BTN 2016 Best Practitioner Jill Huffman

Cardinal Health senior manager of global travel and meetings management Jill Huffman has managed travel for six years at Cardinal Health. In the past 18 months, however, she not only has globalized the travel program and implemented global meetings management with internal support organizations, she did it all as Cardinal Health made 15 acquisitions and expanded to 60 countries. BTN commends this work and her suppliers say they are "in awe" of her energy and efficiency, but something else Huffman achieved in the midst of this rapid-fire growth and program implementation stood out: She improved hotel program compliance by more than 60 percent. Huffman told BTN editor-in-chief Elizabeth West how she did it.

BTN: Improving your hotel program and driving compliance all started with data. Tell us about that.

Huffman: You can't talk to your suppliers if you don't have data. My first initiative at Cardinal Health was to make sure we had data. I looked at hotels, airlines, car, everything, but there wasn't much. So I started pulling reports from the different suppliers and pretty soon my desk was a mass of reports. I needed to make sense of it.

I took the analytics tool we were using for [accounts payable] data and worked with the supplier to build a travel cube off of it. The big thing was that neither my company nor my third party had worked with travel data in this way, so it was something very new, creative. My director and I really had to think about the [data] dimensions we wanted to put into the tool to get the outputs that would allow us to manage our programs the way we wanted. I'm still tweaking the tool as our program goals change.

BTN: So you put in the hotel data—from suppliers, your TMC, from credit card, etc. What did you find?

Huffman: I saw compliance levels at about 26 percent or 29 percent for the hotel program. I thought, "Wow, you're not doing well here."

BTN: You didn't just start a compliance initiative as a result, though. You rebuilt the hotel program on the foundation of your data cube. Expand on how you did that.

Huffman: I worked with real estate to find out what markets we are in; we are in 342 markets in the U.S. When I looked at the number of room nights in each market, I found that people were not going to the preferred properties. I started by looking at the properties where most people were staying, under the assumption that they were the best locations. They made the short list, but we still needed to take it down to two or three hotels per market.

BTN: So how did you do that? You can't visit 342 locations.

Huffman: We started talking to local stakeholders and identified someone willing to help us build the hotel program. We identified safe neighborhoods by ZIP code within a five-mile radius of our location. They toured the facilities. As part of Cardinal's [employee recognition] program, I was able to give our local stakeholders "bravos" and "thank yous" and kind of a kudos every time they went and looked at a new hotel for us. That whole process, and including them as key partners in sourcing the program, created a new level of engagement, and the local markets are helping us to manage compliance.

BTN: Do you send them reporting?

Huffman: Actually, yes. We pull actual hotel booking reports from the travel cube every Monday for bookings made the prior week. Based on ZIP code, flagged preferred hotel properties and price, the tool gives us a list of all compliant bookings. The tool flags compliant bookings that didn't get the correct rate, so we can go back to the hotel. Next, it pulls all the noncompliant bookings. If the ZIP code is OK and the price is lower, it's still compliant even if the property is not preferred. Everyone else on that report will receive an automated email that says they are noncompliant and asks them to change their reservation.

To your question, though, we do send these reports to the local stakeholders so that they can see if people coming to their facilities are staying in preferred properties. Imagine if you're walking in the door of the distribution center and the administrative assistant asks, "Why did you stay at that hotel? That's not a preferred." It's going to make a big difference.

BTN: I bet you had a lot of phone calls after you started sending all those emails.

Huffman: There are always reasons, whether they booked another property because of a room block [for a meeting] or there was no availability. We understand that, but most of the time we just needed to tell them that we want to ensure their safety and that we've vetted these properties. But once we got through those early stages, we saw a huge dip in how many people were going outside the program, and it's not that there was any penalty or reprimand associated with it. It was more about awareness. Plus, they just didn't want to be on that report.

What I really liked was that it opened communication and people started to talk to us about the program. For example, we learned more about sellout markets, where even though it's a small market for us that normally might require only two preferred hotels, we might need to source more because of the sellout situations. It also opened the door for us to get more traveler feedback because people would pick up the phone or they would email us and tell us what was happening in those markets.

BTN: I know you've also incorporated traveler surveys and use weighted feedback to measure hotel performance, but tell me the end result of your compliance efforts.

Huffman: We're at 84 percent to 86 percent nationally. At one point at our corporate office, we were over 90 percent, which was huge for us.