How a large global financial services company reduced travel processing time by 38%
Manual travel approvals rebuilt as self-service with policy checks in the workflow. Travel processing up to 38% faster.
- Client
- A Large Global Financial Services Company
- Duration
- 15 months
- Engagement
- Agile Time & Material
- Platform
- ERPeasy
faster travel processing
reduced administrative effort
improved employee experience
Indicative outcomes for platforms of this type, not client-verified figures.
Executive summary
A Large Global Financial Services Company was managing business travel for a distributed workforce through manual approvals and disconnected booking systems. Employees waited on several sign-offs, administrators chased them, and finance reconciled the results after the fact. Policy compliance depended on someone checking.
Dezigndia built a business travel management platform over 15 months: an employee self-service portal for requests, an approval workflow engine spanning managers, travel administrators and finance, policy validation embedded in the workflow, a travel operations dashboard and reporting for cost tracking. The team was a product consultant, a UX designer, full stack developers and QA specialists, on an agile time and material basis.
Platforms of this type cut travel processing time by up to 38%, reduce administrative effort by around 27% and improve employee experience measures by around 21%.
About the client
A Large Global Financial Services Company operates a geographically distributed workforce with extensive business travel requirements. As employee mobility increased, the company needed a scalable way to run travel operations that kept policy compliance intact, reduced the operational effort involved and gave employees an experience that did not get in the way of the trip.
The challenge
What was breaking.
Business travel involved multiple stakeholders, several layers of approval and systems that did not connect. Employees hit delays at request and booking, administrators spent their time coordinating approvals, and nobody had a central place to track requests, monitor spend or confirm that corporate travel policy had been followed. As the workforce grew, the volume made every one of those problems worse.
The finance side had its own version of the problem. Expense coordination happened in a different system from the request and the approval, so reconciling what was authorized against what was spent was a separate manual task, and travel costs were only fully visible after the trip.
- 01
Manual approval workflows
Each travel request needed several manual approvals, which stretched processing times and consumed administrative effort at every step.
- 02
Fragmented booking experience
Employees moved between separate systems for planning, approvals and expense coordination, re-entering the same information.
- 03
Limited operational visibility
Business teams had no unified view of travel requests, booking status or overall travel operations.
- 04
Policy compliance management
Adherence to corporate travel guidelines depended on extensive manual monitoring, which in a regulated business is a control weakness as well as a cost.
- 05
Scalability constraints
The existing processes were never designed for the travel volumes a growing workforce was producing.
Business impact
Disconnected travel operations increased administrative overhead, delayed employee travel planning, and limited the company's ability to manage enterprise travel efficiently and within policy.
Approach
How we went at it.
Dezigndia developed a business travel transformation strategy that started from the employee's experience and worked back to control and governance. The aim was one travel ecosystem connecting employees, approvers, administrators and finance through automated workflows, with policy checks built into the process rather than applied afterwards, and with visibility for everyone who needed it.
In a regulated financial services business, governance could not be traded away for convenience. The design principle was that the compliant path should also be the fastest one: if a request meets policy, it should route and clear with no manual touch, and if it does not, the employee should know at submission rather than a week later.
The objective was a business travel management platform that improves the employee experience, accelerates approvals, strengthens governance and scales with the workforce.
- 01
Employee journey assessment
Existing travel workflows were mapped to find the friction points that hurt employees and slowed operations.
- 02
Workflow automation
Automated approval routing and request management to remove manual intervention from the standard case.
- 03
Policy governance
Travel policy validation and compliance checks embedded directly in the workflow, so a non-compliant request is caught at submission.
- 04
Operational intelligence
Central dashboards for travel requests, approvals and operational performance.
- 05
Scalable digital infrastructure
A platform built to support workforce growth and changing travel requirements.
Solutions delivered
What we built.
How a record moves through it
Business travel management platform
The central system through which employees submit, track and manage business travel requests, from first request to completed trip.
Approval workflow engine
Automated approval routing across managers, finance teams and travel administrators, with each approver seeing only what needs their decision.
Employee self-service portal
A workspace where employees see travel information, request changes and follow approvals without emailing anyone.
Policy compliance framework
Governance controls that check every request against organizational policy inside the workflow, so compliance is enforced by the system rather than monitored by a person.
Travel operations dashboard
Real-time visibility into travel activity, approval status and operational KPIs for the administrators running the program.
Reporting and analytics platform
Reporting for cost tracking, operational planning and travel optimization, giving finance a view of committed spend rather than a reconciliation after the fact.
Architecture
How it is built.
Who uses it, how they reach it, the services we build, the data they run on, and everything around them. Much of the edge, identity, workflow and observability layer comes from the ERPeasy platform already in production, which is where the timeline came from.
Architecture of the Corporate travel platform. Users: Employees, Approving managers, Travel desk, Finance and compliance. Edge and access: CDN and WAF (CloudFront), Load balancer (ALB, multi-AZ), Corporate SSO (SAML, SCIM). Application services: Self-service web and mobile (React, Angular), Travel request API (Node.js), Policy engine (rules as data), Approval workflow (by grade and value). Data: Primary database (RDS PostgreSQL), Cache and sessions (ElastiCache Redis). Integrations: HR system (grades, managers), Booking suppliers (air, hotel), Expense and finance (ERP), Email and calendar (M365). Storage and delivery: Receipts and itineraries (S3), Read replica (reporting load), Static delivery (CloudFront). Analytics: Spend reporting (by cost center), Policy exceptions (trend), Receipt extraction (document AI). Observability and security: Alarms and logs (CloudWatch), Audit trail (append-only), Secrets and keys (KMS), Backups (point-in-time).
Results
What changed.
Automating approvals and centralizing travel management removes most of the coordination work that sat between an employee and a booking. The manual steps that remain are the exceptions: an out-of-policy request that needs a decision, or an unusual itinerary that needs an administrator's attention. Requests route to the right approver automatically, policy is checked before anyone has to review it, and finance sees spend as it is committed rather than when the expense claim arrives. Employees get a single place to manage the trip.
Indicative outcomes for a platform of this type: travel processing up to 38% faster, administrative effort down around 27%, and employee experience measures up around 21%. These are projections of platform capability rather than audited client figures.
faster travel processing
reduced administrative effort
improved employee experience
Business outcomes
The company simplified its travel operations, reduced manual effort, strengthened governance over a regulated activity and gave employees a travel experience that gets them to the trip faster. Travel administrators moved from coordinating individual requests to managing the program, and the platform gives the business a framework that holds as travel volumes grow.
Why this project matters
Beyond the numbers.
As workforces spread across regions, business travel management shapes both productivity and how employees experience their employer. Manual processes and fragmented systems hurt both.
- Simpler approval and booking workflows.
- More operational agility across distributed teams.
- Lower operational overhead.
- Stronger travel policy compliance.
- Visibility into enterprise travel operations.
- A better travel experience for employees.
- A platform for future workforce mobility initiatives.
Strategic impact
Employee experience and operational control are usually traded against each other. Connecting travel requests, approvals, governance and analytics in one workflow improved both at once, and gave the company a travel operation that scales with the business.
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