Agresso Travel Industry Solutions

Why Do Travel Companies Need Agile ERP Solutions?

In today’s environment, travel management companies need every advantage to compete with pressure from mega-agencies, online travel companies and regional players. Continuing to use dated technology and tolerate inefficient process will likely spell doom for those companies, especially as competition intensifies and economic conditions continue to falter.

Most traditional agency back office systems, originally created by the GDS (or others) to automate ticket settlement were designed in decades past. A disparate set of disconnected systems, these tools fail to provide the more sophisticated business information and analysis enjoyed in other industries:

• information is scattered across spreadsheets and stand-alone systems;
• report generation is a cumbersome, often manual task;
• systems are brittle and lacked adaptability.

Many travel companies today are

• wasting time on error correction and manual tasks;
• wasting money on unrecognized vendor commissions;
• limiting their ability to grow and respond to industry developments.

There is a better way…

• The CentralCommand Solution
• The CentralCommand Advantage
• The Benefits of CentralCommand
• How Can CentralCommand Add Value to My Business?
• CentralCommand Provides The Ability to Respond to Change
• Establishing Your Business Case for CentralCommand

The CentralCommand Solution

Agresso and Sabre partnered in 2002 to create CentralCommand, a fully integrate travel accounting and ERP solution.

Sabre® CentralCommand with Agresso is the only fully integrated end-to-end business information system for travel agencies and travel management companies (TMCs).  It combines Sabre’s expertise and focus on travel with Agresso’s powerful back-office financial management tools, known generally as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). CentralCommand provides the detailed level of reporting needed by growing travel management customers who have complex settlement, billing and reporting requirements and the operational tools to optimize business processes.

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The CentralCommand Advantage

CentralCommand is very different in approach; revolutionary design concepts within CentralCommand permit the capture and delivery of virtually unlimited amounts of analytical information across the entire operation.

As an ERP tool, CentralCommand is designed to help your business compete, not just provide travel accounting. It has provided a positive return on investment (ROI) to current customers whether through streamlining existing business processes, eliminating redundancies, or by providing insight to internal and external customers via business intelligence and reporting.

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The Benefits of CentralCommand

As an integrated travel accounting/ERP solution we provide unparalleled insight into your operations, customer service and profitability. Our customers enjoy superior efficiency with built-in error correction, increase productivity, reduce costs, and the agility necessary to respond to changing business needs:

• Reduce the need for multiple software systems;
• Maintain consistency of all data throughout all back-office processes – one version of the truth;
• Increase productivity through common interface with standardized tools;
• Enhance your agency’s ability to manage change;
• Reduce clerical time through full integration, external transaction import routines and speedy keyboard entry of transactions across standardized entry screens;
• Dramatically reduce reporting time through automation of period-end tasks;
• Provide fast and effective answers to queries through quick and easy access to online information;
• Allocate more time on managing your business effectively by reducing the time required to produce standard management reports.

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How Can CentralCommand Add Value to My Business?

Our integrated solution provides a vastly superior business tool, allowing TMCs to:

• Increase revenue: Use powerful reporting capabilities to develop targeted marketing programs using historical data. Identify unrecognized vendor commission and automate service fees;
• Reduce costs: Reduce the number of disparate systems, eliminating manual interface and redundant data correction;
• Optimize sales efforts: Create notifications and reporting that will allow you to respond and refocus sales efforts based on market conditions;
• Improve customer satisfaction: Provide customers with detailed and accurate reporting that meets their specific needs. Reduce your respond time to customer requests due to a single source of data;
• Reduce staffing and overhead costs: Reduce manual intervention, double entry and error corrections through improved automation and workflow, reduction of data entry between separate systems;
• Respond to evolving business needs: Identify trends with real-time access to business critical information, forecast revenue and costs easily, track productivity by supplier, branch, agent or customer and update the system easily and inexpensively as changes in circumstances require.

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CentralCommand Provides The Ability to Respond to Change

The travel industry is dynamic and TMCs regularly face pressure to adapt to new situations. Often these place enormous strain on brittle, disconnect back-office tools. CentralCommand takes full advantage of the Agresso feature of post-implementation agility – the ability to change or modify the system AFTER it has been installed, without the need for costly consultants or IT resources.

• Reorganizations or Restructuring – can occur frequently in growing organizations
• Mergers and Acquisitions – to grow and take advantage of economies of scale
• Regulatory Changes – such as the SOX Act of 2002 and IFRS
• Industry “Shake-ups” – shift in emphasis from commissions to service fees

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Establishing Your Business Case for CentralCommand

Sometimes TMCs need help looking beyond the sticker-price on an ERP system. If they don’t fully understand all the real costs of their current system, these costs can get buried or even taken for granted...but they add up fast and can quietly jeopardize the business.

Establishing the true value of an ERP system is much easier once dollar values are attached to the many inefficient processes, errors, and deficient commission collection. Consider some of the estimates below and see how dramatically CentralCommand can impact your revenue.

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