KDS Helps Henkel Reduce Travel Expenditure and Provides Added Services to Travelers

"Out of the total number of trips booked at Henkel headquarters by KDS users, 60% are booked online. This success is a direct result of KDS Corporate ease of use and very intuitive graphical user interface."

Sascha Kluewer, Manger Purchasing Services, Henkel

Henkel is an internationally operating company with a widely diversified product portfolio, including adhesives, household cleaners, body-care products, and surface treatments.

The Henkel Group is managed by Henkel KGaA in Düsseldorf, Germany. At the end of 2001, Henkel employed more than 45,000 people worldwide, 12,000 of whom work for the company in Germany for a year-2000 turnover of 8.4 billion dollars. Henkel is represented in more than 75 countries.

Objectives

Henkel employees include a total of 5,000 business travelers, 2,000 of whom are based in Düsseldorf. In Europe and the United States, the company spends 45 million dollars worldwide in travel (air, hotel, and car). Sixty percent of the trips are city pairs between headquarters and European capitals.

Faced with growing travel expenditure, the company's Travel Management turned to self-booking solutions for a streamlined travel process and conducted a market assessment of the available solutions. Henkel needed to reduce process costs by enforcing travel policy rules and wanted to be more well-informed when negotiating with carriers. The solution also had to provide additional services to the travelers, such as 24/7 booking.

Henkel studied five self-booking solutions available in Europe and the United States and ranked their ease of use, their ability to be used internationally and to be linked to multiple GDS (Henkel uses Amadeus, Saber, Galileo, and Worldspan). Adoption rate being key to Henkel, it was essential that the solution be simple and not require training.


Solution
Henkel market research showed that KDS was the only e-booking solution that could be deployed internationally through multiple GDS, languages, and currencies. Its interface was simple enough to be used immediately, and it also integrated perfectly with the workflow of Henkel's corporate travel agency, Carlson Wagonlit (CWT).

After a four-week pilot phase, during which employees traveled complex trips, the deployment at Henkel headquarters in Düsseldorf was completed in no more than 100 days.

In order to best implement the KDS solution, Henkel Travel Management used a poster campaign to develop employee interest in the upcoming solution. This teaser was so well orchestrated that it drove a high number of travelers to register on KDS in the first days of the rollout.

The positive reaction to the KDS solution has been reinforced by Henkel's internal research, which shows that it usually takes no more than three minutes to book a trip online on KDS Corporate ?much quicker than booking by phone.

Henkel doesn't treat VIPs in any special way. Out of the 20 people in Management Circle One -- people directly below the board-- roughly 50% book themselves on KDS.

KDS advanced features such as Trip Template are actively used by city-pairs frequent travelers, who are able to reserve a complete trip (including air, car, and hotel) with a few mouse clicks ?just by entering their departure and arrival date and time.

KDS Professional Team and CWT Solutions Group worked with Henkel Travel Management to customize the application and integrate the travel policy rules. The fares database includes Henkel preferred suppliers, who are displayed and promoted in the online booking tool. Once customized, KDS's intuitive graphical user interface clearly identifies travel options that are compliant with corporate policy. When a trip must be booked outside the policy, the traveler must justify it, and the trip then follows a special validation process.

After this successful deployment at the Düsseldorf headquarters, KDS Corporate is being deployed at Henkel sites in Europe and in the United States.

The company plans to reach its return on investment in KDS Corporate by 2003.
source : KDS