Mihai Dinu is global travel manager at UiPath, a process automation software company founded in Bucharest in 2005 and now headquartered in New York.
When Mihai Dinu became the first ever global travel manager for robotic
process automation software company UiPath in 2018, there was no global travel
programme to manage. This is the blueprint of how he began with a clean sheet
of paper and ended up executing a comprehensive travel strategy for 4,000
employees in more than 30 countries.
In the beginning
Founded in Bucharest, Romania, in 2005, UiPath recruited Dinu when it had
fewer than 600 employees, overwhelmingly in Romania, India and the US. All that
was about to change. “When I joined, the leadership team told me they needed to
create a travel programme because they knew hyper-growth was coming,” he says.
At the time Dinu joined, UiPath was using SAP Concur as an expense tool
only and retained a travel agency in Bucharest, where most employees were then
based. There were what Dinu calls “limited” local agreements with a small
number of suppliers.
Travel management company
The first, lowest-hanging, fruit Dinu grabbed was to add Concur’s booking
tool, though he was soon to make an important modification (see below).
“The next step,” Dinu says, “was to find a travel management company with
a global footprint. It was important to do it very fast because we were growing
very fast. Usually, implementation takes 18 months. We couldn’t do that. We had
to finalise global implementation in about a year.”
After a request for proposal process, UiPath appointed American Express
Global Business Travel. The US was implemented in three months, with Europe,
the Middle East and Africa taking another three months after that, followed by
the more fragmented Asia-Pacific market.
Dinu attributes the rapid rollout to a combination of factors. Top of the
list was working closely with the Amex GBT and SAP Concur implementation teams,
combined with his own TMC experience. “I think my operational background helped
me burn some stages of the implementation process,” he says. Another key factor
was securing key company stakeholder sponsorship which anticipated and minimised
any internal roadblocks.
UiPath appointed other TMCs in Japan and China because they are unusual
marketplaces where even the global distribution systems differ from those used
elsewhere. These anomalies apart, he considered it necessary to appoint a
single global provider to give him a single TMC point of contact and
consolidated data.
“It was very important to have structured data from the TMC so we could
think about the next step after that, which was building the travel supplier
base,” he says. “In a scenario with multiple TMCs providing data, it would have
been harder to achieve those goals.”
Online booking tool
Once Dinu had introduced Concur’s booking tool, he encountered what he
calls “the never-ending story of ‘I found a cheaper price on Booking.com.’ My
answer to that was to integrate Booking.com into the booking tool. Amex GBT had
an agreement with Booking.com, so we could either integrate its content through
the GDS or go the other route and integrate the content directly. We went for
the first option. When the end-user books the trip [on SAP Concur], there is a
message telling them this is Booking.com content.”
In addition to making travellers happier, Dinu discovered a bonus
advantage to the integration. “We use this information for benchmarking so that
if the search results display a better Booking.com rate than our discounted
rate, we can have a conversation with the property to say we need to lower the
negotiated rate. It’s a good integration to have even just for the sake of
real-time benchmarking.”
Reporting
Dinu does not rely solely on TMC booking data. He also looks at expense
reporting data for travel booked outside the designated TMC and booking tool,
in some cases through non-compliant behaviour but in others because of approved
exceptions such as booking accommodation via a conference registration site.
Another valuable reporting source is the corporate cards issued to
travellers.
Supplier relations
Improved data has delivered deals Dinu could not achieve when he joined
the company. On an early tour of New York’s hotels, “I went with my laptop
knocking on their doors and saying ‘Hi, I’m Mihai from UiPath; we would be
interested in having discounted rates at your hotel.’ I was trying to explain
to them that we were growing very fast, but people didn’t know about us.”
With no figures to demonstrate projected spend, Dinu initially made
little progress in achieving negotiated rates or even his preferred form of
payment. “We were doing employee onboarding sessions in hotels close to our
office,” he says. “We needed 20 rooms for a week and we wanted to pay by
invoice. They said we needed to pay by credit card.”
Once Dinu could demonstrate reliable data, all these problems evaporated
and he now sources negotiated hotel rates through an RFP process.
UiPath also now has agreements with the big three airlines in the US and
with major carriers in Europe. Best of all, he has landed global agreement with
two carriers, one of them Turkish Airlines, conferring discounts for UiPath regardless
of the country in which the flight is booked.
In-house technology
“Being an automation company, this is our pedigree. We are trying to
implement our own technology,” says Dinu. UiPath software developers have built
an application programming interface (API) to pipe data from the Amex GBT reporting
tool into a data warehouse, where it is integrated with other data sources such
as the expense tool to feed a custom-built travel spend dashboard for senior
management.
“It speeds up the process and helps the leadership team take decisions,”
says Dinu. “In companies which operate very, very fast, you need to find
workarounds that help you work faster and be more accurate, so automation can
be an advantage in ensuring the currency of your processes.”
UiPath developers have also built a bot that handles registrations for
employees registered to access the company’s Uber For Business account.
“Everything had to be managed manually in the past,” says Dinu. The bot is
trained to delete accounts for deactivated users such as former employees.
Another accomplishment has been construction of a Slackbot (a combined
automated help and direct messaging bot based on the Slack internal comms
platform) to answer employee questions about policy. Again, as well as saving
the small travel team’s time (Dinu has two assistants: one in Romania and one
in Asia-Pacific), the process provides quick answers regardless of the
traveller’s time zone.
There is more home-grown travel technology to come from UiPath. “We are
trying to automate whatever makes our lives easier and enhances the traveller
experience,” Dinu says.
Duty of 'caring'
“It’s important to shift from duty of care to duty of caring,” says Dinu,
meaning that employee welfare should not only be to comply with legal protections
but genuinely to look after their wellbeing.
“There are statistics showing that
over the next decade something like 50 per cent of the workforce will suffer
from mental illness,” Dinu says.
“We have to keep close contact with travellers
to make sure they are well taken care of. We are big users of Slack. This is a
very fast way of communicating with our travellers and they know where they can
reach out.”
UiPath also tries to look after its travellers through policy. Gym use,
for example, is an allowable on-trip expense, as is lounge access for flights
above a minimum number of hours.
Additionally, “We pay special attention to our employees with medical
conditions,” says Dinu. “They are allowed to fly business class and premium
economy. It’s important to make sure all our employees are able to travel.”