CASE STUDY
CVTE: Fuelling growth with an integrative, cost-efficient strategy
Key Highlights
About CVTE
Guangzhou Shiyuan Electronic Technology Company Limited, also known as CVTE, is a leading high-tech enterprise that specialises in the design, development and sales of LCD main boards, intelligent interactive panels, medical devices and other intelligent hardware.
The company owns a number of subsidiaries and runs two brands – Seewo for education and MAXHUB for commercial. CVTE places great focus on their comprehensive laboratories throughout China of which over 3,000 granted patents and 900 computer software and work copyrights, and software product registration certificates have birthed. Established in December 2005 and employing almost 5000 workers, the company is currently ranked first among Guangzhou enterprises for the number of patents owned.
Objectives
CVTE’s primary goal is to expand and enrich electronics in the consumer and commercial sectors, while elevating efficient, convenient and inspiring consumer experiences in electronics for their customers. To thrive in a challenging environment of stiff competition, CVTE needs to remain agile while expanding internationally, delving into new insights to meet the diverse and changing demands of their customers.
4 objectives in working with a global TMC
- Acquire professional travel management solutions and recommendations
- Integration and consolidation of all business travel
- System integration with CVTE’s official enterprise WeChat, OA and APP
- Generate effective data analysis reports by transforming data into insight
The challenge:
Multiple suppliers result in data loss and dip in bottomline
Businesses that need to expand overseas require a robust travel policy to support their operations. While the company continues to grow and deliver exceptional results in technology development, CVTE has struggled with the development and implementation of a clear travel policy to mandate employees’ travel, draining resources which could otherwise be used towards investment in further research and product development.
CVTE spends CNY 42 million on both domestic and international travel. Many of the air bookings were made via multiple local suppliers by individual employees due to the company’s unclear and loose travel policy, resulting in loss of relevant data about employees’ travel and booking behaviours. There was also a lack of understanding on the objectives to compliance of a travel policy. Additionally, there was no system integration to CVTE’s platforms as employees made online bookings via various local suppliers’ OBT for domestic flights and offline local vendors for international flights.
To look into the potential of an effective travel policy as the mainframe for driving compliance and integration to CVTE’s internal processes, the company engaged FCM to help turn the tables. Of key importance was the need to ensure that meaningful data could be extracted for future analysis, as well as to improve their employees’ business travel experience.
Collaborate, Consolidate, Communicate
FCM worked in close collaboration with CVTE to develop and implement an end-to-end integrative solution, connecting CVTE’s official enterprise WeChat, OA and APP with FCM’s online booking tool. This converged infrastructure enabled the company to capture meaningful booking behaviour and patterns, allowing FCM to cost-efficiently analyse the collected data into insights for refinement of CVTE’s travel programme, and translate that into a well-designed and robust travel policy.
This ability to derive insights from data drove CVTE towards its goal of improving their business travel processes and ultimately raising its bottomline. No longer are they making decisions based on guesses, but from comprehensive, personalised reports that empowers them to make the best possible decisions on business travel to satisfy stakeholders and travellers.
CVTE also transformed its relationship with airline partners. FCM helped the company to obtain favourable corporate deals with airlines, including better rates and additional benefits. In addition, CVTE received exemption from airlines’ requirement of white list, including China Eastern, China Southern and Hainan Airlines.
Following the deployment of the integrated system and setup of the working relationship with airlines, FCM initiated regular communications with the airlines to ensure that CVTE received airlines updates and short-term preferential promotion rates, on top of their existing contracted rates.
A regular un-used ticket report was also created to optimise the use of such tickets in a timely manner, ensuring minimal loss of expired and non-refundable tickets. This generated savings of over CNY 260,000.
More and more companies have over the years, embarked on the creation of robust travel programmes as they start to acknowledge the impact that business travel has on their bottomline. As travel policies become more sophisticated and mature, building an integrative travel programme for businesses has gathered pace, and is fast becoming the norm.
Enabling cost savings in more ways than one
Today, CVTE has moved away from a fragmented multi-supplier booking approach to an integrative end-to-end business travel booking system – harnessing powerful data insights to unlock impressive cost savings and efficiency gains.
The shift to this integrative platform has also helped to bring about a shift in mindset towards the modern approach of booking business travel.
“Many of our travellers were initially uncertain about the new system as it was a departure from our traditional method of booking travel. Now that they have experienced FCM’s OBT and seen how it has simplified and improved the planning and journey of their business travel, they have embraced this new change,” says Ms Dai, Business Travel Manager at CVTE
I was also impressed with the FCM team, who was always available to provide us with relevant analysis and advice on improving employees booking behaviour, keeping a tight supervisory control strategy over business travel, as well as ways to generate cost savings. They were extremely patient as well, always explaining new processes in a detailed and clear manner. Thanks to the FCM team, we are more knowledgeable on the latest travel cost settlement methods in the market and are now using AirPlus International, a global business travel payment solutions provider, to make our travel costs and spend even more transparent.
The cost savings and efficiency gained can be re-invested towards innovation and help the business to deliver new offerings to our customers. The potential is limitless.