How HQ SummitGround’s embedded travel policy & booking process cut ground transportation costs
Industry:
Financial Services
Client Size:
85,000 Employees
Location:
New York, United Kingdom
Company Background:
Our client is a global financial service provider delivering commercial, investment, private, and retail banking services. The bank also specializes in asset management, wealth management, and transaction banking. Their services cater to financial institutions, healthcare, media and telecom, natural resources, real estate, and technology sectors.
The Business Need:
As one of the world’s largest investment bank and financial services companies, our client has an existing and clearly defined corporate travel policy. However, they struggled to ensure employee ride requests remained travel policy compliant.
An overwhelming number of ground transportation rides were frequently booked outside of the policy. Rides booked across multiple providers were often more expensive, and a challenge in terms of managing ground transportation spend and employee expenses.
Our client sought a ground transportation solution with the policy built into the booking experience. The goal was to streamline the booking process in a way that’s easier for employees while safeguarding policy compliance.
The Solution:
As part of our ground transportation platform, we embedded our client’s travel policies into the booking process to address out-of-policy rides. This made it simple for their employees to stay on budget, easily assign a client code, share the trip purpose and select the most suitable vehicle. Our client had the ability to update and amend existing travel policies or build new ones based on particular business functions, team members, and office locations.
This included the functionality to change which employees can choose certain vehicles based on their role, trip purpose, and journey length. For example, the client set criteria for the team in the United Kingdom that presented only black taxis for shorter rides between 1-2 miles. In case of airport ride requests, private car vehicles were presented. This advanced booking logic was central to ensuring maximum cost-efficiency, and lower ground transportation costs.
The automation of our client’s travel policy into the booking process worked in harmony with HQ SummiGround’s employee expense management system. We integrated with SAP Expense Concur enabling e-Receipts to be posted directly to employees’ accounts for all ground transportation expenses. Within our client’s ground transportation dashboard, they were able to view all employee expense data with every ride charge automatically listed. This resulted in faster employee expense processing, approval, and reimbursement.
From the employee’s perspective, they had the autonomy to book their own rides while remaining travel policy compliant. In doing so, we replaced the manual, time-consuming approval process with a seamless booking experience.
For spend visibility and transparency, our platform provided monthly reports to department managers. This included actionable insights based on frequent routes, employee usage, supplier activity, and activity by geography, office, or department. The result was that our client gained a full picture of ground transportation spend, and could quickly identify any hidden, or indirect costs.
The Results:
- Significant increase in travel policy compliance as our solution provided control and visibility throughout the booking process. This led to a reduction in their yearly ground transportation spend as out-of-policy rides decreased.
- Automating employee expense management resulted in significant time saving across the business. Most notably, the accounting team, department managers, and individual employees.
- Further cost-saving benefit as a result of access to regular reports and data on our client’s ground transportation usage, behaviors, and spend. This allowed our client to gain greater visibility, and further reduce costs based on ongoing optimization.
