
As well as Old Mutual Global Investors, its UK operations include savings and investments firm Skandia UK which, along with Skandia International and various European entities, is to be re-branded to reflect its relationship with Old Mutual. The wind of change is certainly blowing through this venerable institution.
That should hold no fears for Kim Clayton, Skandia UK’s travel manager. Over the past couple of years, she has seen so much change that a mere multinational re-branding exercise should be a walk in the park.
For a start, until around two
years ago, Kim had very little experience of travel management. She inherited the travel portfolio, with little handover time and a steep learning curve, from a departing colleague. On top of that, she isn’t actually the company’s travel manager. She is the central services specialist within the facilities management department and – assisted by her colleague Janet Mabey – spends only a couple of days a week managing around £3 million of travel spend for 1,800 employees.
QUICK WORK
And if that wasn’t enough to contend with, Kim had very quickly to forge a working relationship with Chambers Travel Management (which took over the Skandia account on January 1, 2012) and Chambers’ account manager Fabienne Groisil-Wren. She also had to implement a new online booking tool (just to complicate matters further, Fabienne is currently on maternity leave, so Skandia’s business travel is being handled by Chambers’ strategic business managers Gemma Munsey and Sue Reeves).
It’s not as if there is much consistency in the travel requirements, either: apart from regular trips to the Old Mutual offices in Cape Town, Skandia employees are frequently jetting off to South America and across western Europe, notably to Germany, France and Italy.
“We have also recently developed more business opportunities in the Far East – particularly Hong Kong and Singapore,” says Kim. “Our travel also takes us to Bangalore and Mumbai because our IT has been outsourced for the last five years to a third-party company based in India.
“We are very project driven, and as well as all the places already mentioned, 2013 saw an increase in flights to and from Australia, due to an ongoing project which is intended to bring major changes to the way we work from 2016 onwards.”
She says forging a relationship with Fabienne and Chambers “was a doddle”, but implementing the online booking tool was rather more problematic. “In the early days it was very difficult, with system issues caused by Skandia’s firewall, with the travel bookers having to get used to working with Chambers’ operations team in Glasgow, and with the natural course of everyone getting used to ‘change’,” says Kim.
SMOOTH RUNNING
“Fabienne and the Chambers team were fantastic, and through regular monthly meetings, we gradually came out the other side. By the second half of 2012, everything was running along a lot more smoothly – and I was starting to feel as if I’d been involved in travel all my life.”
For all the firewall hassles, it clearly worked – Skandia’s online adoption is currently running at around 80 per cent. Policy compliance is high, too, even though it is not mandated.
Kim adds: “Our policy is to
book the lowest-cost available flight, subject to it meeting our travellers’ needs. Timings of flights are important, particularly on long-haul, when flights need to match meeting times at the destination.
“Since working with Chambers, we have also concentrated on improving hotel rates with some of our preferred hotels. While the policy is not mandatory, we try to comply as much as possible to keep our costs down, and the travel team does adhere to the policy extremely well.”
From Chambers’ perspective, Gemma Munsey insists that Kim’s initial inexperience has quickly given way to a heady mix of expertise and efficiency. “From the outset,
we immersed ourselves in Kim’s day-to-day role,” she says, “and held, at the very minimum, weekly calls or meetings to discuss key achievements, set goals and discuss anything she had queries with.
“We provided best-practice advice and supporting evidence to help her prepare for internal meetings and, of course, fully supported her with all supplier negotiations.”
Gemma adds: “Today, we have a very open and honest partnership. Kim is very good at arranging for us to have access to Skandia’s key personnel and travel bookers, so we are able to get a deep understanding, not only of Skandia’s business, but also of their travellers’ needs and idiosyncrasies, which allows us to tailor our approach to their specific requirements.
Kim concludes: “For me, it has been a great relationship since day one – I think the success of the relationship has been the result of our regular contact. Gemma and I normally catch up with each other by phone at least on a weekly basis, and meet in person on a monthly basis.”