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Icon: The centralisation
of travel management in Europe
Background
Icon plc (NASDAQ: ICLR) is a contract research organisation
with it’s global head-quarters in Dublin, Ireland that
manages clinical trails on behalf of pharmaceutical companies.
The company has 24 operations in 15 countries and currently
manages approximately 290 projects in 55 countries. Due to the
nature of the service that we provide there is a large volume
of travel to ensure that we meet our service commitments.
Travel in Europe
Due to the fact that travel costs are a significant amount
each fiscal year it has been the ambition of the management
team to implement a system that would allow a more rigorous
workflow for the approval of travel bookings. We also
recognised that the centralisation of any purchasing will
always benefit the company. Associated with this we had
developed a simple in house system to allow the traveller to
request bookings and their manager to approve.
We recognised that the system had many limitations and
required redevelopment to meet our perceived needs. Not being
in the software business we always prefer to buy rather than
build. We came across SkyGate, had a web based demonstration
and following some initial discussions arranged an onsite
demonstration in Dublin. We followed this with a reference
site visit to see both SkyWeb and SkyGate in operation.
It is now several months since we first went live with the
application in Dublin and we have been very pleased with the
results. The travel department have found it a fantastic
productivity aid. We have been accumulating booking data and
will use this in the future to talk to suppliers. The managers
who now approve travel electronically are able to see the cost
prior to the ticket being booked due to the GDS interface.
Importantly for Icon we can also see if the travel is
rechargeable and to whom.
The next step for Icon will be to implement SkyWeb in other
European offices so that we can have one database of travel
information for Europe. Then we will be closer to the
possibility of centralising travel purchasing.
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