Travel Planet Delivers Customized BI and Automated Invoicing

[AlteryxAdvocacy]

Author:

Cyprien Descheemaeker

Role:

Chief Technology Officer

Company:

Travel Planet

Overview of Use Case

Travel Planet is a French travel management company specialized in business travel for medium and large businesses. More than a reservation platform, they offer reports and business intelligence tools to help companies manage all aspects of booking. With Alteryx, Travel Planet can continuously provide its customers with tailor-made services and real-time access to cutting-edge information.

Describe the business challenge or problem you needed to solve

Travel Planet’s customers rely on the company to make plane, train and hotel reservations all on a single platform. To satisfy that demand, Travel Planet needs to manage 400,000 profiles and process 2,500 trips per day. Its main challenge is integrating data from different sources, such as Excel, CSV, and Cassandra database, to provide customers with top-notch analytical reports and customized invoices in different formats.

Describe your working solution

Our customers receive their data from us in different formats, which enables them to easily understand detailed travel expenses, behavior, savings, and frequency, among many other metrics. Once the data is integrated and analyzed in Alteryx, the outcome is visualized on Tableau View. For invoices, we built a workflow on Alteryx Designer that allows us to create and update invoices in the format of our choice.

We use Alteryx to extract recurrent data and create dynamic outputs; integrate profiles using one customized workflow per client; generate customer invoices in XML, CSV and PDF; and support our back office with data matching, reporting, and banking data integration. We know that by bringing all these data together, we will never have a 100% match, nor will it ever be 100% automatic, but Alteryx handle the large majority of it leaving the complex cases to our specialists.

Generating Invoices

First, we collect generic billing data (type of document, date of creation, Travel Planet data, etc.), customer data (customizable analytical fields, billing data, etc.) and data from the type of service (itinerary, vendor info, etc.). We organize the Alteryx workflow as below:

Header: logo, travel planet, billing address

Then, we populate personalized fields. We add the type of service, data format, and the summarized amounts. Every invoice is different.

 Then we add the calculation of taxes and the summary table. 

We use the Join tool to connect all the parts, and finally the invoice is generated in a PDF! Using Alteryx, we can provide our customers with:

- Business Intelligence in PDF, Excel or dashboard formats;

- A global view of travel expenses by amount, modification or cancellation;

- A detailed view of air expenses by road, company, booking class or segment;

- A multi-criteria analysis of travel behavior;

- An individualized algorithm, including behavioral recommendations for minimizing customers’ carbon footprints.

Describe the benefits you have achieved

We must be flexible to generate invoice statements in whatever formats our customers need. Alteryx is a very easy tool that is intuitive and interactive. Within minutes you can create a workflow and have results. In the past, we needed two full time employees to consolidate our invoices, but now, we only need one person one day of the week to do this.

Related Resources

Travel Planet’s website: https://travelplanet.pro/