Havas Voyages American Express, SAS Team to Manage Expenses

The largest French business travel management company, Havas Voyages American Express manages and optimizes travel expense budgets for its client companies. Since the end of 2001, the company has offered EASY STAT, an online service developed with SAS. This secure decisional extranet, intended for the B-to-B market, allows clients of Havas Voyages American Express to consult and analyze their travel expenses online.

Customer Success Video

Check out this video to learn more about Havas Voyages American Express and its successes with SAS.

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Customer ViewPoint
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Dominique Savart

Director of Information Systems, Havas Voyages American Express

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Havas Voyages American Express has a mission to sell travel services to companies. Therefore, its value-add lies not only in its capacity to offer a high quality of service, but also its ability to centralize data, analyze it and make it available to its clients.

In order to offer reliable and up-to-date reporting, Havas Voyages American Express selected an online decision analysis and reporting solution, developed with SAS. Dominique Savart, director of information systems, notes, "Above all, we wished to influence the market by offering a product not offered by anyone else. Technologically, our image had become stuffy and our objective was to show that Havas Voyages American Express could be the pioneer in the area of new technologies. We are now the only company with a day-plus-one (D+1) reporting tool" – that is, reports based on the previous day's data.

Rapidly Operational Project
Initiated in the beginning of 2000, this project was opened for bidding. The goal of information services management was to develop an extranet for clients as well as for internal use and to implement this project by outside teams, with transfer of know-how to the Havas Voyages American Express teams. Savart adds: "SAS won out over its competitors, because the company presented a competitive, innovative and technically believable solution. In our opinion, the decisional extranet truly met what we wished to achieve." The first objectives of the implementation were:

• Make available, on a D+1 basis, clean data originating from the data warehouse, controlled by management rules.
• Make the same application available to the internal account managers and external clients.
• Have the application capable of growth: the extranet must meet both the standard reporting needs as well as personalized reporting.

This encompasses global analysis of the average budget, a more advanced analysis geared to negotiations with airline companies, as well as analytical tables in order to track the travel policy application.

At the end of 2000 all those considerations had been covered by the new application developed with SAS. EASY STAT initially operated exclusively for eight to 10 months as an internal application, and then pilots were launched on the extranet.

"Our problem with the extranet was especially the implementation of satisfactory and auditable security systems rather than purely functional problems," Savart says. "More than anything, we wished to provide our clients with a secure service. For that reason, we finally decided on a so-called 'encoded tunnel" or VPN (virtual private network)."

Functionally, EASY STAT is built on a data warehouse, on the basis of a SGBD/R Sybase. The data is extracted each day from this warehouse and loaded into the extranet application.

A Progressive Solution
EASY STAT continues to evolve: improvement of statistics for rail transport and other cross-tabulated analyses. Recently, an automated management of activity reports was implemented. EASY STAT is now a true D+1 analysis tool and also allows management of clean reports with tables and graphs that can be archived or edited for external distribution. Information service management is also working on analyses for "pre-trip" reporting – in other words, the capability of analyzing engagements of travelers taken during their trip preparation depending on their travel schedules. With the extranet, clients are able to rapidly display all the data, so that they can achieve travel savings prior to their trip or also check observance of security conditions.

Convincing Results
Approximately 20 clients and 130 internal account managers use EASY STAT. Says Savart: "EASY STAT is now unique in the marketplace. This is truly an innovative product that is functional and can evolve. In addition, this decisional business-to-business extranet provides us with true credibility in the market especially when we participate in calls for bids."

Boosted by these results, Havas Voyages American Express now plans to internationalize EASY STAT. Next it will be made available to other subsidiaries of the American Express group. Information management already has made a commitment to its clients to deploy its extranet with a consolidation throughout Europe. A British, German or Spanish buyer can connect and use EASY STAT, when desired, within the context of a European contract.

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