2019 U.S.-Booked Air Volume: $135 million
2019 U.S. T&E: $300 million
Primary U.S. Car Rental Supplier: Hertz
Primary U.S. Payment Supplier: American Express
Primary U.S. Travel Risk Management Supplier: ISOS
Consolidated U.S. TMC: BCD
Siemens increased its 2019 spending on U.S.-point-of-sale airline tickets by about $8 million while its T&E spending was virtually flat from the previous year.
Siemens last year completed moving all U.S. business that could use Concur Expense to the off-the-shelf, end-to-end SAP Concur Travel & Expense solution. The remainder uses the Concur booking tool through Siemens' relationship with BCD Travel. In April of this year, the company implemented SAP Concur booking and expense in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru. Brazil was already on that platform. BCD Travel facilitates the rest of South and Central America for bookings on Concur; however, those countries will eventually migrate to the end-to-end platform to standardize expense types and trip purposes and provide greater data strength.
In 2019, Siemens completed several initiatives to award travel supplier contracts. Following a global TMC services bid, CWT retained the Siemens business it had in Asia and incumbent BCD Travel added most of the rest of Siemens global transactions to its scope. The company also awarded its corporate card business to incumbent American Express and managed to wrap up a competitive tender a year and a half in the making for its fleet business, which ended with incumbent provider Wheels. HRS continues to manage Siemens' global hotel program, but the company now additionally uses HRS to provide continuous sourcing in Siemens' primary markets.
While Covid-19 will undoubtedly cause Siemens to reduce its travel volume significantly in 2020, its impact on internal meetings was softened to some extent as the company began investing more than two years ago in technology and processes to hold such meetings virtually. The company recently signed its first external meeting contract since shutdown but for 2023.