Eliminating wasteful processes, particularly when it comes to manufacturing or customer service, is a very valid motivation for most businesses.
Until now, these lean principles have never really been applied to the booking of business travel. Rarely is travel a core process that is essential to the everyday working of your business and therefore streamlining the processes that surround it is something that just never quite makes it to the top of your To Do list. However, when you take a step back to analyse just how draining the process of booking and managing business travel can be on productivity you might find yourself a little shocked.
Think back to the last business trip that you or someone in your organisation had to take. It was most likely booked using multiple websites (one for the flight, one for the hotel, one for the train, etc), websites that then send you separate email confirmations for each leg of the trip or mode of transport used - email confirmations that then needed to be printed off to account for the fact that said websites aren’t particularly mobile friendly and can’t be relied upon to call up your confirmation details when you’re on the go.
What should have been a simple trip can quickly turn into a drawn-out headache for your team - it takes up more than it’s fair share of time, builds waste into your processes and lowers employee satisfaction.
Thankfully, business travel is getting lean. There are now travel management portals which enable you to book your business trips in one place, totally free of charge - some are even completely compatible with all mobile devices and promise to show you all rates available, meaning you will no longer have to check various online booking sites to get the best deal. And if you are travelling with colleagues you can book for all of them together, with one checkout, one email confirmation and travel details being sent to each traveller.
Finding one of these portals really does mean that you’re getting to the heart of lean thinking; it’s about doing more with less and that’s exactly what these portals provide. It’s lean, it's free and it will transform your processes today, just like travel.cloud.
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