MARCH/APRIL 2014
Working relationships
Buying Business Travel brings together TMCs and their travel-buyer clients from a wide range of sectors to find out just what makes their relationships tick
APPLIANCE SCIENCE
Travel for tech company Oxford Instruments has been revolutionised by its engagement of TMC Egencia. Alex Blyth reports
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OXFORD INSTRUMENTS is a major British export success story. In the last six years this Abingdon-based nanotech company has grown its turnover from £100 million to £351 million, with 98 per cent of sales overseas, primarily to China, continental Europe and North America, but increasingly to Russia and India. Now listed on the FTSE 250, it is growing at 15 per cent year-on-year and has operations across Europe and North America. It has around 800 employees in the UK, 600
in eight manufacturing sites across North America, and a further 600 in Germany and Finland. This generates a significant amount
of travel. Group commodity manager Ian Wright is responsible for the company’s travel spend, which is now nearly £2.5 million a year, of which 80 per cent is on flights, 10 per cent on hotels, and 10 per cent on car hire. Five years ago, Wright conducted
a thorough review of Oxford Instruments’ travel buying. What he
discovered prompted him to transform the system. One of his first steps was to engage Egencia, and the ensuing relationship has revolutionised the way that Oxford Instruments books its travel, generating significant savings, and has also enhanced the travelling experience for its employees.
INEFFICIENT SYSTEMS “I came to Oxford Instruments from a large aerospace company, which had a mature travel buying system in place, so when I began my review five years ago, it didn’t take too long for me to identify the shortcomings in how we were doing it here,” says Wright. “The two major issues were that all
travel bookings were made and logged on paper, and each office had its own way of booking travel, so there was no simple, efficient way of retrieving information on what had been spent where, and by whom. Wright says this fragmentation of
management information meant that the company was unable to trace and manage adherence to policy. “We had no idea whether or not deviation from
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