Only about two weeks after he joined Allegion, global travel
manager Dan Schwartz abruptly realized the security product manufacturer had a
travel risk management problem. The company was holding its first global leadership
conference, and Schwartz was reviewing flight plans for attending executives
when he saw it.
"We had 29 leadership people on the same flight,"
Schwartz said. "I'd been here for two weeks. I maybe am more bold than I
should be sometimes, but I knocked on the CEO's door and said, 'What's going on with this?'"
While the flight in question proved uneventful, the
experience illustrated the risk at hand. While Allegion may have just spun off
from Ingersoll Rand, it nevertheless was a $2 billion company on its own with
thousands of travelers, extensive international operations and a need for a
comprehensive travel risk management program. The responsibility for building
it fell to Schwartz, who'd had a long career on the travel agency side and
joined Allegion as global travel manager not long after its late-2013 spinoff.
"When I came on board, there was basically nothing in
place," Schwartz said of Allegion's travel risk management program. "Ingersoll
Rand had a program that they'd kind of punched over our direction, but that
particular vendor didn't seem very interested in retaining our business."
Schwartz, who resides in Allegion's procurement department, did have global
travel data from BCD Travel, and Allegion chose iJet as a global travel risk
management provider.
"At first, we did the very basics, so it was just a
matter of all of it dropped into a database so we could use their tools to be
able to find people when things would get weird," Schwartz said. "We
originally had signed up so the only time travelers got communications from
iJet was if they were leaving their home country. We're in the process of
changing that now and making it so that all travelers will have access to the
mobile tool and access to the iJet suite. [But first] let's get people tracked,
whether we have all kinds of fancy technology laying on top of it or not. At
least we can track our travelers. That really is the secret."
Allegion, which owns dozens of security-related brands,
including Schlage locks and Von Duprin security doors, operates facilities
throughout Europe, Asia and the Americas, and Schwartz estimated that 15 to 20
percent of the company's travel is international. Allegion spends about $30
million to $35 million annually on global T&E, and though Schwartz said
little of the company's corporate travel goes to the highest-risk destinations,
he cited Turkey and Mexico as "our hot spots."
Mandates are not part of Allegion's corporate culture, but
the company strongly emphasizes booking air travel through BCD, allowing
Schwartz a good sense of where travelers are going to be. While Allegion does
not require employees who will travel internationally to undergo any specific
training, any international booking triggers an email to the traveler with
links to iJet information on the destination country and to an intranet page
with applicable information.
On that page, "they have access to global travel
resources, things like health alerts and medical alerts," Schwartz said. "That's
also where they can get to what we call Allegion on the Road, [what] we've
rebranded the iJet relationship. They can … do their own research. We also have
links to things like business travel insurance and policy."
In the coming weeks, Allegion will make iJet's Worldcue
travel risk app available to all travelers, which Schwartz said offers an
opportunity to further acquaint travelers with the program's offerings.
"We've done, actually, a pretty minimal job of
communication," Schwartz said. "Travelers are aware of [the program],
but we could do a better job of communicating with them. We're really coming up
on that next round of communication now because we're just finalizing [making]
the Worldcue app available to all travelers."
Should an emergency arise during a business trip, Allegion
travelers are instructed to contact the Allegion on the Road emergency hotline.
"We've distributed ID cards that … have that number on it. It's on all our
itineraries and all the emails. Their job is to find a hidey-hole and call in."
In that instance, Schwartz will convene a
conference of Allegion's incident response team, comprised of legal, HR and
finance representatives, among others, as well as senior leadership. Schwartz
also will request check-ins within four hours from any affected travelers. If
they need help, Allegion calls in iJet. If there is no response, Schwartz will
conduct what he calls a "sanity check," to find and contact the
traveler by any means necessary: all phone numbers and email addresses, as well
as coworkers and managers traveling alongside the missing person. If another
two hours passes with no contact, Allegion will call in iJet.