Editors Note: This article is reprinted with permission from the NBTA Business Travel Quarterly.

The largest categories of indirect spend for corporations, travel and meetings are also among the more complex types of service spends. The past several years have seen a merging of travel and meetings into the overall umbrella of procurement, bringing both benefits and challenges.

“It’s been happening now for several years and we expect to see it accelerate,” says NBTA member Ralph Colunga, senior director of travel, meetings, and support services for Oracle, based in Rockland,

California. His department has been part of procurement since he started about three and a half years ago. “The trend is to always be looking to obtain the best value,” he says. “That means transparency in all

you do, greater control and standardization, dealing with risk mitigation, and progressing metrics.”

Colunga says the benefits of such a convergence are multifold: “Discipline in terms of selection, negotiation, and management of suppliers, and a consolidation of the supplier base should lead to economies of scale. Plus, it helps to standardize expectations in terms of what the company will get

from the supplier in terms of service and what the supplier can expect from the corporation.”

As chief procurement officer of the New York-based global investment firm AllianceBernstein, L.P., Joanna Martinez sees the trend as a natural outgrowth of the “collection of tools used by sourcing professionals to analyze market conditions and decide which strategies to use, which are very applicable to the travel spend,” she says.

She also notes that the procurement tools can help travel managers “keep a focus on not just their internal clients and their satisfaction, but also look back at the supply market to understand and keep up with the changing dynamics of the supply market.”

Still, such a melding isn’t without challenges. “When the migration first takes place, there can be a gap of knowledge management on both sides,” says Colunga. And then there’s the old cliché that procurement just cares about price, while travel and meetings are focused exclusively on service.

Theoretically putting the two together leads to the best price-value proposition, with a little give and take on all parts. “The ideal is to get the best supplier for the best value, not just the cheapest price,” says

Colunga.

From a career perspective, too, Martinez sees synergies between travel and procurement. “As travel changes, travel professionals will have to think a little differently about what kind of service they add to a company,” she says. “On the whole, corporate America is changing. People need to look at enhancing their skills on a broader scale, rather than the more linear approaches of the past.”