Maritz Travel: Business Process Management Helps Manage Constant Change

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By Linda L. Briggs

Each high-end product you sell differs from the previous one, and dozens if not hundreds of employees shape, sell and support each product. In addition, you're competing in an industry where rapid change is the norm. Sound like a perfect setting for a business process management solution?

Maritz Travel is a global leader in incentive travel management -- the 110-year-old firm provides companies with meeting facilitation, special events and incentive travel programs. It's a $1 billion-plus operation with about 900 employees, part of marketing firm Maritz Inc., both based in St. Louis. If you know a top salesperson who's been rewarded with a special all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii, say, that's an example of the sort of product that Maritz offers.

Early in 2006, Maritz began actively seeking a BPM solution to better control its processes. Problems included a lack of consistency in processes and the flow of information, areas where the same information was entered into the system over and over by different departments, and lots of repetition. "We're a very successful company and the largest of our kind," says Mike Tenholder, senior project director for Maritz Travel, who has spent 25 years in the travel industry and has an IT as well as a business background. "But we had a lot of room for improvement. We said, ‘We really need… consistency in our business process, so everyone can work off the same page.'"

That first became clear late in 2005 when Maritz decided to conduct a value stream analysis -- a basic assessment of business processes that helps gauge where value is added and where waste accumulates. Part of the assessment involved talking to a wide range of employees, Tenholder says, "each of [whom] came back loud and clear and said, ‘We need a better way of managing our processes.'"

One challenge in the travel incentive business is variation. Unlike a manufacturing concern, Maritz isn't producing widgets -- it's booking airlines, negotiating hotel rooms, and accommodating groups of people. The variations from project to project are tremendous, Tenholder says. "We can't eliminate variation in our business, [but] we can manage it more effectively."

The travel industry also changes rapidly. "Things change in our travel industry so fast, that we can't be hard and fast connected to a client/server application," Tenholder explains. "We thought, maybe a business process management solution is where we need to go."

Enter Lombardi Software with TeamWorks Enterprise Edition. Lombardi's BPM suite offers the ability to create process-centric applications that work with a company's existing architecture to give visibility into data and processes. It also offers an "in-process" feature that yields real-time data on process performance.

Timing is Everything

Critical to the speed of Maritz's selection and rollout of a BPM solution was executive sponsorship. Chief Operating Officer Rich Phillips saw the value of a BPM solution early on and was the top executive sponsor who signed off on the project. "As a result of our value stream analysis work," Tenholder explains, "we came to him with a number of recommendations to improve processes… We [said], ‘We cannot build a technology solution to address these issues. [We need] a consistent process flow, a central repository of client data, and we can't build them fast enough to solve our problems. We have to go out and buy something.' It didn't take much convincing."

Once the decision was made, things moved quickly. The company studied ratings of BPM vendors from analyst groups Gartner Inc. and Forrester Research to select five top contenders. Maritz issued an RFP in late January, entertained presentations from the five finalists in mid-March, signed the deal with Lombardi at the end of March, and began implementation the second week of April. "Our company is ready for change," Tenholder says with a small laugh. "They're hungry for it."

The five systems Maritz evaluated were Oracle's BPEL Process Manager; FileNet's Business Process Management suite; FuegoBPM, a solution from Fuego, which was in the process of being purchased by BEA Systems; Savvion BusinessManager; and Lombardi's offering. It ended in a close contest between Savvion and Lombardi, Tenholder says. "It came down to people, and an understanding of what we wanted to accomplish. Lombardi just seemed to grasp it right away."

