CATHERINE CHETWYND TALKS TO CHRIS DAY, STRATEGIC PROCUREMENT MANAGER FOR THE ROYAL NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF BLIND PEOPLE (RNIB)
Do you have a global travel programme and, if so, how many travellers do you have worldwide? We don’t have a global programme, but do have a limited number of people who travel worldwide for conferences and seminars. We are a UK charity and have, potentially, 1,750 employees who can travel – although, with a number of care homes, whose staff don’t need to, there are probably 1,400.
Is your travel policy mandated and how do you drive compliance? We have a policy and it is mandated, which makes negotiations easier because we know what areas we are looking at and how we negotiate them. We drive compliance through MI [management information] and, the way the booking tools are set up, they only display certain fares, and managers ensure people comply. We don’t get many people going outside policy and, when they do, it’s mostly because there’s an event on somewhere and hotel accommodation is hard to find, or there are difficulties with train travel after a late-night meeting. People are aware they are dealing with donated funds.
Do you use a travel management company (TMC)? All our travel is booked through a TMC and we recently awarded the contract to Click, which we negotiated with three other charities. The major charities in the UK get together for a number of us to do a joint tender through the Charity Sector Procure- ment Group (CSPG), which increases our negotiating clout considerably.
How does being a charity affect how you buy and your relationship with suppliers?
30 BBT MAY/JUNE 2014
We expect to pay less than a commercial entity because we are a charity and, to be fair, most suppliers are keen to work with us.
What one piece of advice would you give to suppliers? To make booking of hotels and rail as easy as possible. As part of the tender process we went out to 22 suppliers, tendered to 16, and we got a mix back: some had much better sites than others, whose websites made it complicated to book.
What is the greatest challenge you face in your role, and how are you dealing with it? My greatest challenge is ensuring people use, and like, the online tool. It’s impor- tant it works well and is accessible for blind members of staff. The industry does not appreciate how it works for blind or partially-sighted people – switch off your monitor and try and use a site. The acces- sibility team knows how to make a website usable, and we work with suppliers to see that the websites we use heavily are made accessible. We use software called Jaws, a screen reader that has text-to-speech output and zoom-text, which splits the monitor in half and expands the text like an on-screen magnifying glass. A lot of suppliers build a site to look pretty rather than functional, and making something functional is the biggest challenge.
How many people are there working with you, and how do you divide the roles? The procurement team comprises eight people working with me, who have category management roles, so that specific people look after different areas – travel, IT, copiers, utilities and so on.
How long have you been a travel buyer, and how has the role changed during that period? I have been here just over 11 years and when I came, we were not buying travel centrally – it was done by individuals. I decided to introduce a couple of business Visa cards and book for people on the Easyjet website. We used to have a Premier Inn account, but it was a nightmare to reconcile – details were missing, people didn’t take rooms they said they had… I’m much happier managing suppliers through a TMC.
The main thing that has changed in
my role is technology – being able to pool all our requirements through an online portal so that the procurement team can manage suppliers and ensure they are doing what they say they are doing. Travellers feel they own the booking process, and it has changed their perceptions of how they book travel, and how easy it is. The MI that the portal provides is important, too, with CO2 report- ing. As a charity, the environment is very important to us – our target is to monitor and reduce CO2 emissions as a whole, not just through travelling. We subscribe to five of the ten [global sustainability initiative] One Planet principles.
What is your view of managed travel 2.0? We kind of adopt it, in that we expect staff to follow policy, but take a flexible approach. When booking ahead on rail, there are often first class tickets that are cheaper than stan- dard, and we would not stop someone doing that. We are trying to find the cheapest way of travelling, rather than sticking to policy for the sake of it. Likewise with hotels: there may be accommodation closer to where they are working which may be rated above
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