Harmonious cooperation

The Dürr Group and AirPlus have been partners for more than 30 years.

The listed mechanical and plant engineering firm has relied on our efficient payment solutions since the 1990s. When it comes to business travel, the Dürr Group also believes in long-term relationships and has been working with our partner BCD Travel for almost 15 years. We spoke at length with Shirin Wagner, Expert Corporate Mobility Management at the Dürr Group, about what makes her company’s close ties with AirPlus and BCD Travel unique, and how it benefits them.

Three factors the Dürr Group prioritizes when it comes to business trips, and three arguments that speak for our partner BCD Travel as a global provider of travel services. In addition to delivering a compelling range of offerings and services, BCD Travel deploys its own staff members to customers’ premises. The BCD Travel team at the Dürr Group’s headquarters in Bietigheim-Bissingen, Germany, for example, handles the German companies’ travel matters. With its workforce of 20,500 people, the Dürr Group uses the services of BCD Travel in 22 countries. To this end, BCD Travel has interfaces in place that facilitate worldwide reporting of all booking data and centralized settlement through AirPlus.

Seamless integration, best-in-class service

BCD Travel’s high-quality service and personal contact are well-received with the Dürr Group’s business travelers. Shirin Wagner explains: “Our staff members greatly appreciate the services provided by our BCD Travel Implant, and the AirPlus Corporate Cards make it easier to pay for expenses while on the road.” The cards ensure quick and secure payment processes at the Dürr Group as do company-specific AirPlus Company Accounts and AirPlus Virtual Cards used for procurement. “We request that our travelers use Corporate Cards only for expenses incurred during trips, for example, for hotels,” says Shirin Wagner. “For increased transparency and enhanced travel cost settlement, all the costs of flights, train tickets, rental cars, or visas are settled in advance, centrally via the respective AirPlus Company Accounts.”

For this reason, the close partnership between AirPlus and BCD Travel is essential to all payment and settlement processes. It ensures consistent and consolidated invoicing for the Dürr Group, so the cost of in-house business travel processing is kept to a minimum. Because the statements issued by AirPlus contain all the additional data required, following a brief review the costs are charged to the respective cost centers and projects in an automated manner, reducing the workload of everyone involved.

Policy compliance integrated into processes

The good teamwork between BCD Travel and AirPlus also pays off when it comes to compliance with the Dürr Group’s policies. “In addition to the traffic-light configuration in the online booking engine, the various settings AirPlus offers guarantee adherence to our travel policy,” says Shirin Wagner.

These settings include:

• maximum payments
• limiting the type of expenses
• and/or excluding specific providers or merchants.

This seamless process was developed in response to the Dürr Group’s request to BCD Travel and AirPlus for a complex and individualized service: While additional data such as staff IDs and cost centers can be entered into the respective fields, the company’s long project numbers posed a challenge at first. The solution was to enter the information separately into two programmed data fields and then merge it for the statement file.

Of course, business travelers are not aware of any of these processes running in the background. On the contrary, travel expense reports are completely digitized. Staff members can upload smartphone photos of receipts via an interface and prepare their reports with just a few clicks.

A harmonious and seamless partnership at every level

All this allows the Dürr Group’s Corporate Mobility Management team to focus on other processes. Shirin Wagner has no points of contact with staff members placing bookings, which is a good thing in view of the sheer number of employees. Instead, when it comes to her employer’s partnership with BCD Travel, she prioritizes strategic topics, for example, implementing new mobility services.

The well-oiled machine that is the Dürr Group, AirPlus, and BCD Travel trio becomes particularly clear to Shirin Wagner every time new business units are incorporated into the group and need to be implemented. “Because we know exactly which documents and information AirPlus and BCD Travel will request in these cases, we can prepare and redact all the material so implementing the interface is harmonious and seamless.”

These are the two words we hear time and again in connection with the partnership, including from BCD Travel. “All of the workflows run smoothly. Even under time constraints, communication between our BCD team and AirPlus is highly solution-oriented,” Shirin Wagner says with a smile. Over the years, this synergy has proven itself at the Dürr Group.

Always being able to rely on each other and tackling every challenge with a solution in mind are two other factors that make this alliance stand out, particularly in extraordinary situations such as the pandemic. Shirin Wagner says: “The situation during Covid was a textbook example: Our staff members still were able to travel a lot because BCD Travel made it possible and helped” – harmoniously and seamlessly, of course.

The long-time partnership among the Dürr Group, AirPlus, and BCD Travel is exemplary of efficient travel management. Because payment and settlement processes are integrated seamlessly, the cost of in-house processing is kept to a minimum and transparency is increased.

AirPlus and BCD Travel enable consolidated, automated settlement that reduces the workload for the teams in finances and controlling. In turn, business travelers benefit from fully digitized travel expense reports and excellent service.