What happens when the time comes to replace an entire legacy system with a tailor-made, integrated solution? Alex Blyth asks those in the know
Amdocs provides software to the world’s major telecommunications companies. Whether it is software that sits behind the billings system, or that enables SMS competitions or any other form of internal or external software, Amdocs is the company telcos know they can turn to.
Before joining Amdocs, Emma de Lange worked at Coca-Cola. “Travel booking there was relatively straightforward,” she recalls. “Pretty much everyone was going to or coming from Atlanta. This couldn’t be more different. We book everything from one-day sales trips to Paris, to a two-month placement at AT&T in the US, to a press trip to Pune, in India, and a home-visit for our many expat employees.”
She explains: “We tend to have a heavy focus on one destination for a period of time, and then switch entirely to a new location. It drives the airlines crazy as we can’t give them an accurate list of our top ten destinations.”
MAJOR OPERATIONS
It is not only the variety and complexity of the Amdocs travel programme that is challenging for De Lange and her eight-strong European travel team – it is also the scale of it. The company has around 20,000 employees, of whom roughly 7,000 travelled in the last six months.
Around five years ago the travel team decided it needed to improve the experience it was providing to the company’s travellers. “Although we have a global travel policy we had no unified global travel programme,” says De Lange. “We used 14 different TMCs, all operating different systems in different divisions and parts of the world. Like systems at many organisations that have grown rapidly and across a wide geographical area, it had been put together piece by piece, as and when needed. As a result, there was no consistency. Booking was complex and extracting meaningful management information was all but impossible.”
She continues: “Furthermore, there was a new generation of travellers in their 20s coming through. In their personal lives they were used to booking all their own travel online, and found it intrusive and cumbersome to have someone do it all for them at work. We needed to streamline our system and bring it into the 21st century. It quickly became apparent that improving our existing system was not going to be enough. We needed to start again from a blank page.”
RADICAL CHANGE
From the outset, De Lange and her colleagues had no illusions about the scale of the undertaking. “These projects are always challenging,” she says. “It’s a radical change, and even the most innovative, change-ready organisation can struggle to accept it. Bringing legacy data with you – without losing any live requests – is incredibly difficult and incredibly important. And most importantly of all, you need to be certain that the solution you end up with will deliver.”
The first step was to get the right partners onboard. De Lange says: “There are not many vendors who can offer a system that encompasses everything from multi-level pre-approval to the booking tool and expense management. In the end we chose SAP. It is better known as a financial software company, but it’s beginning to move into the travel arena and we were convinced that its solution was the right one for us. Equally, Amex was the TMC that was the best fit. Unfortunately, it didn’t work so neatly for our Asia-Pacific division – which is important for us with 9,000 of our employees in India – where BCD is now our TMC.”
In order to gain company-wide buy-in, the travel team spent a long time running large-scale user groups. These generated ideas for system features and provided invaluable feedback on each iteration of the system. It culminated in a six-month process of rigorous testing.
De Lange is confident that the finished product is what her users need. She reports that the greatest technical hurdle was simplifying the approval process. “Our old system required pre-booking authorisation from managers and the travel department. We have simplified it so we are now removed from the process. Ultimately, we shouldn’t be involved in whether spending on a trip is justified – that is down to individual managers. The issue was finding a way they could provide that approval without either creating delays in booking travel or requiring managers to be always on their computers.”
The solution was to introduce a simple app that managers can keep on their phone, and where they can quickly and easily view and approve any travel requests.
RETAINING DATA
The final challenge was to make the switch while retaining legacy data. “We hold 7,000 traveller profiles,” says De Lange. “If we had lost them it would have been a disaster. So we shut down the system for a week, extracting live requests, and ensuring we retained information on the past six months of bookings, as well as access to all our historical data.”
The system is now live and functioning well, and De Lange is looking forward to getting back to the rest of her job. “For the past five years this project has taken up so much of my time that I have almost forgotten that there is more to travel management than this. We will continue to monitor closely the new system, reviewing it and making any necessary enhancements, but for the most part, it is now complete.”
She concludes with some advice to other travel managers who might be considering embarking on a similar project. “Invest time in the planning phase. Be clear about what is essential in your system and where you can compromise in your agreements with your software provider and TMC,” she says.
“Finally,” she adds, “benchmark against what other organisations are doing. Get along to industry events. Read the industry press. Just because what you are doing works fine for now, don’t assume it could not be improved. We must always be striving for better.”
TMC VIEWS
Trevor Elswood, managing director at Capita Business Travel
You only have one shot at the first launch. Maximising compliance and adoption from the beginning will deliver maximum savings, so it is essential to get it right.
Begin by appointing a dedicated programme manager; this cannot be seen as something to bolt on to existing work. Ensure you have stakeholder support from across the business – including procurement, HR, finance, facilities, training and marketing – and at all levels. Make sure you listen to the end-users as well as to senior level stakeholders.
Then research the market and ensure your new supplier has a proven track record of successful account management, implementation and change management teams, which will fully support a smooth technology and supplier transition.
Develop a clear, mutually agreed transition strategy including a behavioural change communication programme. Work with your supplier to pull what information you can obtain from legacy systems and improve on this where possible.
Employ your key bookers to test, test and test again. As part of your pre-launch and launch campaigns use training, focus groups, webcasts and super-users. Ensure you give your agency sufficient internal support so that you can deal quickly with any new issues and challenges that arise.
Adam Knights, group sales director at ATPI
It can be very difficult to transfer traveller profiles from one system to another, but it is vital you retain these profiles, and by migrating to a more integrated system there is often much more you can do with them. For example, once you link them to your HR system you can start to build dynamic traveller profiles.
So, begin with clarity on these benefits and on the risks. Bear in mind that you need to keep your data secure, so work closely with your IT department through the migration process.