Within World Vision Australia (WVA), our business unit is in charge of OHS, Security, Travel, Staff Care and Compliance.
Simply put, my team and I are responsible for the security and safety of all WVA Staff. Whether they’re at their desks, or traveling across the country or even worldwide, we are in charge of making sure they are safe and able to do their jobs to the best of their abilities.
The Problem
Before we discovered Locomote, we were stuck with a manual booking system through a travel management company (TMC). To say it wasn’t an ideal situation would be a major understatement.
The process we were using wasn’t streamlined, which meant that there was a lot of time intensive back-and-forth. The other result was a huge amount of paperwork which is never a good thing.
It’s lack of accessibility was extremely frustrating. The most annoying aspect of the process was that in terms of travel approval and compliance, there wasn’t great oversight. In fact it was very poor.
An internal audit focused on our travel processes came back with a poor score, which was rather alarming. As soon as we saw that we knew we had to do something, if for no other reason than the safety of our staff when they were travelling.
The Solution
Apart from the innovative design, we were immediately drawn to the user-friendliness of the Locomote platform, the experience is second to none.
The fact that the Locomote platform was also highly compliant when it came to pre and post travel authorisation reviews meant that we saved costs and we had far greater control over the safety of our staff when they were travelling for the company.
USER ADOPTION
We were very pleased with how easy it was to get started with Locomote.
It’s extremely user friendly and thanks to the first class training and roll out by the Locomote staff we were up and running in no time.
The staff uptake has been fantastic with user adoption rates far exceeding our initial expectations. Our main challenges before were safety, compliance and cost savings.
The Locomote platform has been very effective in meeting each of those needs.
THE DIFFERENCE
There were two main differences between the Locomote and the others that we had tried.
Firstly, Locomote is fully automated and provides us with total control.
Secondly, we are now able to administer the platform end to end, which is a big plus.
FAVOURITE FEATURE
Well for me, the best feature has to be the High Risk Approval process.
This not only provides oversight in terms of compliance, but more importantly provides a gatekeeper approach which ensures that any employee travelling to a high risk location has been adequately prepared, trained and is fit to travel.
While the most positive experience has been the ability of our travellers to own their own travel booking process and have visibility of the approval and booking stages. This aspect of the Locomote platform has been highly praised by staff members.
Results with Locomote
From a business perspective Locomote has enhanced safety for our staff in a big way. It’s also provided a number of efficiencies across the business including, very importantly, some impressive cost savings.
Before we implemented Locomote, all our travel bookings were processed primarily through our administration department. Now bookings are generated by the traveller, rework is minimal and the travel approval manager has real time visibility of all costs, justifications for travel, the security rating of the destination and the preparedness of the traveller at his or her fingertips.
As a result, travel has become far more planned and cost controlled than before where it was a fairly hit and miss undertaking. A year after we had implemented the Locomote platform, we were delighted to discover that we were meeting our travel policy and OHS requirements 100%.
Locomote has brought a far greater level of professionalism and ease of control to aspects like staff safety, compliance, travel booking and management efficiencies, not to mention the cost savings benefit of the platform.
