Travel management company FCM Travel's consulting arm has introduced a new software tool that automatically analyses corporate air contracts.

The product, known as Air Contract Intelligence or ACiQ, is available to any company with airline contracts - not just FCM clients.?

It involves FCM uploading a corporate¡¯s air contracts along with data from its TMC. Each contract is then analysed for its value, such as ensuring that the contract is targeted in the right areas for a company's usage, and returns the results in a dashboard for the travel manager to review.?

"Airline contracting is procurement and procurement is a methodology. Where there's methodology, there's room for automation," said Jo Lloyd, FCM Consulting¡¯s global head of customer management and consulting, at the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) convention in Denver last week.

"The system does the work of overlaying one against the other to see where the performance is. We inject things like fair market share so we can understand if the targets that are in place in those contracts are also reasonable to the market conditions."

FCM piloted the solution with five companies with multinational contracts to ensure it could be scaled, said Lloyd, and it was fully launched in mid-July.

The tool's output can provide granular insights, as well as reviewing every air route and company performance to highlight whether they still should be in the programme, added Lloyd.?

FCM Consulting¡¯s air category lead Jason Kramer said it was a solution designed ¡°to identify opportunities in one's airline programme", such as the potential to make savings or ways to improve contract performance, traveller behaviour or benchmarking.

"A lot of customers do this already, but most of this tends to be pretty manual or pretty expensive,¡± added Kramer. ¡°This really simplifies and makes the process more efficient and cost effective."

The price for the service will depend on various factors, such as the number of contracts, the complexity of those contracts and the number of reporting sources.?

"It can be a self-service platform where [the travel team] can use the analytics to manage the category themselves, or FCM Consulting can play a greater role in the category management of it," explained Kramer.

"It really is intended to drive savings on an ongoing basis and to get away from the two, three, five-year [request for proposals] cycle. What you're ultimately doing is optimising your contracts when opportunities arise. Things can change between RFPs significantly depending on the type of company you are."