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Taking steps to better practices.

Article Excerpt
Business Travel News proudly names as Best Practitioners of Business Travel for 2005: Cynthia Gillen, director of procurement and travel management for Chicago-based BDO Seidman LLP; Kevin Iwamoto, global air, car and ground commodity manager for Palo Alto, Calif.-based Hewlett-Packard and chairman of the National Business Travel Association; Brenda Jackson, accounts payable analyst of non-inventory payables for Sturtevant, Wis:-based JohnsonDiversey; Brian Nichols, hotel and ground transportation manager for Wilton, Conn.-based Deloitte Services LP and Christopher Staal, vice president of global sourcing strategies for Stamford, Conn.-based Thomson Corp. While BTN cannot empirically determine which practices were best in 2005, the accomplishments of these individuals represent the best efforts of all travel professionals and reflect areas where buyers are stepping up.

BTN named Gillen for innovating the use of short-term, high-volume hotel contracts to leverage midmarket volume, Iwamoto for negotiating multiple airline alliance deals; Jackson for pioneering broad-scale, companywide use of hotel folio data for prepopulating expense reports, Nichols for implementing and helping educate the industry about enhanced rate-loading processes and Staal for Improving scorecard metrics and melding purchasing and travel management techniques.

The group last month discussed with BTN their best practices and professional excellence.

BTN: How do you identify a best practice? How much of that vision comes from experience?

Christopher Staal: Whenever you are trying to do something better, the first thing is to do some benchmarking to find best practices. You go to industry associations and periodicals and peers you network with. We don't like to use the words "best practices" because a world-class best practice may not be appropriate for a particular environment. We call it a "better practice."

The global scorecard for us was something that came from that. We felt that we as a company had enough data on travel. We felt like we didn't need to spend any more time or energy measuring it any finer than we are today. Then, as Thomson became a globally focused company, now with time, you have a more globally managed program, and as our chief financial officer says, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it."

The global metrics and the global scorecard came into play as a best practice for us, or at least a better practice, because I don't know what nirvana is and I don't know that what's world-class for Thomson is the same as world-class for Hewlett-Packard.

Brian Nichols: Our travel area was moved into strategic procurement services about two years ago, and part of that was applying real structured yardstick metrics across the program. For us, it was being able to measure the program and zero in on the metrics where we've identified areas for improvement, where we can have major impact. We would not pursue it if it does not have a measurable financial impact.

For us, step one if we're going to pursue a best practice is to look at what are we not doing well today and, if it has a large potential impact, to go after it.

BTN: Is that the low-hanging fruit theory of travel management?

Nichols: You know, it helps to be low-hanging but big fruit. We don't want necessarily to go after low-hanging...

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