Mihai Dinu is global travel manager at UiPath, a process automation software company founded in Bucharest in 2005 and now headquartered in New York.

When Mihai Dinu became the first ever global travel manager for robotic process automation software company UiPath in 2018, there was no global travel programme to manage. This is the blueprint of how he began with a clean sheet of paper and ended up executing a comprehensive travel strategy for 4,000 employees in more than 30 countries.

In the beginning?
Founded in Bucharest, Romania, in 2005, UiPath recruited Dinu when it had fewer than 600 employees, overwhelmingly in Romania, India and the US. All that was about to change. ¡°When I joined, the leadership team told me they needed to create a travel programme because they knew hyper-growth was coming,¡± he says.

At the time Dinu joined, UiPath was using SAP Concur as an expense tool only and retained a travel agency in Bucharest, where most employees were then based. There were what Dinu calls ¡°limited¡± local agreements with a small number of suppliers.

Travel management company
The first, lowest-hanging, fruit Dinu grabbed was to add Concur¡¯s booking tool, though he was soon to make an important modification (see below).

¡°The next step,¡± Dinu says, ¡°was to find a travel management company with a global footprint. It was important to do it very fast because we were growing very fast. Usually, implementation takes 18 months. We couldn¡¯t do that. We had to finalise global implementation in about a year.¡±

After a request for proposal process, UiPath appointed American Express Global Business Travel. The US was implemented in three months, with Europe, the Middle East and Africa taking another three months after that, followed by the more fragmented Asia-Pacific market.

Dinu attributes the rapid rollout to a combination of factors. Top of the list was working closely with the Amex GBT and SAP Concur implementation teams, combined with his own TMC experience. ¡°I think my operational background helped me burn some stages of the implementation process,¡± he says. Another key factor was securing key company stakeholder sponsorship which anticipated and minimised any internal roadblocks.

UiPath appointed other TMCs in Japan and China because they are unusual marketplaces where even the global distribution systems differ from those used elsewhere. These anomalies apart, he considered it necessary to appoint a single global provider to give him a single TMC point of contact and consolidated data.

¡°It was very important to have structured data from the TMC so we could think about the next step after that, which was building the travel supplier base,¡± he says. ¡°In a scenario with multiple TMCs providing data, it would have been harder to achieve those goals.¡±

Online booking tool
Once Dinu had introduced Concur¡¯s booking tool, he encountered what he calls ¡°the never-ending story of ¡®I found a cheaper price on Booking.com.¡¯ My answer to that was to integrate Booking.com into the booking tool. Amex GBT had an agreement with Booking.com, so we could either integrate its content through the GDS or go the other route and integrate the content directly. We went for the first option. When the end-user books the trip [on SAP Concur], there is a message telling them this is Booking.com content.¡±

In addition to making travellers happier, Dinu discovered a bonus advantage to the integration. ¡°We use this information for benchmarking so that if the search results display a better Booking.com rate than our discounted rate, we can have a conversation with the property to say we need to lower the negotiated rate. It¡¯s a good integration to have even just for the sake of real-time benchmarking.¡±

Reporting
Dinu does not rely solely on TMC booking data. He also looks at expense reporting data for travel booked outside the designated TMC and booking tool, in some cases through non-compliant behaviour but in others because of approved exceptions such as booking accommodation via a conference registration site.

Another valuable reporting source is the corporate cards issued to travellers.

Supplier relations
Improved data has delivered deals Dinu could not achieve when he joined the company. On an early tour of New York¡¯s hotels, ¡°I went with my laptop knocking on their doors and saying ¡®Hi, I¡¯m Mihai from UiPath; we would be interested in having discounted rates at your hotel.¡¯ I was trying to explain to them that we were growing very fast, but people didn¡¯t know about us.¡±

With no figures to demonstrate projected spend, Dinu initially made little progress in achieving negotiated rates or even his preferred form of payment. ¡°We were doing employee onboarding sessions in hotels close to our office,¡± he says. ¡°We needed 20 rooms for a week and we wanted to pay by invoice. They said we needed to pay by credit card.¡±

Once Dinu could demonstrate reliable data, all these problems evaporated and he now sources negotiated hotel rates through an RFP process.

UiPath also now has agreements with the big three airlines in the US and with major carriers in Europe. Best of all, he has landed global agreement with two carriers, one of them Turkish Airlines, conferring discounts for UiPath regardless of the country in which the flight is booked.

In-house technology
¡°Being an automation company, this is our pedigree. We are trying to implement our own technology,¡± says Dinu. UiPath software developers have built an application programming interface (API) to pipe data from the Amex GBT reporting tool into a data warehouse, where it is integrated with other data sources such as the expense tool to feed a custom-built travel spend dashboard for senior management.

¡°It speeds up the process and helps the leadership team take decisions,¡± says Dinu. ¡°In companies which operate very, very fast, you need to find workarounds that help you work faster and be more accurate, so automation can be an advantage in ensuring the currency of your processes.¡±

UiPath developers have also built a bot that handles registrations for employees registered to access the company¡¯s Uber For Business account. ¡°Everything had to be managed manually in the past,¡± says Dinu. The bot is trained to delete accounts for deactivated users such as former employees.

Another accomplishment has been construction of a Slackbot (a combined automated help and direct messaging bot based on the Slack internal comms platform) to answer employee questions about policy. Again, as well as saving the small travel team¡¯s time (Dinu has two assistants: one in Romania and one in Asia-Pacific), the process provides quick answers regardless of the traveller¡¯s time zone.

There is more home-grown travel technology to come from UiPath. ¡°We are trying to automate whatever makes our lives easier and enhances the traveller experience,¡± Dinu says.

Duty of 'caring'
¡°It¡¯s important to shift from duty of care to duty of caring,¡± says Dinu, meaning that employee welfare should not only be to comply with legal protections but genuinely to look after their wellbeing.

¡°There are statistics showing that over the next decade something like 50 per cent of the workforce will suffer from mental illness,¡± Dinu says.

¡°We have to keep close contact with travellers to make sure they are well taken care of. We are big users of Slack. This is a very fast way of communicating with our travellers and they know where they can reach out.¡±

UiPath also tries to look after its travellers through policy. Gym use, for example, is an allowable on-trip expense, as is lounge access for flights above a minimum number of hours.

Additionally, ¡°We pay special attention to our employees with medical conditions,¡± says Dinu. ¡°They are allowed to fly business class and premium economy. It¡¯s important to make sure all our employees are able to travel.¡±