Apple Leisure Group: Workflow magic makes a backlog vanish

Setting the scene

Apple Leisure Group (ALG) focuses on packaged travel and resort/brand management. With brands including Apple Vacations, Travel Impressions, and CheapCaribbean.com driving distribution, ALG is the top seller in the US of all-inclusive vacation packages as well as the number one seller worldwide of leisure travel to Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Jamaica.

ALG’s three distribution businesses – Apple Vacations, Travel Impressions, and CheapCaribbean.com – sell similar vacation packages to travelers. But they operate independently. So each used its own systems and business processes, which had evolved over the course of several decades. To streamline operations, ALG wanted to move all three companies onto one platform and standardize and consolidate their processes.

“We have well over 80 different processes in our distribution business,” says Jason Metcalf, ALG’s vice president of operations and business transformation. “My team was charged with identifying all the distinct processes and areas we could consolidate to drive efficiencies. We were looking for workflow tools that could help.”

Metcalf and his team reviewed the business process management (BPM) software on the market, evaluating multiple demos to narrow down their choices. Ultimately, they selected one provider and solution: Genpact and its intelligent BPM suite Cora Orchestration.

ALG leveraged the dynamic workflow technology in Cora Orchestration to consolidate and standardize processes across its distribution businesses, providing agility that allowed it to more quickly win new business opportunities. For example, the initial pilot developed by Genpact allows ALG to extract product and promotional information from hotel and airline emails and load them onto each brand’s website for customers and travel agents.

Before the pilot, each company’s loading team would route incoming emails. Since they operated separately, no one was consistently tracking the data across the three brands. They couldn’t see how big the backlog was or what was coming in. Cora Orchestration changed all that. Cora Orchestration now pulls the product data out of emails – including attachments and backup information – and carries it all the way from the loading stage to customer-facing websites. By transforming this manual process, ALG has increased revenue, accelerated its speed to market by 30% to 40%, and reduced its backlog of tasks by 80%.

ALG’s senior leadership really liked the pilot, especially because Genpact helped design and launch it within 30 days.

Working with Genpact, ALG has improved its customer experience in a number of ways. ALG can now provide faster service with better price matching accuracy. A new customer care ticketing tool built with Cora Orchestration processes tickets quickly with more immediate resolution to queries, meaning customers can plan their trips with greater ease. An automated price matching workflow provides ALG team members with the correct policy for each case, allowing qualifying customers to save more on their purchases.

Before Cora Orchestration, the price matching process was completely manual. Teams used about 70 different policies to review each case based on tour, product, and competitor to determine if it was similar enough to issue a match. The price matching workflow built in Cora Orchestration allows users to enter the tour, product, and competitor type to automatically pinpoint the right policy. “We can go back to a supplier – say, a hotel – and show that a competitor had a lower price,” explains Metcalf. “It gives us the data to make sure we have price parity and allows us to recover money from that price match. That’s a very important part of our business.”

But that’s not all, according to Metcalf. “We’ve seen an average reduction of around $150 per booking in terms of the dollar amount we need to match. And since users can now track price matches and add backup information for auditing, we’ve reduced the number of price matching instances by about 20% to 30%. In our business, that can amount to significant savings.”

For Metcalf and his team, the best part of Cora Orchestration is its flexibility. “It can add different workflows in a short period of time,” says Metcalf. “We can now adapt our workflows to meet the different needs of our business.”

ALG is currently developing a workflow for soliciting promotions. Normally, ALG’s buyers approach hotels to see if they are willing to offer products – but they do this manually, generating a convoluted trail of emails in the process. That makes it difficult to track successes. Using Cora Orchestration solved that problem, too. If a solicitation is successful, it sends the promotion directly to the product loading workflow.

“We’ve learned a lot about Cora Orchestration,” says Metcalf. “We’re trying to maximize our use of the product. We still have a number of different applications that can leverage Cora Orchestration and I hope to continue to build them out.”