CORPORATE CASE STUDY
Helen Keppel-Compton, Head of Procurement, Partnership Services, John Lewis Waitrose
HOW TO... OUTSOURCE BUSINESS TRAVEL
When your travelling employees all have a stake in the company, and are not employees but Partners, any change management process has to be keenly thought through and communicated robustly. Mandation is not an option and consultation is the only way forward.
S
o it was in 2010 that John Lewis Partnership (JLP) took the decision to update an inefficient travel booking system and move from an
in-house to an outsourced function. “Basically, it was the quantum leap from old school travel management – à la stone age – to the 21st century,” summed up Tom Stone of Sirius Travel Sourcing, the consultancy brought in to oversee the process. Read on for the journey JLP took and the results accrued to date.
STEP 1
Helen Keppel- Compton, Head of
Procurement Business Service
Centre, John Lewis Partnership
Helen has extensive experience with the John Lewis
Partnership, having joined as a graduate trainee 24 years ago. She moved into her current position in 2011 which has entailed setting up a completely new function in a shared service that is only two years old itself. The shared service has been set up to
drive effi ciencies and cost savings across the retail brands of the Partnership – John Lewis and Waitrose.
The status quo was an entirely manual booking system for the 80,000 partners, of which only a small core is regular long-haul travellers. Nonetheless, they were used to a high-touch style of service, with the in-house travel team phoning one TMC for air bookings, another for rail bookings, and an HBA for hotel bookings. Helen Keppel-Compton,
head of procurement, partnership services, at John Lewis/Waitrose, says: “We have high volumes of low complexity journeys and low volumes of high complexity
journeys.” However, the shortcomings of this system outweighed any advantages. “There was no management information,
it wasn’t cost-effective and there was no traveller tracking so we were not fulfilling our duty of care,” says Keppel-Compton. Moreover, a culture had been created that travellers could do their own thing. There was, however an upside: “It was a personalised service,” said Keppel-Compton.
STEP 2
The decision to implement such drastic change was not taken lightly “as we knew that change would be a wrench for the travellers,” says Keppel-Compton. A travel office had been set up to service
JLP only and it was recognised that, in a first move, the service should embrace Waitrose in order to bring synergies.
STEP 3
In a tandem move, the company travel policy was tightened. “We haven’t used the word ‘mandate’ but ‘encourage’ instead," explains Keppel-Compton. Any out-of-policy travel requests must have sign-off from the right authority. The policy was also made available through the organisation’s intranet.
“There was no management information from the old system, it wasn’t cost- effective and there was no traveller tracking so we were not fulfi lling our duty of care”
6 THE BUSINESS TRAVEL MAGAZINE
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