Key Client Case Study

This professional services firm employs 12,000 people primarily in the UK, but also in Canada, the US, Australia and Europe. Of the 12,000 employees c4,000 were declared as regular business travellers. Several well-established in-house functions shared ownership of Travel Risk Management procurement decisions, but the ongoing supplier relationship management was largely handled by a Corporate Travel function of 4 and a Corporate Security team of 2. Other influential departments included HR, Insurance, Corporate Risk & Resilience, Global Mobility and Employee Benefits.

1. Identified Duplication in Spend: Insurer & TMC

Whilst the integrated Travel Risk Management solution hanging from the insurance policy was opted out of operationally, no reduction in the pricing structure had been offered by the insurer to reflect this. This was also the case when the pricing structure of the corporate travel solution was interrogated. As each contract had been in place for several years, the renegotiation position with regards to these two areas was clear and saw modest but meaningful reductions achieved in both cases to reflect the fact that neither suite of TRM tools were requested, required or being utilised in any way.

2. Declared Populations Reduced: Medical & Security Assistance Supplier

An overly complicated and tiered population declaration system, ambiguous contract definitions and intimidating legal 'small print' had forced the travel department to err on the side of caution and declare an inflated travelling population of 4,000 business travellers across each 12-month period. In effect this figure of 4,000 was arrived at by reviewing job specifications that stated the need to travel, rather than hard travel data, and in reality, a total of c500 people would ever be travelling at any one point in time.

The supplier in question still required an assessment of all of those who 'might travel' in the upcoming year, but a much more appropriate assessment was presented to said supplier, seeing the declaration fall by almost 50%.

3. Renewal Price Negotiation: Medical & Security Assistance Supplier

In addition to the reduced population declared, numerous additional products and services were bundled into the original contract which were either never implemented, discontinued or in fact examples of where our client should have received updates onto newly improved platforms that had not occurred. This placed Boston Park in a position to request these areas be taken into account during the renewal pricing process. This, along with some concerns raised over account management, and pricing comparisons sought and presented from alternative suppliers, saw a further price reduction for the upcoming annual term.

4. Supplier Termination: Geopolitical Risk Advisory & Tracking Suppliers

Following a simple review process of all providers capability, and service requests made to each over the previous 24 months, the decision was made to terminate the subscription with the geopolitical risk advisory firm and the contract with the standalone tracking supplier. The travel itinerary & app-tracking solution provided by the incumbent Assistance supplier was deemed fit for purpose and far more cost effective. On investigation the subscription in place with the geopolitical advisory firm was not a required pre-requisite to access their ad-hoc security consulting and training services as had been previously presented, and the information and analysis reports which formed the core of the subscription service were drastically underutilised.

A 38% reduction in Travel Risk Supplier spend, decreased managerial burden from less products and suppliers to manage, increased ROI perception from the SMT and C-Suite and deeper account management assurances coming from the highly valued and trusted Medical & Security Assistance partner whose contract was committed to on fresh terms for a 3 year period, with SLA's, renewal process, and quarterly service review process now formally in place.