Travel Planning (FI-TV-PL) 

Purpose

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

Travel Planning in SAP Travel Management with its integrated online booking service contributes greatly towards reducing your travel process costs. You can reduce the instances involved in planning and booking trips, simplify the process itself, and automatically apply your travel policies. It also improves the transparency of costs and of the areas/employees for which they were incurred.

Travel Planning provides an important strategic advantage for the role of the travel manager in your company. The business volume statistics and reporting tools in Travel Planning deliver concrete arguments for rate negotiations with service providers. Managers are relieved of routine tasks and can concentrate on strategic issues such as system and quality management and the optimization of internal processes.

Travel Planning also gives employees more responsibility. The functions are not only intended for experts who use the system on a daily basis to book travel services, they are designed particularly to assist occasional users. Such occasional users could be travelers themselves or secretaries who organize trips for groups of travelers.

Cost advantages are gained through the link between Travel Planning and the SAP Business Workflow, which standardizes approval processes and allows implementation of even complex approval procedures.

Notes on Implementation

To use the full range of information and booking functions in Travel Planning, you set up a connection to a global distribution system (GDS), which enables you to communicate with the travel service providers.

Travel Planning currently supports the following reservation systems: Amadeus, Galileo, Sabre, Deutsche Bahn Corporate Portal, and direct connections to low-cost carriers and hotel reservation systems through SAP NetWeaver Exchange Infrastructure (XI). These systems provide access to thousands of hotels, flights, train connections, and rental car offerings.

Integration

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 there, data can be transferred automatically to:

●     Financial Accounting (FI)

●     Payroll (HR)

●     Controlling (CO)

Features

Travel Planning provides the following functions:

●     Access to provider-independent information services for flights, hotels, rental cars, and trains

●     Online booking of flights, hotel rooms, and rental cars

●     Application of travel policies for queries and bookings

●     Custom hotel catalog

●     Automatic application of agreements made with travel service providers

●     Automatic application of travelers' personal preferences

●     Travel statistics and reports for analysis purposes or for negotiations with service providers

●     Full integration of data in Travel Expenses