In a business travel climate best described as unforgiving, Accenture wanted to foster radical efficiency among 95,000 employee-travelers who visit clients spanning 120 countries. The answer: Empower employees to manage travel expenses as if they were the CEO of their own firms.
A tool that put an employee’s expenditures in context, including comparisons with other individuals, would allow everyone to make more prudent travel decisions, versus simply booking reservations…and spending money.
Accenture’s IT team and their business counterparts innovated a solution called myTravelSummary built on a single premise: If employees spent Accenture’s money the way they spent their own, they would be more accountable for travel decisions and find new ways to save. To inform employee decision making, Accenture gave its travelers easy-to-access “personal travel dashboards” with data presented simply. The robust travel-tracking tool provides an analysis of expenditures, creating immediate incentives for travelers to make major changes to their more costly habits. Now, employees can make much more cost-effective decisions with every new booking, contributing to reductions in Accenture’s overall travel spend.
According to Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT), a leading firm specializing in business travel management, Accenture is its first client to engineer an interface to travel data that creates personalized and sophisticated reports. Accenture is also one of a few companies that has consolidated all travel arrangements with one partner, CWT, and merged all its travel data internally into a single data warehouse — making the development of myTravelSummary possible.
Accenture spends a considerable amount on travel each year, and that amount increases by approximately 22 percent every year. Thanks to its powerful, individual dashboards and travel key performance indicator tracking capabilities, myTravelSummary will contribute significantly to reductions in Accenture’s travel expenses.
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