At an Amadeus press briefing at the start of ACTE's London conference, Florian Tinnus, manager of processes and systems for DaimlerChrysler's global travel management, made two remarkable statements.
“Offline is dead,” he declared and then: “If one of my travellers has to ask the travel agent, we have a problem.”
With some 35,000 frequent travellers in the company making about 210,000 trips a year, it takes some confidence to make a statement like that. And the second is not one that the huge majority of corporates would agree with.
But after a five year revolution in how business travel is managed by the German car maker, Mr Tinnus was talking about a company which was moving into the future: the world of the touchless transaction, where every part of the process is automated and there is no manual intervention.
For most companies offline - phoning or e-mailing the agents or even talking directly to them in an implant so they can make the relevant bookings - is very much alive. Most bookings are still done in that fashion.
Online booking rates in Europe, though rising quickly, are still in the minority and lagging well behind those in Americas.
But what Mr Tinnus and Daimler have done is to automate the whole process from booking through expense management to the collection of data.
Employees make their own decisions about travel. There is no pre-trip approval as early research found that that was one of the most complicating aspects of the booking process and few went outside of it anyway.
They pay with a company credit card in their own name, scan in their expenses and are re-imbursed directly to their bank. Bookings made outside the company travel policy are rejected.
Daimler used SAP Travel Management and Amadeus to bring about the change with TQ3 Travel Solutions as the project manager. The aim was to simplify a structure which had in Germany alone 70 travel agencies and 16 different cost centres to an “entirely paperless system in which all booking inquiries, flight and hotel reservations, expense management and post travel reconciliation could be completed online.”
Before the change-over, DaimlerChrysler calculated there were ten phases of a business trip including approval, cash advances and approval of expenses. Under the touchless system, that is down to seven phases with trip approval, cash advances and the centralised system of approving expenses all gone. It saves everyone both time and money.
“Compliance has increased dramatically from 50% under the pre-approval system to over90% in 2004,” Mr Tinnus said. “Overall we have achieved a saving in direct costs of $5.6m per annum, while the indirect costs or ‘process' cost per trip has decreased by more than 50%.
“The important message is that there are significant savings through touchless in the fulfilment process,” Mr Tinnus said. But he warned that moving to what he called the seamless process, a company needed not only state of the art technology but also a firm strategy for change.
“You need a strategy for process change, for technology change and for mental change. This is bringing your traveller to a new role and your agency to the new role of IT support.
“But the biggest problem is the mental change - that is the most important and the most challenging.”
Undaunted Mr Tinnus and DaimlerChrysler are now embarking on the next phase of their revolution which is to “improve transparency by expanding and integrating current data analysis procedures and tools to create a travel data warehouse.”
A second part of the phase two advance is to try and directly integrate suppliers into the online booking process.
“We are now delivering a service which has to be re-invented all the time and benchmarked all the time,” Mr Tinnus said.