Who actually owns business travel in a manufacturing company?
Ask a manufacturing business who is responsible for finance, operations or procurement and there will usually be a clear answer.
Ask who owns business travel and things can become less straightforward.
The finance team may monitor the spend. Procurement may negotiate with suppliers. A PA or office manager may arrange travel for senior employees. Project teams may organise their own journeys. Engineers and salespeople may book directly. Directors may approve expenditure, while HR has an interest in traveller wellbeing and duty of care.
Everybody is involved, but does anybody actually own it?
For manufacturing businesses, that question matters because business travel is often closely connected to operations. Employees may be travelling to customer sites, factories, suppliers, exhibitions and installations. Some journeys are planned months ahead; others arise because somebody needs to be somewhere tomorrow.
Without clear ownership, it is easy for travel to become a collection of individual transactions rather than something the business actively manages.
Booking travel is not the same as managing it
One reason ownership can become blurred is that arranging a journey and managing business travel are two different things.
Booking a flight or hotel is relatively straightforward. Managing travel across an organisation involves much more. Someone needs to consider how travel should be booked, what should be approved, how costs are monitored, what information is collected and what happens when an employee needs help. There are questions around traveller safety and duty of care. There may be unused tickets, cancellations and refunds to manage. The business may want to understand spending by department, customer, project or cost centre.
And somebody needs to decide whether the overall process is actually working.
If nobody has responsibility for the complete picture, individual parts of the process can work perfectly well while the organisation as a whole has surprisingly little visibility or control.
What happens when everyone books differently?
Consider a manufacturer with salespeople, engineers, project managers and directors travelling regularly.
One employee books flights directly with an airline. Another uses an online travel website. A PA arranges travel for the directors. Engineers organise hotels themselves because they know which properties are convenient for particular customer sites. Another team has its own preferred booking method.
Individually, each decision may seem perfectly reasonable. Collectively, however, the business may have created several different travel processes. That can make it harder to answer some fairly basic questions.
How much are we spending on business travel?
Which suppliers are we using?
Are employees following an agreed travel policy?
Are we receiving refunds and credits when journeys are cancelled?
Could we identify all employees affected by a major travel disruption?
And are people spending more time arranging travel than they need to?
The problem is not necessarily that anybody is doing anything wrong. It is that nobody has been given responsibility for looking at travel across the organisation.
The hidden administrative burden
Fragmented travel can also create work in places where it is less visible.
An engineer who spends 45 minutes comparing flights is spending 45 minutes not doing engineering work. A PA trying to resolve a cancelled flight may spend part of the afternoon on hold with an airline. Finance may receive invoices and expense claims from multiple suppliers and booking channels. Project managers may need to establish which travel costs belong to which customer or installation.
None of those activities necessarily appears as a separate cost in the travel budget. But the time is still being spent. This is particularly relevant for manufacturers without a dedicated travel manager. The administrative work does not disappear simply because there is no travel department. It is distributed among employees whose primary responsibilities lie elsewhere.
That can make the true cost of managing travel difficult to see.
Finance, procurement and operations see different parts of the picture
There is another reason clear ownership matters: different departments naturally look at travel from different perspectives.
Finance may focus on spend, reconciliation, budgets and reporting.
Procurement may concentrate on suppliers, contracts and value.
Operations may care most about whether an engineer can reach a customer or whether a project team arrives when required.
HR may be concerned with employee wellbeing, traveller risk and duty of care.
PAs and office managers may see the practical reality of arranging journeys and dealing with changes.
Travellers are likely to care about whether the process is quick, sensible and gives them appropriate choices.
Directors may ultimately want to know whether the organisation is spending money efficiently while giving employees the support they need.
None of these perspectives is wrong. The difficulty comes when there is nobody bringing them together.
Ownership does not have to mean centralising every decision
Giving somebody responsibility for business travel does not mean every hotel booking needs director approval or that engineers should lose the flexibility they need to do their jobs.
Manufacturing businesses often require flexibility precisely because their travel is operational. An engineer responding to an urgent breakdown may need to book differently from a sales team attending an exhibition six months from now. A senior employee visiting an overseas customer may have different requirements from somebody making a routine domestic journey. Good travel management should accommodate those differences rather than pretend they do not exist.
Clear ownership simply means somebody is responsible for deciding how the system should work. That person or team can establish the framework: how bookings are made, what information is required, when approval is necessary, how travellers receive support and how the organisation measures whether its arrangements are effective.
What should the travel owner actually own?
The job does not necessarily need to sit with somebody whose title includes the word 'travel'.
In a smaller manufacturer, responsibility might sensibly sit with finance, procurement, operations, an office manager or a PA. In a larger organisation, several departments may need to be involved. What matters more than the job title is whether responsibility is clear.
Someone should be able to answer questions such as:
How much are we spending on business travel?
Who is travelling and why?
How should employees book?
Who approves travel where approval is required?
Are our arrangements appropriate for both planned and urgent journeys?
What happens when a traveller needs assistance?
Can we identify employees affected by disruption or an emergency?
Are we capturing refunds, credits and potential savings?
How much employee time is being spent arranging and administering travel?
Are our current arrangements still suitable as the business grows?
If nobody can answer those questions collectively, the organisation may not really have a travel programme at all. It may simply have lots of people booking travel.
Start by finding the owner
Manufacturers do not necessarily need another layer of bureaucracy.
In fact, the objective should be the opposite: to make travel easier to arrange, easier to understand and easier to manage. Clear ownership can help achieve that. It gives the business somewhere to bring together cost, operations, traveller support, reporting and policy. It also creates accountability for improving the process rather than simply continuing with arrangements because 'that is how we have always done it'.
So perhaps the first question a manufacturing business should ask about its travel programme is not how much it spends or which supplier it uses. It is much simpler:
Who owns it?
If the answer is unclear, that may be the first indication that there is an opportunity to improve.