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Case Study: TravelGrid Implementation at Piaggio Vehicles (PVPL)

How TravelGrid automated travel requests, approvals, SAP integration, and expense workflows at Piaggio Vehicles — the process, the integrations, and the results.

1. Abstract

The purpose of this case study is to highlight the implementation of TravelGrid, a Travel and Expense Management solution, at Piaggio Vehicles Private Limited (PVPL). It covers the automation of the travel process, the challenges of a paper-based approach in the travel industry, and how to mitigate the problems of a manually driven travel process within an organization. The objective is to give a clear picture of the scope of automation and of solving business problems related to Travel and Expense Management — case by case — such as submitting a travel request, processing tickets, arranging cabs and hotels, or submitting travel expenses.

As a single platform, TravelGrid optimizes the following aspects:

  • Time & Data Management
  • Process Adherence
  • Prevention of Human Errors
  • Less Paper Work
  • Data Manipulation
  • Report Generation
  • Data Reconciliation
  • Information Security
  • Cost Savings

2. Introduction

Travel is the third largest line item in most company budgets, behind materials and payroll. For medium and large enterprises, the problem is that the whole process usually runs on manual effort. Finance teams try to hold down travel spend with stacks of bills, invoices, and tickets; approval processes that run by hand; and a constant watch for fraudulent claims. How smoothly it all works depends on how well the departments in the loop coordinate: approvers, the travel desk, finance, and the travel agents.

When any one department falls behind, travel spend rises. A five-day delay in approving a trip can push airfare up by as much as 10%. A delay in settling an employee's expenses leads to endless escalations, with senior people pulled in to clear the backlog. These interruptions consume time and money, and they drive secondary costs up as well.

Automation changes this. Analytical tools now come with built-in business intelligence out of the box, so stakeholders can act on reliable data instead of guesswork. With dependable reporting in hand, a company can cut manual effort sharply and raise the efficiency of its operations and performance.

Of course, reports are only as good as the data feeding them — and that data comes from integrated tools that automate the process end to end. TravelGrid automates the entire travel and expense cycle, from request to reimbursement.

3. Challenges

PVPL processes 1,000+ trips a month. Roughly 30% of trips are by air; the rest use taxis, mostly for intra-city travel.

Before TravelGrid, the entire travel process ran on manual effort, with email as the primary channel for the following:

  • Raising a travel request.
  • Approving the travel request by the respective managers.
  • Requesting flight tickets from travel agents.
  • Requesting a cab for inter- and intra-city travel from the travel desk.
  • Settling expenses when an employee submits hard copies of the bills to the finance team; the bills are then checked one by one for discrepancies and processed in SAP.

The toughest challenge was managing the data across the entire travel process. Because most communication ran through email, and some through hard-copy application forms, generating reports was cumbersome and consumed a great deal of manpower:

  • Checking whether a traveler has violated any PVPL travel policy. Managers or accountants had to compare PVPL policy documents against each travel request or expense claim to validate compliance.
  • Processing unapproved travel requests was one of the biggest challenges. Requests often remained unapproved because managers were unavailable — either they had left the organization or were out of station and could not approve on time. Clearing these requests required many follow-ups, and sometimes senior officials had to intervene.
  • The travel desk had a tough job managing booking requests. Each travel request triggered two activities. Air ticket requests had to be forwarded to the travel agents, booked, and the details maintained in a spreadsheet. Taxi requests for inter- or intra-city travel meant the travel desk had to coordinate with the taxi agency tied up with PVPL, book the taxi, and note the booking information in a spreadsheet. This was tedious and became unmanageable on days with multiple taxi requests; fulfilling them on time demanded more manpower.
  • Generating MIS reports was time-consuming and among the biggest challenges. MIS reports are vital to any organization: they surface process anomalies so corrective action can be taken. Building reports from email dumps required manually migrating data from emails into a spreadsheet format, a daunting task with a high chance of human error.

