Travel expenses are one of the largest personnel-related cost factors and offer great cost-saving potential.

The R/3 component Travel Management - Travel Planning with its connected online booking service contributes greatly towards reducing your trip process costs. Using Travel Planning you can reduce the instances involved in the planning and booking process of a trip, simplify the process itself and automatically include enterprise-specific travel policies. It also improves the transparency of the costs and the cost-incurring areas/employees.

The use of Travel Planning provides an important strategic advantage for the role of the travel manager in your enterprise. The business volume statistics and reporting tools in Travel Planning deliver concrete arguments for rate negotiations with service providers. The travel manager is relieved of routine tasks and can therefore concentrate on more strategically important tasks, such as system and quality management and the control and optimization of internal enterprise processes.

Travel Planning also extends the employee responsibility. The functions are not only designed for experts who use the system on a daily basis to book travel services, they are designed particularly to assist the occasional users. Such occasional users could be, for example, the travelers themselves or the area secretaries who have to deal with the organization of trips for several travelers.

Cost advantages are also made due to the link between Travel Planning and SAP Business Workflow, using which the approval processes can be defined uniquely and the complex approval procedure implemented successfully.

In order to make full use of the information and booking functions available in Travel Planning you must set up a connection to global reservation system, via which communication with the service providers can be made.

The current connection is to the AMADEUS Global Travel Distribution reservation system. This system is in use world-wide and has 160,000 terminals in 37,000 travel agencies and ticket sales centers connected to it.

The following data from Travel Planning is transferred automatically to Travel Expenses in SAP Travel Management:

• Date and time
• Reason, destination
• Receipts with airfares, car rental prices and hotel prices
• Stopovers

From Travel Expenses an automatic transfer can be made to:

• Financial Accounting (FI)
• Payroll (HR)
• Controlling (CO)

The following functions are available for you to use in Travel Planning:

• Access to provider-independent information services for flights, hotels, car rental and rail
• Online booking of flights, hotel rooms and car rental
• Consideration of internal travel policies for queries and bookings
• Possibility of setting up an enterprise-specific hotel catalog
• Automatic consideration of agreements made with travel service providers
• Automatic consideration of travelers' personal preferences

• Statistics and reports for trips taken to analyze the trip behavior of the employees or to aid negotiations with travel service providers

• Full integration of data in Travel Expenses