Talking business
Bob Papworth talks to the University of Nottingham’s Jeannette Harrison, who was named Travel Buyer of the Year at BBT’s Business Travel Awards 2012
Winner Jeannette at the awards with host, comedian Chris Addison (left), and Ed Hubennette, from sponsor Marriott
Jeannette Harrison, Travel Buyer of the Year at Buying Business Travel’s Business Travel Awards 2012, embarked on her travel industry career at the tender age of 16. Starting out as a business travel consultant, she then moved to the leisure side of the industry
as the manager of a high street International Air Transport Association (IATA) agency “in the days when we issued air and rail tickets by hand”.
She left the industry to raise a family – she is relishing the
prospect of becoming a grandmother for the first time this September – but, not being one to relax for too long, she undertook part-time administrative work, and voluntary work, and went to college. She joined the University of Nottingham in the late 1990s and has now worked in procurement there, in various roles, for the past ten years. Her passions include reading, horse-riding “when I get the chance”, and travelling – ideally with a good book, good company, and yet more horse-riding.
to come, through utilisation of the management information that we are now analysing with our suppliers. We have some areas that have achieved well over the 10 per cent, but we’ve also identified areas of spend that we are not able to influence due to the particular nature of them. The detailed management information is helping us to understand what our overall programme looks like.
The promotion of “travel alternatives”
was part of your strategy – have your travel volumes declined over the past year?
This is difficult to identify, as we didn’t have any previous data. Next year, however, we
will be able to compare our patterns for travel, but whether they are simply not travelling or are using
Keeping our online adoption rate high must be our priority, but as it has remained high for the last 12 months, we don’t anticipate a decline
You were the first in the higher education sector to
How has your award- winning programme
developed over the past year? I think it’s fair to say the last 12 months could be described as the ‘honeymoon’
period. We have made only a few necessary adjustments to the programme in order to allow users to become comfortable with what was, in effect, a complete change in their way of working.
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In your Business Travel Awards submission, you identified targeted annual travel and entertainment savings of 10 per cent – has that been realised? We have a very high online adoption rate, which has delivered significant savings to the business. Process efficiency savings are high as we had a paper- based manual process previously. Programme efficiency savings through spend consolidation have yet
develop and implement your online solution – are others now following your lead? Tentatively, certainly not as a full-blown programme, but they are picking elements of it. I believe this reflects where we all are with regards contract expiry and systems development though, rather than a general malaise over tackling what can be quite an emotive and sensitive area of procurement.
Your programme generates “vastly improved”
management information: how has this been used, and have there been any surprises? We are just coming to the anniversary of the completed roll-out and
will shortly have a full 12 months data to look back on; we are ready to set targets for the future so serious utilisation of the data has yet to come. There haven’t been any real surprises but we can now see what is happening and, therefore, identify what needs improving moving forwards.
alternatives, we wouldn’t be able to prove without introducing further monitoring or enforcing policy changes. The technology has moved on now to a point where we can monitor some of this and a business decision will need to be taken in the future whether or not to implement.
Similarly, you identified “environmental impact targets” – a success, or on the back-burner in the current economic climate? We are now building reports showing our footprint for the Scope 3
Travel Carbon Reporting. These reports should help identify areas that we can concentrate on, as we move on. There’s been some progress to date but lots more to come in the future.
Have you managed to continue to reduce
maverick purchasing? Our previous programme was well used, and the new one has continued to be so with very
little maverick purchasing. That said, due to the nature of travel and the way the
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