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Editor’s note: We are pleased to welcome T&E strategic sourcing guru Scott Gillespie, author of the Gillespie’s Guide to Travel Procurement blog, for some guest posts this week.
Two observations really drove this point home for me last week. The first came from Marc Hochman, a partner at A.T. Kearney with deep expertise in the procurement arena.
Marc cited Kearney’s Assessment of Excellence in Procurement study of nearly 300 global firms (average US$10 Billion, revenues). It showed that CEOs have much higher expectations of getting innovation and growth projects from procurement than they are getting today.
It also showed that nearly 80% of the study’s leading companies are already using metrics for measuring procurement’s innovation, compared with about 20% of the lagging companies. So innovation is clearly important within procurement.
The second “aha!” moment came courtesy of Business Travel News and its annual list of the 25 Most Influential Executives in the Business Travel Industry Industry. Of the 25 people listed, only three struck me as named for their innovative efforts.
Debbie Dayton at Deutsche Bank, Susan Lichtenstein at Cisco and Bram Graber at KLM-Air France all get kudos for successfully implementing new and meaningful business practices.
The rest of the Top 25 were named mainly for their powerful ( and mostly positive) influences on their parts of the travel industry. Achievements fell under the headings of mergers, acquisitions and alliances for the ten suppliers, and for promoting industry rules, regulations and standards by the twelve (12!) government and trade association executives.
What’s starkly missing from this list? New travel procurement technology! Too narrow? OK, how about new travel technology – of any kind??
Folks, travel is a really big industry. It’s far from frictionless – lots of opportunities exist for improving the way we source, transact, record and analyze our travel. That there were no technology leaders named to this list is – well, you pick the right word: baffling, frustrating, sad…”good” is not an option.
Enough whining. On to solutions. You, Respected Reader, need to identify a problem you see somewhere in the travel category. The messier and more pervasive, the better. Grab a supplier by the neck, stick your two noses into the roots of the problem, and get excited about solving it.
Good luck! I hope we’ll soon be reading your names on BTN’s list of Top 25 Executives!
(This post is also on Gillespie’s Guide to Travel Procurement).
2 responses so far ↓
1 John Northrop // Feb 12, 2010 at 1:00 pm
Hi all. I follow Scott’s LinkedIn postings and his blog with interest, and this topic really resonates with me. Getting corp travel “unstuck” in many corporations will - I believe - be facilitated by trying the “new” and the “maybe not quite ready for prime time.” Category leaders need to be willing to step outside comfort zones and explore new ways of doing business. Or, better, INVENT new ways of doing business, as Scott suggests above.
What excites consumers of leisure travel also excites corporate travel consumers. I agree with those that say successful travel programs need to excite (versus deflate) and encourage (versus threaten) its travelers. I think we do that by embracing the latest and greatest (Twitter? Facebook? TripIt?) and by building a program that encourages compliance mostly because it’s cool.
And for us? Building a program where services are easy to source, measure, and performance manage is critical for success. Innovation certainly fits in this type of program and is a competency that should be recognized and awarded - within our teams and with our vendors.
Is anybody chinning this bar - or getting there - with his/her program?
2 Dave // Feb 25, 2010 at 5:02 pm
At the risk of being promotional, Purchasing has been tracking the increased role of the buyer in sourcing travel so much we have a dedicated channel on our site for it: http://www.purchasing.com/channel/Travel.php Some good case studies and data on managing the travel spend.
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