New Functions in R/3 Travel Planning

Scope of Functions

For Release 46A the functions of Travel Planning have been further adapted to the users' requirements.

Specifically, the following improvements have been carried out: ,

Enhanced user-friendliness

• In the area of Employee Self Services, for users of Travel Planning, as part of the EnjoySAP initiative, a Travel manager transaction TRIP ) has been created, with which you can manage the data for travel requests, travel plans, and travel expense reports in a unified environment and using similar techniques.

• In the Planning manager (TP01), the tab page for the 'travel request' overview was omitted to enable direct access to the individual travel service categories. Clarity has also been improved through the use of HTML views for displaying the data of a travel plan.
  The previous version of the planning manager can be called via transaction TP03.

The following new functions of Travel Planning are also available to the users of the travel manager ( transaction TRIP) in the section Planning a business trip.

New functions for price determination and availability queries

In Release 4.6A, R/3 Travel Planning offers several new functions in the area of price-based availability queries and user group-specific strategies for querying or displaying available travel services:

Query of lowest priced flight offers: best-price flight

• With its 'best-price' query, the system offers you proposals for the most economical flight connections for the relevant route.
  You can choose directly from the flights displayed and, if you wish, start the reservation process. You can set R/3 Travel Planning so that special rates your company has negotiated with travel providers are taken into consideration.
  You decide in Customizing for R/3 Travel Planning whether the travel profile is to be taken into consideration in 'best-price' queries (see below).
  The relevant settings are done in Customizing under Define price and availability strategies.

Enterprise-specific rates in the hotel and car rental sector

• The hotel sector
  You can store rates with hotel chains or individual hotels in Customizing and have them taken into consideration both in availability queries and for reservations dependent on different user groups.
  The negotiated rates must in this case be accessible to the connected reservation system to guarantee access to these rates.

• The car rental sector
  Here too you can store rate agreements with car rental companies in Customizing. They can, however, for technical reasons, only be taken into consideration for reservations; availability queries on the basis of negotiated rates is not possible.
  Consideration of enterprise-specific rate agreements can be switched on or off for each user group. Unlike in the case of negotiated hotel rates, here again the reservation system connected does not check for relevant rate authorizations.

User group-specific display and query strategies

With Release 4.6A you can switch different characteristics of the price and availability query per user group on or off. (Customizing activity Define price and availability strategies ).

For the different travel service categories you can activate the following parameters:

• Flight

• Display of flight lists in availability query according to priorities or global

• Activation of the 'best-price' function;

• Travel profile check with active 'best-price' query

• Consideration of travel profile for flight class rebooking due to missing flight price data

• Hotel

• Display of hotel list for availability query according to priorities or global

• Availability query only for rooms that comply with the trip rules defined for room classes

• Application of enterprise-specific hotel rates for availability query

• Query in enterprise-specific hotel catalog
  - only for rooms that comply with the trip rules defined for room classes
  - consideration of negotiated rates in hotel catalog

• Car rental

• Display of car rental providers for availability query according to priorities or global

• Consideration of negotiated car rental rates

• Display of lowest priced vehicles per car rental provider

New functions in the flight sector

• Stabilization of price determination functions in flight area

• Seat selection:
  Via an interactive seating plan you can choose your seat yourself for a flight you have selected if the connected reservation system offers a seating plan.

• In Customizing for enterprise-specific airfares and flight discounts, you can now store specific routings for the individual rates and discounts, that are valid for the enterprise-specific agreements (see Customizing activities Define allowed entries for enterprise-specific airfares and Define enterprise-specific flight discounts .

New functions in the hotel sector

• Enhancement of the search function:
  The hotel name can now also be used as a search criterion.

• Hotel catalog:
  The entries in the enterprise-specific hotel catalog are now defined dependent on the travel profile, that is to say, they can be assigned to a user group-specific travel profile. This guarantees compliance with trip rules also with regard to availability queries in the hotel catalog.
  The relevant settings are made in Customizing under Define assignment of travel profiles to hotel catalog items.

Enhancement of the communication interface

Through the connection of Travel Planning with the SAP Communications Interface, you can now send individual parts of screen contents per fax or e-mail.

Travel profile

You can now set time limitations for user group-specific travel profiles.

Control station

With the control station, R/3 Travel Planning now offers employees who are not Customizing specialists a supplementary access to frequently used settings. Depending on user groups you can define separate control stations through which the respective user groups can start all relevant activities, such as Customizing activities, queries, reports or URLs directly.

The necessary settings are done in Customizing under Control station.