BPM in Action To illustrate the sort of process change that TeamWorks has wrought at Maritz, Mike Tenholder, senior project director for Maritz Travel, described a new client acquisition process, one that previously required "a hundred forms or emails going back and forth," along with extensive duplication of data entry. With TeamWorks, all the information is entered once, contained in a central location, and accessed at the appropriate times in the process by various employees. Here's what it looks like, in a much abbreviated example. The process begins when a Maritz salesperson makes a new sale -- say, a company who's already a customer decides to send 1,000 employees to Hawaii on a sales incentive trip. The salesperson uses TeamWorks to complete a form pulling in customer information, as well as specifying trip requirements, such as the number of travelers and other parameters. The proposal development team then takes that information from TeamWorks, sources the hotel rooms, flights, and other information needed, and prepares a proposal. Once the sale is made, project management again takes the data and fills in additional details, developing a specific itinerary. The program then opens for registration, allowing designated employees of the customer to visit an area of the Maritz Web site and sign up. At each step, data is pulled from TeamWorks as needed, not re-entered. Notification also goes to technical team members at Maritz, who assign parameters to the trip -- who can fly first class, what sort of hotel room each will be assigned, and so forth. Travel directors at Maritz who are supervising the project can check at any time via the Web site to see how registration is proceeding. Finally, the accounting team can take information from TeamWorks, reconcile billing, and issue invoices. That's just one simplified example of a process at Maritz; the company offers various types of business and travel programs, along with other services. And that's another advantage of the BPM software: It enables Maritz to make slight changes to the process for variations in each type of travel program the company manages. "Our challenge was consistency in data; now it's all in one spot," Tenholder says.

Selection Process

A critical part of any BPM rollout is getting the IT and business sides teamed up. "This implementation was really owned by the business [side]," Tenholder says. The product selection team included business analysts along with office workers and IT professionals, who added cautions about data and systems integration as well as time estimates based on the difficulty of some tasks, but were supportive.

In the first step of the rollout, analysts and IT professionals spent a week in training with Lombardi, onsite at Maritz. Training included how to design a database as well as how to tie the right variables into it.

"We had already done a lot of work on business process flows from our value stream analysis work," Tenholder says. "So we were able to take those, put [them] into Lombardi right away, then play it back to our user community." The team went through three iterations of a feedback loop for each process -- setting up a business process in TeamWorks, having the appropriate users test it, incorporating their feedback, and sending it back out for another test.

The backend integration, for passing data from Lombardi to the enterprise database, was surprisingly simple. Maritz already uses Web services and Enterprise Java Beans, which made things easier. "We were able to take what we had," Tenholder says, "and do some modifications so that Lombardi could talk to us."

The company uses a customized client/server application that sits atop an enterprise Microsoft SQL Server database and a proprietary operating system, none of which was an issue with any of the bidding vendors. As a travel company, Maritz also must be on JBoss (an open source J2EE-based application server implemented in Java), something Lombardi "really stepped up to the plate about and was ready to deliver," Tenholder says.

Final Advice

In parting, Tenholder cautions businesses that install a BPM product against moving too quickly. "Once people see the application and the opportunity, everyone's going to want to do it fast. You sort of have to regulate the enthusiasm." Being pressured into trying to do too much too soon with the products, he warns, can leads to chaos.

Lombardi itself cautioned Maritz about changes the product would bring. TeamWorks gives views into ongoing processes in real time -- suddenly, management can see bottlenecks as they are happening. That's a good thing in the long run, of course, because it helps identify process improvements. But it can also suddenly shine light on who's doing what, and under what sort of work load. Many users, including top management, won't be used to the sort of clear visibility into data and processes. "The metric reporting, the capturing, the simulation of processes…" Tenholder says, "may be something that people aren't used to seeing: real time data on process performance."

The Maritz team has had to work "to make sure we show the right metrics at the right level," Tenholder concludes. "Senior management doesn't need to see every detail, where a line manager may need to see more."

It's too early for any sort of return on investment measurements -- the system has only been in place a matter of months. But Tenholder can say this: "We're expecting a substantial increase in productivity. By the end of the first year, we'll have something." And, perhaps more telling, other business units at Maritz have been actively inquiring about the product.

Useful Links

Maritz Travel
http://www.maritztravel.com/

Lombardi Software
http://www.lombardisoftware.com/

FileNet Business Process Manager
http://www.oracle.com/appserver/bpel_home.html

Fuego/BEA Systems
http://www.fuego.com/

Oracle BPEL Process Manager
http://www.oracle.com/appserver/bpel_home.html

Savvion
http://www.savvion.com/

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