EADS's Wants Optimised Travel Process
Background
The European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS) is a worldwide leading company in the aerospace industry. Through its subsidiaries—Airbus, an aircraft manufacturer; Eurocopter, the biggest helicopter company worldwide; EADS Astrium from the space travel industry; and Cassidian, one of the biggest suppliers for global security solutions and systems worldwide—EADS shows a complex organizational structure with a multitude of processes that often differ between its approximately 200 sites around the world.
EADS came into contact with NP4 through their travel service provider. At that time in 2004, EADS sent out a request-for-proposal to NP4 and other suppliers for renewing its travel processes. For EADS the main topics were the following: travel guidelines for better transparency and controlling of travel bookings; an Internet Booking Engine (IBE) implemented such that bookings could be processed on- as well as offline; for IBE and conventional travel agency bookings, a pre-trip approval process in order to make costs transparent even before a trip; consolidation and balance of on- and offline booking data; and data enrichment and forwarding to accounting systems.
Solution
NP4’s core competency lies in the collection, consolidation and transmission of travel data from around the world. Thus, in finding a solution for EADS, NP4 concentrated on the requirements for data consolidation, the pre-trip approval process and enrichment and forwarding of data.
Bit by bit NP4 developed a solution to completely meet the needs of EADS, in the process gaining valuable experience that contributed in part to NP4’s own product line Travel Data Suite. EADS now runs a very customized version of the Travel Data Suite with the following components: TD pool for collection and consolidation of all relevant booking, payment and accounting data; TD doc for production of travel cost estimations and providing detailed pricing information about the trip and booking fees, cost centre, project number approver, fellow travellers, etc. to travellers and their supervisors; TD chart for reports and statistics that make travel flow transparent and provide a basis for travel guidelines and negotiations with travel service providers; and TD hub for the initialisation of various systems, connecting internal and/ or external third parties (e.g. the Finance Department interface to Accounting) to enable forwarding of collected and consolidated travel data. This last component especially reduces EADS’s process costs.
NP4 works with various departments at EADS. The Procurement department at EADS holds responsibility for the entire project with NP4. As well, currently NP4 is in close cooperation with EADS’s Travel Management and Human Resources departments for the enrichment of travel documents with human resource data.
Today the Travel Data Suite is operated throughout EADS in four countries—England, France, Germany and Spain. In addition, TD hub provides more than 50 interfaces to different accounting systems.
Product Highlights from the EADS Perspective:
- Data consolidation on- and offline
- Pre-trip approval process
- Data enrichment for further processes
- Data forwarding to accounting systems
