Merging Fragmented Travel Data into One Dynamic System

‍About Roche: 

Roche is a Swiss-based pharmaceutical company specialising in  diagnostics, pharmaceuticals and diabetes care. Ranked in the top  three Pharma companies worldwide - Roche aims to improve the  health, well-being and quality of life of people on a global scale.  Roche has provided treatment to around 137 million people in the last  year alone. 

The challenge: 

With an annual travel and expense spend of several hundred million  per year, Roche had a significant travel and expense program. They  needed to merge data from three Travel Management Companies  (TMCs), two credit card systems, two expense tools, one pre-trip  data source along with HR and financial Hierarchies into one single,  multifunctional platform.  

Their biggest challenges were: 

• Fragmentation of data.  

• Lack of visibility into activity.  

• No visibility into consolidated data.  

• Rigid hierarchies making it challenging to communicate activity  outside of the travel team. 

• Untracked use of non-preferred suppliers 

“We were very fragmented,” said Roche’s Senior Category Manager  for Global Travel Christian Guex. “We have three different TMCs that  cover ninety percent of our travel spend. This gives us less control.”  

Without a clean data source, Roche did not have the transparency  needed to make global and local decisions around travel suppliers. 

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The Process: 

PredictX integrated Roche’s travel data onto a single platform by: 

• Merging the data gained from all three TMCs, card and expense,  as well as multiple financial hierarchies.  

• Applying normalisation, cleansing and enrichment routines to  the data. 

• Merging the HR company hierarchy with the Financial company  hierarchies. 

PredictX was able to give Roche a better insight into the trends and  spend with all travel and expense companies they used. This gave  them the knowledge and tools to make global and local decisions  across departments.  

“With immediate access to data, I no longer have to wait on Excel  reports. I have everything at my fingertips. This is a huge advantage,”  said Guex.  

The Result: 

Although Roche did not plan to make big changes in its travel policy it aimed to give each department the flexibility to know what they are  spending and steer their own function. Empowering departments to  make their own data-backed decisions is a key pillar of Roche’s travel  programme. 

"We achieved transparency, which gave us the flexibility and  empowerment to work with the business on traveller experience and  behaviour, as well as spend and budget,” said Guex.  

The most distinctive result was the brand new implementation of  The Story. The Story used machine learning to transform complex  data into a narrative. Instead of logging into a complex data system,  personalised pdfs with historical and contextual data were easily  pulled and sent to relevant departments- getting the right data to the  right people. 

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