GUEST BLOG: Companies embrace business travel and expense report management as part of their digital transformation

Goodbye Bureaucracy

In business travel, as in many other sectors, advances in technology have led to a shift in users’ habits, revolutionising the entire industry. Meeting the expectations of their employees in terms of technology is just as important to companies as implementing travel policies, keeping costs in check and guaranteeing the safety of their travellers. When they are at work, employees expect to find the same fast and intuitive tools that they use to organise their lives at home. Today, it is unthinkable to spend an hour looking for the perfect Paris-London flight that both complies with company policy and arrives on time for a meeting. The same goes for devoting hours to going through receipts, submitting an expense report and being reimbursed months later. We expect things to be easier with technology. Companies no longer have a choice: they must do away with bureaucratic red tape and usher their travel and expense report management into the digital era.

Conscious of this two-fold challenge – satisfying users while helping companies to achieve their objectives – KDS offers fast, simple solutions intended to play a key role in businesses’ digital transformation projects.

Automating business travel and expense report management offers users a simpler, faster and more consistent experience. With traditional tools, expenses generated during the trip are not integrated into the booking process, which is often limited only to transport and accommodations. With KDS Neo, you can book an entire trip (taxis, accommodation, transport, shuttle buses, additional baggage, upgraded seating, etc.) and at the same time, on the same platform, manage your expense reports via web or mobile. The unified platform offers usability on par with the best-loved mainstream websites. As for companies, they can expedite processes, automate certain tasks and get greater visibility and control over the actual costs of trips, allowing them to step up their management of assignments and contracts. And it's all totally paperless thanks to KDS Neo digital expense reports, which have the same legal value as the original documents.

For improved efficiency and a faster response to complex situations ... the only way is technology

Productivity is a key concern for senior management teams and deploying platforms to manage business trips and adaptable and user-friendly expense reports is now inevitable. Every company seems to have a strategy for this.

For a long time, the French engineering firm, TechnipFMC, managed its employees’ business travel (an average of 20,000 to 25,000 trips a year) using an internally developed tool which required many manual processes. For its international projects a wide range of personnel are required to travel at different phases of the projects (preliminary study, development, construction, transport to the oilfield, on-site installation), which led TechnipFMC, like many companies, to seek simplicity, responsiveness and control for its travel programme.

“We have to be reactive, so we need travel booking tools that are a perfect fit for the very specific constraints of our industry,” highlights Claude Lelièvre, who handles Regional Travel Management Development for TechnipFMC in the EMIA region. “To meet the expectations of our project assistants, who are often in charge of business trips, and to cater to the frequent changes and last-minute requests that they are faced with, we opted for a tool that is complete, flexible, agile, and highly user-friendly.” At TechnipFMC, bookings can now be made much more quickly, and the company has significantly reduced the length of a typical expense reimbursement cycle.

In addition to these operational factors, companies also need to forge ahead with the digital transformation for strategic reasons. This transformation and a company’s choice of tools can influence its image and culture. A company’s internal tools and processes should reflect its vision, its strategy, and the way it does business with clients and suppliers.

Thanks to a significant investment in R&D, KDS is able to keep innovating, pre-empting advances in technology and regulations and helping its clients to achieve their objectives. As an account manager, thanks to the implementation of KDS Neo, I’m fortunate enough to to witness this with my clients, especially at TechnipFMC.

If you would like to know more, please feel free to contact me and to read the TechnipFMC case study: https://www.kds.com/case-studies/technipfmc-visibility-flexibility-and-safety-of-business-trips/ 

This post was written by Romain Fory, Key Account Manager, KDS, who are exhibiting at Business Travel Show on 20-21 February 2019. Register for your free ticket now at www.businesstravelshow.com/register 

GUEST BLOG: Chasing status

I write this fresh from my North American Neo roadshow, where I met some great people and collaborated on some amazing ideas that could shape the future of T&E. But that's a different story... This story is about a personal experience - of the very impersonal kind - that has come to crystallise the modern problems facing travellers of all ages.

I was staring at my Priority AAcess boarding pass in Minneapolis airport bound for Chicago. 

"Ladies and gentlemen this is an announcement we have 155 mega premium platinum status travellers and so anyone in grades 1 through 5 will now need to check in their hand luggage. We do not have a valet so your bags will probably get crushed in the hold and you'll need to wait 45 minutes at baggage claim - even though you spent the whole week living out of a small bag to avoid this very situation... Have a nice day".

Luckily my good friend Phil was at hand to calm me down with those immortal words 'Man, we're going to have to get you status!'

So where else, other than travel, does 'priority' actually mean 'second last' and where else does chasing status affect so many?

The creation of seemingly endless grades of traveller means that Road warriors (and yes that includes Millenials) are being covertly downgraded in order to keep up the chase for this ever elusive ‘status’. Open booking is simply allowing this crazy parallel universe to spiral out of control. Without proactive policy controls how can we resist the urge to spend just a little bit more to get those points?

But most importantly how we make this situation better?

Well, Neo is a good start. Neo treats everyone with the ultimate CEO status, at least at the booking stage. You just tell Neo where you need to be and when, and then Neo does the rest, just as an executive assistant would.

What it could also do is provide status hungry road warriors with the ability to control their own destinies.

Imagine if corporates started setting trip level policy.

Neo could provide the door-to-door baseline cost for each trip (think reference fare in old school language), including automatically calculated 'on trip' expenses. As long as the business value meets that expected cost, the traveller gets the green light.

That green light could also be accompanied by a vPayment limit that is aligned with that trip budget, so there's no need for individually settled costs and the dreaded wait for cash reimbursement. The traveller can then work within their own budget and trade off flight status for hotel points, empowering travellers to be their own walking P&L and to drive both company and personal success.

Best of all - when they got back from their successful trip, they wouldn't need to complete an expense report at all...

Trust goes both ways and empowerment makes us grow.

Now get back to chasing status.

This post was written by Oliver Quayle, KDS senior vice president, products and partners. KDS is exhibiting at the Business Travel Show, 4-5 February 2014 on stand B920. Register now for free at www.businesstravelshow.com.