THE BUSINESS TRAVEL MAGAZINE I 39 The Review THE TECHNOLOGY ➔ HRG pioneers reporting by blobs
I'VE SEEN the future of travel management reporting – and it involves blobs, writes Mike Swindell. At least, that’s the vision of Nigel Meyer, HRG’s group director for technology and data services, who is leading the charge toward a richer source of information and an easier way of accessing it. Even now, management reports
can be complex and tricky devils, but with HRG planning to push into new reporting territory, with greater levels of complexity, the task of comprehending what comes out at the other end will be even more challenging. With that in mind, the technical
boys in the back room at HRG are turning to graphics – or, to be more specific, blobs. They’ve taken their inspiration
from the group’s Travel Watch tool that uses a world map to display the location of a company’s travellers at any given time. In the new vision of management information reporting, the world map will also be overlaid with blobs that will, for example, represent the total amount of money a company is spending on travellers in any location. It follows that the larger the
blob, the greater the amount of money – and the blobs will be configured in different colours to represent different elements of the travel spend. “What we are trying to do is
focus on impact,” says Meyer. “As a decision-maker, you will see the impact. It’s very visual. You can see the impact of travel for your department. You can see it for yourself and you can drill through it and get a copy of your invoice out. You can do whatever you like with the data and it will be presented in such a way as to allow you to make informed decisions.” And the
than just recording bookings. “We have a client who does about 1,000 transactions a day but they change 60 per cent of their bookings every day,” he says. “That’s corporate behaviour, and it could cost this particular company in excess of £12million – it’s colossal. We’ve got other clients who don’t spend that much in a year for their whole travel budget, and that’s just in cancellation fees.” Another real-world example of behaviour having a substantial impact on budgets involves videoconferencing. HRG discovered that younger,
more technologically minded people in a client company were routinely booking out
information will be much more than airline tickets booked, hotel rooms taken and cars hired. According to HRG's commercial director, Stewart Harvey, the aim now is to track behaviour rather
“If you haven’t got the data, if you don’t capture the event, then you can’t calculate the cost”
video suites while senior executives were flying in business or first class to meetings. “We said ’you
have three guys flying from London to New York for a one-
day meeting and you have this video facility booked out by a couple of guys from technology’,” says Meyer. “If you switch them
around, there’s the saving. But if you haven’t got that data, if you don’t capture that event, you can’t calculate the cost.” To get the information they
need for the wider picture of travel expenditure, HRG is designing a system that is taking data from any source. “We don’t care what it comes
from as long as it conforms to some sort of standard that we can bring in to our environment,” says Meyer. “We have always been good at capturing the event – the ticket price, the hotel room – but that can be expanded to capture far more detail that will help a client to do business well; to enable them to communicate effectively with their clients or colleagues.” Reports will still offer a view on
the financial aspect of travel but will also focus on environmental issues, the commercial impacts of any given decision, compliance governance and aspects of work/ life balance for employees. HRG’s new style reporting will
be more complex, but, ironically, easier to access and understand. “It’s all about capturing more date, validating it, making sure its accurate and then applying it in such a way that it doesn’t require the user to have a degree in
mathematics to understand it,” explains Meyer. A further crucial difference from
the current summaries of facts is that the new system will be dynamic, reacting to rules-based triggers set in place by corp- orations. “This will help companies do ‘if and when’ modelling – if I change from one carrier to another, for example, what would it look like?” says Meyer. “What we do today might tell
you what the financial impact might be but it doesn’t tell you what the impact will be on your service to your travellers, how much extra time someone will be travelling, or what the environ- mental impact might be of any change,” he adds. And the good news is that this
new generation of dynamic reporting is not just aimed at HRG clients. “What we are building has to be flexible and adaptable,” says Harvey. “We are saying even if you
have your own deal for a self- booking tool or work with a different GDS, we can cope. We don’t even have to be your travel management company. We can still collect the data for you and we can still make it work with risk management, analysis and alerts,” Harvey adds.
48 I THE BUSINESS TRAVEL MAGAZINE
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