The challenge
Amway, a global leader in health, beauty and home care products, had a fragmented travel program: Each of its 11 markets in the Asia Pacific region had its own travel policy and service provider. This meant that they had little to no visibility on where, when, and on what they were spending on for their business travel in the region.
As the company was undergoing a business transformation globally, they needed the visibility of this data to help them identify potential areas for savings, and eventually deliver a consolidated travel policy and program that would be consistent across all markets.
The Solution
CWT works with Amway globally, however a unique approach was required for Asia Pacific, due to the complexity of its business in Asia Pacific. Amway’s business spans 11 markets in the region, each operating in various languages with differences in culture and needs.
To ensure that we understood each of them, we provided support to the global travel team on their local rollout strategy and worked closely with them to execute the implementation and bring all of these markets together on a common booking platform. While they retained their respective travel policies at this point, each country as asked to book all their travel requirements through one central platform.
This important step of bringing all the travel spend into one place allowed our program managers to quickly identify opportunities for savings and out-of-policy actions to encourage more compliant behavior from their employees.
It has also enabled CWT to learn about Amway employees’ travel behaviors, laying the ground for the next phase of consolidating their travel program. With this data, and the strategic counsel of our program management team, Amway has also been able to define a new way of evaluating each market’s travel spend and make informed decisions on how to improve its program.
“Partnering with CWT has been much more valuable than booking travel for employees. It has been about discovery and using data. Since making the change to CWT, we are able to see and understand our travel in ways we could never have done before. The availability of information has allowed us to establish baseline data and show a continued decline in costs and an improvement in compliance. This new found wealth of information has also afforded us the opportunity to strategically manage our travel and bring our program closer to becoming a benchmark for other organizations.“
Guy Langenburg
Global Travel Team Manager, Amway
The Results
This success has empowered Amway to turn data into action, helping them to understand how best to control costs and optimize their program. It has also helped change employee behavior as they are now more aware of their travel policy and have help identifying actions that are compliant.
Being more aware of their policy and business objectives has led to more prudent travel habits: travel arrangers are now more diligent in approving only essential travel requests and employees are switching some of their meetings online.
As a result, Amway has seen a 16% drop in travel spend year-on-year and a decrease of USD280 in the average ticket price (ATP), with no disruption to their business strategy or reduction in travel trips. We are now planning the second phase: Consolidation of their travel program to deliver one single travel policy across the region.