4. Solution Offered

Channel Mentor IT Solutions Private Limited (hereinafter referred to as CM) offered its flagship product, TravelGrid, to PVPL to automate its entire travel process. CM also customized the product to PVPL's needs, in particular to automate the taxi request workflow.

TravelGrid runs both as a standalone system and as an integrated one. Most corporates run an ERP that manages their entire operations, so CM recommended that PVPL use TravelGrid as an integrated platform. With this setup, PVPL gets the full benefit of end-to-end automation.

The TravelGrid solution running at PVPL integrates with three systems:

  • Integration with LDAP: LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) lets users authenticate with their Windows user account. With LDAP integrated, PVPL users do not need a separate set of credentials to log in to TravelGrid; they authenticate with their Windows username and password. Users no longer have to remember extra credentials specific to the TravelGrid portal.
  • Integration with SAP's HCM module: Most ERPs include a Human Capital Management module with components such as Organizational Management, Personal Administration, E-Recruitment, Time Management, Payroll, Employee Self Service and Management Self Service.
    Employee Self Service (ESS) holds vital employee information, such as name, employee code, grade, cost center, managers and approval hierarchy, work location and designation. TravelGrid uses this information to drive workflows within the application. On every successful login, the system retrieves the employee's details from the ESS component and stores them in the TravelGrid database, where they are used to run the workflows quickly. ESS data is also used to check for travel policy violations, which are typically based on grade and the type of travel (domestic or international). This removes most of the manual checks finance personnel used to perform.
  • Integration with SAP's FICO module: SAP's FICO module manages finance-related data such as travel expenses, general expenses, invoices and credit notes, and cash and forex advances.
    In the current phase, TravelGrid integrates with SAP FICO to push travel expense data to the SAP system automatically. When an employee submits an expense, the expense summary goes to the respective managers for approval. After approval, it moves to the bill verifier's queue in the TravelGrid application, where the verifier can approve or reject it. On approval, the system automatically posts every expense line item to the SAP FICO module. This integration removes the manual work of entering expense line items one by one in the SAP portal and lowers the risk of human error.
    The same integration also posts invoices for air, rail, bus and taxi travel to SAP.
    The SAP integration is currently done through web services developed by the PVPL team. Because the web service avoids a direct connection to the SAP system, it protects security; the service acts as a middle layer, or interface, between TravelGrid and SAP.
  • Customized reports: CM delivered the customized reports PVPL asked for. Today these reports remove the laborious work of converting travel and expense data from emails into a spreadsheet format, for both the travel desk and the finance team.

5. Results and Benefits for PVPL

  • The system centralized travel and expense processes for a large base of users.
  • The system drives compliance and policy adherence.
  • The system ensures timely and accurate expense reporting.
  • Shorter cycle times for approvals, reimbursements, and supplier payments.
  • Lower cost of A/P for due diligence and accounting.
  • Visibility into spending trends, enabling better projections and stronger negotiations with suppliers.
  • Indirect cost savings achieved with off-settable taxes.
  • Additional ROI realized after one year of using TravelGrid.
Average expense report cost reduced by 14%
Days booked in advance increased from 8 to 13
Policy verification checkpoints increased from 4 to 8

6. Conclusion

In summary, TravelGrid is a single platform for managing travel and expenses in an organization. It connects multiple departments and gives them a smooth, hassle-free process.

TravelGrid ships with multiple ERP connectors, so it integrates easily with any ERP system. It supports several authentication systems, including LDAP, AD and ADFS, and can enable Single Sign On by integrating with third-party or proprietary SSO engines.

TravelGrid is built on Java with a robust Java-based framework. This makes it a platform-independent tool that can run on any operating system, and flexible enough to be customized easily to the customer's needs.

Finally, the biggest advantage of using TravelGrid as a single platform for end-to-end automation is the volume of data it captures at every stage of the process lifecycle. This large, high-quality data set makes TravelGrid an indispensable tool and lets CM offer business intelligence reports tailored to each customer.