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Alexander Hamilton Awards

Improving Efficiency of Global Travel Sourcing

Bristol-Myers Squibb's global payment program won the 2019 Bronze Alexander Hamilton Award in Working Capital & Payments.

Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) is dedicated to discovering, developing, and delivering innovative medications to improve the health of patients around the world. A couple of years ago, the company’s internal travel and entertainment expense (T&E) processes desperately needed an injection of efficiency. Employees who traveled on company business were given a corporate card. Unfortunately, the card was not widely accepted in some of the regions where the global biopharmaceutical firm had operations.

Employees who traveled where the corporate card wasn’t accepted used their personal credit card to cover T&E, then expensed their purchases through BMS’s expense management tool. Some became so accustomed to this process that they started using personal cards for all expenses, even with vendors that would have accepted the corporate card. This was problematic because it reduced the ability of sourcing managers to monitor corporate travel spending.

“When accounting for expenses, we use a hierarchy of categories and subcategories,” says Dr. Sara Friedlander, the global director of enabling services for Bristol-Myers Squibb, who is responsible for the company’s travel sourcing and operations as well as sourcing for strategic meetings. “When you are using a personal card, you are relying on your colleagues to select the right expense type for each transaction, but they may not know exactly which category applies. Reconciling expenses to the right category was a never-ending task for my team, when they should have been doing more strategic work. We needed to have the same people who were actually making the purchases also correctly identifying what they were expensing.”

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Meg Waters

Meg Waters

Meg Waters is the editor in chief of Treasury & Risk. She is the former editor in chief of BPM Magazine and the former managing editor of Business Finance.

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