INSIGHT
High-quality data makes the biggest impact
Your business travel programme is only as good as the information you can find within it.
Making effective decisions at the highest levels of your companies future spend and travel preferences starts with the historic data you build up every minute of every day through bookings and expense spending.
So it's vital to book with a trusted TMC partner that can capture a multitude of data sources and sort it into easy-to-understand reporting. And of course, it has to keep your data safe.
FCM ensures accurate, consistent and secure reporting no matter how and where your travel is booked. Our intelligent data platform is able to integrate direct submissions from back office systems, GDS and third-party booking platforms globally, but it doesn’t stop there.
For example, by connecting your invoicing systems to our reporting system, you can send larger amounts of higher quality data, more regularly.That means faster updates and a wider range of reporting analytics. Doing this across more and more countries also offers a vastly-improved real-time view of your financial reporting.
By taking a direct connection from the data source, we can sift through to amplify the highest-quality data for our technology to mine. Everything is validated against our FCM global governance framework.
Along with our data and operation teams, you have access to a friendly and intuitive user interface which you can use to continuously monitor, track and improve the quality of your data.
For example, our latest technology means your data’s quality is constantly checked, with fixes automatically performed. It is then uploaded, or reuploaded, and our system now offers you an immediate score out of 10 to demonstrate what the data quality level is.
Tailoring your data
FCM prides itself on ensuring your account manager has the power to solve your challenges. Through custom C-Level dashboards replicating Bloomberg-style spending analytics, you can get a simple understanding of high/low spend and programme performance.
Our custom compliance dashboards can show hotel programmes by city. This makes it easy to identify out-of-policy bookings, and percentile reporting triggers – focusing on the 90% percentile outlying offenders. That way, we can just focus on the ones driving non-compliance and leave alone the ones booking within policy.
By integrating with expense platforms, FCM customises dashboards so you can see granular details. You'll be able to see programme leakage by comparing agency spend vs. spend expensed, while drilling down into additional data points such as ancillary costs. You can also set your travel budget by cost centre and division, for example.
“Having clean, high quality data today, including third parties, is more important than ever to maximise savings.”
There's no need to wait for a data audit report to be run. Instead you can access the highest quality data by drilling down into each element based on its specific high or low score, and then identifying where any issues are to fix them.
Many customers aren't tied to a GDS and want NDC. We want to ensure our customers can book through whatever source they wish and have the confidence we can capture data from it.
That is why FCM Platform connects with additional sources, for example a booking website such as Hotel.com or Expedia, as well as with different expense providers. By integrating thirdparty expense data, you can identify leakage, and analyse where discounts were not leveraged to maximise savings.
All of these data feeds can then be integrated directly into FCM Platform and validated against both our requirements and yours. One consolidated, full view of your business travel programme.
Leveraging different data sources means we can standardise and validate your data against our own reference data tables, your reference data tables and those from third party suppliers too.
This offers you the most complete picture of your data, its quality and its accuracy, benchmarked across other customers and sources as well as our standards and their standards for the truest representation.