Ground travel, and taxis in particular, can be a tricky area for procurement officers. For a start, it’s incredibly difficult to persuade employees to stick to using an approved supplier. Unlike air and train travel, which are frequently booked in advance, taxis are often required at short notice. If an employee is in a hurry to get somewhere and it’s raining, you can be sure that their first thought won’t be company protocol. If it’s easier for them to arrange transport themselves than to follow an approved procedure, that’s what they will do.
Procurement teams need to think beyond simply negotiating competitive rates. Selecting a ground transport supplier means finding a balance between convenience for users, compliance with regulations and visibility for stakeholders. The most successful solutions are those that make life easier, not just for travellers, but for every department that relies on travel data.
This means that procurement officers need to bear in mind the requirements of more than just travel managers. Internal stakeholders can also include the finance, sustainability, legal and HR teams as well as the IT department. Each of these teams has its own requirements for the data surrounding business travel. Choosing the right supplier is therefore no longer about simply booking journeys – it’s about supporting a range of business objectives.
Financial integration – speed and insight
For finance teams, two aspects of ground travel stand out as most important. The first is purely administrative. In many organisations, ground transportation management is all about processing employee expense claims for journeys from multiple providers. If these arrive in the form of crumpled, missing or backdated receipts, inaccurate data and delays are the result. Keying details manually into an IT system and splitting travel expenses into cost codes is tedious, time-consuming and likely to result in errors. It also increases the chance of disputed and/or fraudulent claims.
Still more important is travel spend visibility. If a booking system links automatically into expense software, not only is the process streamlined but managers are provided with an accurate – and live – picture of travel spend. This enables them to identify spending patterns and understand how any changes in company policy affect this, which in turn makes it possible to monitor compliance and negotiate better deals with suppliers.
Integration can also improve the experience for employees. Automated receipts and expense claims reduce the administrative burden placed on them, encouraging compliance and increasing productivity.
Understanding carbon emissions
ESG reporting is on the rise. Even those companies not required to produce formal reports are in many cases trying to reduce their carbon emissions. To do this, a clear understanding of current emissions is required. A digital booking platform for ground transport can calculate emissions for each individual journey based on the vehicle and mileage and should be able to report accurately on this by trip, traveller or department. Meanwhile the booking process itself should offer travellers the choice of an electric vehicle. As with finance systems, data from the travel supplier should integrate automatically into any emissions reporting system.
Make life easier for the IT team
One last technical consideration is that any travel solution should integrate seamlessly with the organisation’s finance systems. It must also satisfy privacy and security protocols as employee data will inevitably be involved in the booking process. Compliance with GDPR and internal policies is essential.
This has become increasingly important as organisations seek to streamline their technology estates. Procurement teams may find themselves under pressure from IT departments to avoid adding any new disconnected platforms that will require more administrative work.
Meeting high standards in duty of care
Another important factor in selecting a travel partner is the security of employees. HR and legal teams will both need to be reassured that the organisation’s duty of care is being fulfilled and that employee safety and wellbeing are fully addressed. There is also a growing expectation from employees themselves that their employer will take their travel safety seriously.
Real-time trip data can play an important factor in this, allowing companies to know where their employees are and to confirm their safe arrivals. It also allows them to respond quickly to incidents or disruptions. As travel data accumulates, organisations can study trends to help them review company-wide policies about routes and safety policies.
Making sure the team uses it!
The final challenge is the one I mentioned first – encouraging employees to use the system. The problem of employees taking it upon themselves to manage the “last mile” of a journey by booking their own cabs persists. We recently conducted a survey which showed that almost half of employees (48%) are still free to choose their own travel options. The only way to alter this is to provide them with a platform that is genuinely easy to use. That means it needs to be an intuitive app that they can use from their phone. Our own solution has the advantage of being just a toggle away from their personal Uber app, but others too can be user-friendly. Convenience is the key to adoption.
At the same time, a platform should allow you to set controls on journeys. That can include distance, type of vehicle and should also allow different levels of authority to be allocated. Only certain individuals, for example, should have the option of booking luxury vehicles. Or a general priority can be set to pick electric vehicles. The system needs to offer employees the freedom to make ad-hoc bookings easily, but only within the policy guidelines of their employer. When that balance is achieved, travel managers will gain the visibility and control they need, employees will have a service they are happy with, and the wider business will benefit from richer, more reliable travel data.