By, Ron Gillette, group president, FSG Europe, Xerox
If you’ve ever arranged travel for business or personal reasons you know that the process can involve quite a bit of option-searching, price-checking and logistics-collecting. A well-planned trip is often only achieved with meticulous organization and research on your part.
A comprehensive source-to-settlement travel and expense solution offers business travelers and the enterprises they represent tremendous time and money savings by simplifying and streamlining the travel and expense process. This is why Xerox has teamed up with KDS, a leading European software provider for travel and expense (T&E) management.
According to Oxford Economics for every dollar invested in business travel, businesses benefit from an average of $12.50 in increased revenue and $3.80 in new profits. So vendors that can offer flexibility and uniquely address customer needs through innovation and superior service win out.
Xerox and KDS have complementary skills, competencies, products and service offerings that will provide significant value to existing and prospective clients seeking to lower business costs and improve efficiency in business operations.
KDS Neo manages the booking of every travel component: taxi, rail, air, hotel, etc. and predicts trip expenses, pre-filling the expense report for simple approval and submission. Thousands of routes and options are analysed, based on search criteria, company policy and users preferences. The end user fills out the simplest possible form and a graphical timeline and preliminary expense report are displayed in seconds.
Xerox represents the client facing part of the solution. We serve clients in an extensive cross-section of industries by managing their critical finance, accounting and procurement processes. Our methodologies drive transformation and continuous improvement for each client.
According to the US Travel Association, direct spending on business travel by domestic and international travelers including expenditures on meetings events and incentive programs totaled $249 billion in 2011. By combining Xerox’s business process expertise with KDS’ market leading technologies the result is a scalable solution that offers flexibility of choice while removing millions out of the cost associated with travel, expense and finance processing.
