Reining In Business TravelReining In Business Travel

With the recession official, many businesses are keeping a tight rein on travel expenses. To help its business customers manage what they spend on the road, Carlson Wagonlit Travel, a Minneapolis business travel-management company, plans to boost its business-intelligence services. Early next year, the company will add multidimensional analysis and on-demand reporting capabilities to its Discovery travel-expense reporting tools.

Carlson Wagonlit began giving its customers access to Discovery, which is based on query and reporting software from Actuate Corp., in July 2000. The service lets travel managers generate spending reports using data gleaned from the travel agency's database. Managers use the information to monitor spending, prepare travel budgets, and negotiate contracts with airlines, hotels, and rental-car companies. More than 200 companies in the United States and 100 in Australia use Discovery.

Early next year, Carlson Wagonlit will expand Discovery with on-demand reporting capabilities that will let clients generate semicustomized reports. Reports generated by the system today use predefined parameters. With the new capabilities, users will be able to set those parameters, such as the time period the report covers.

With the expanded service, Carlson Wagonlit expects fewer requests from clients for user-specific reports. "We don't have to have as many developers around here working on ad hoc reports," says Jay Vetsch, senior director of information delivery.

Before year's end, Discovery will also boast a new user interface that ties the software more closely to Carlson Wagonlit's self-booking and traveler-profile systems. And by mid-2002, Carlson Wagonlit will add Cognos Inc.'s PowerPlay online analytical processing software to Discovery, letting users perform detailed, multidimensional analysis on travel-spending data.