Coming into a massive, mature and in many ways already
well-managed travel program just two years ago, Johnson & Johnson global
director of travel and meeting services Maria Chevalier has tackled global
contracts across all categories to largely eliminate ancillary fees, globalized
a fragmented meetings and travel program, fostered development of a central
database of traveler and trip information and put herself at the forefront of
industry efforts to advance crisis management and bolster hotel rate-loading
accuracy.
For these efforts, Business
Travel News editor-in-chief David Meyer this month named Chevalier as the
2010 Travel Manager of the Year, citing "her innovation, communications
skill and teamwork as well as her commitment to advancing industry practices
involving global consolidation, supplier relations and data management on
several fronts."
Chevalier, who started work at J&J in 2008 following her
role in a consulting position with BCD Travel, said the company's structure
provided a particular challenge when it came to globalization. It's made up of
about 250 operating companies located in more than 80 countries, with its
travelers visiting nearly every country in the world, according to Chevalier.
In addition, the company has long had a non-mandated culture.
In 2009, Chevalier and her team began their globalization
efforts, moving meetings and travel through one source and one technology
platform. They put American Express in place as the company's global agency and
aggressively implemented and pushed usage of StarCite's meetings technology
platform. Most markets are now on board, including many accustomed to using
their travel companies for more than a decade.
She and her team also have globalized travel delivery
standards, making key service metrics and reporting components common across
regions.
Because of strict regulations on travel in the healthcare
industry, Chevalier and her team also worked with American Express to develop a
rigid training program for any agents working with J&J. Agents are required
to test 100 percent following their training, or they cannot serve on the
account, without exception.
Besides the globalization efforts, Chevalier and her team
also have focused on a global data management strategy. For example, they've
created a central repository of all traveler and trip information, including
traveler types, trip purpose and details. This allows the team to better
determine goals and policy, she said.
With the data strategy implemented, Chevalier and her team
were able to effectively set goals using business intelligence. She compares it
to building a house, with the data management strategy as the foundation and
business intelligence strategy rising from that.
For example, looking at the 14-day advance rule for air
travel, Chevalier said it would be easy to simply set a goal to move it from 50
percent to 60 percent, but having the business intelligence would let the
company know whether that was a reasonable goal. The remaining 50 percent could
be salespeople who are not able to shift their booking window, so it would be a
wasted effort.
The team also constantly has sought traveler opinions on
such topics as the quality of preferred hotels and the sort of policies it
would take to best monitor their behavior.
With contracting, Chevalier employs what she calls a "supplier-enabled
innovation" to extract deeper savings and compliance. It's necessary
because much of J&J's travel program relies on an outsourced model and
depends on suppliers for innovation, she said.
Recent contracting focus has been on ancillary fees across
travel categories. While most companies have focused on an a la carte approach,
J&J instead has focused on trying to leverage in those areas where the
company has spend. J&J has been largely successful in eliminating ancillary
fees globally, she said. For example, the company was able to negotiate
Internet access globally with a major hotel company when it was not available
from the suppliers locally.
Other contracting success has focused on improving the
accuracy of the rate loading process, for which BTN named Chevalier one of the best practitioners in 2009. J&J
also has worked to reduce buyer penalties in meetings contracts, such as
attrition and cancellation clauses, while instituting service-level agreements
for the suppliers for such aspects as meal delivery. Hotel contracts have
always been very heavy with penalties should the customer not perform and weak
on penalties if the hotel doesn't perform, Chevalier said, and she and her team
have worked to undo that.
This year, J&J conducted bidding for its car rental
contracts on a global basis rather than regionally and so far is reporting
success, Chevalier said. Car rental suppliers have the capabilities and
willingness to do it, and the marketplace also has changed with mergers and
acquisitions, she said.
Chevalier also has been promoting the use of mobile
technology. When J&J rolled out a mobile application for traveler itinerary
management in the United States, she was able to reach 50 percent adoption of
the tool within 30 days with a single e-mail communication.
While globalization provides travel managers with essential
data for sourcing strategies, Chevalier said traveler safety and security was
the key driver in the globalization efforts. Little did she know when she began
how thoroughly a tongue-twister of a volcano in Iceland would prove the
validity of that strategy.
When the ash cloud from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano brought
Europe's airspace to a halt in the spring, the one-supplier, one-platform
program allowed J&J to immediately assess where all its travelers were.
Within minutes, the company had an instant report of where all its meetings
were as well as future meetings coming up. J&J then was able to focus on
the primary task of assuring security for current travelers as well as the
secondary challenge of mitigating costs of those future meetings that would be
disrupted.
Without the global travel and data platform, compiling such
data takes weeks, she said.
As the dust settled, Chevalier also saw the disaster as an
opportunity to influence industry change. Systems are designed to handle single
events, reacting if an airplane goes down or if a major hurricane hits, for
example, and handle one location in one period of time, she said. The volcanic
ash situation, on the other hand, was a constant moving target and showed the
cracks in the system, which wasn't created to have a handle on an event over
that length of time, affecting multiple markets and changing by the minute.
With the Association for Corporate Travel Executives Global
Educational Conference in Chicago on the horizon, she consulted the
organization's leaders to encourage them to address it. In the end, she found
herself leading that discussion at the conference, which also resulted in
ongoing discussions via a LinkedIn group and research into a white paper about
managing the disaster.
Finding areas to innovate is one of the challenges that faces
a large, mature travel program such as J&J's, Chevalier said. While it's
easy to show quick results when taking over an unmanaged travel program, it's
more difficult to make progress when best practices already are in place across
the program.
The question when walking into a travel program that's
already a well-oiled machine, she said, is how to take the best of the best and
make it better.
Her efforts of the past couple of years were a fitting
answer to that question.
This report originally
appeared in the Sept. 6, 2010, issue of Business Travel News.