I got this business case from an interview i had for a travel PM role for Neo1 part of AMEX GBT and i need to present to them the answer :

Problem Statement

Today a lot of+- data/information is collected, created and captured when a business employee books a trip using a B2B online booking tool (OBT) (PNR / Itinerary / Booking). Primarily this data is used to help secure the purchase of a flight/hotel and communicate to the various stakeholders in the process to ensure the booking is fulfilled.

For many years T&E systems have attempted to use this information to help automate the manual process of completing expenses – however no single platform has cracked it due to the conflict between the technical object that is the record of truth to manage 1 – the trip and 2 - the business expense.


 Booking Record          VS              2. Payment Record
The Target Persona

As a business traveler that books my own travel online and pays for it using a corporately issued and company paid credit card I wish to speed up the time it takes me to do my business expenses after a business trip.

Ask

• List the key data elements (not necessarily an exhaustive list) captured at time of booking for a flight and hotel.

• Identify the key data elements (not necessarily an exhaustive list) that a business requires to accurately comply with fiscal tax regulations and accounting rules for expenses incurred using a corporate credit card.

For each data element 1 (booking record) to 2 (payment record) indicate how they could be used to automate a business employees expense task.

For each data element, identify potential challenges or impacts within the ecosystem, including issues such as conflicts, duplication, reliability concerns, changes over time, or customizations made by merchants, vendors, the company, or system configurations.

We don’t expect you to spend more than 30 min, it does not need to be perfect, it just helps us and you appreciate the sorts of work we do and if you like it?

Deliverable

Prepare a short 15 min summary of the data activity focused on:


 Key learnings during the discovery exercise.

 Top 5 most valuable data points from Booking to Expense and why?

 Top 5 ecosystem risks of relying on this data to eliminate expense processing activities.
Helpful Information

Some mandatory Expense Data elements – feel free to add, change as needed.


 Merchant name.

 Location of purchase.

 Date and time of transaction.

 Transaction amount.

 Transaction currency.

 Billing amount.

 Billing currency.

 Transaction tax rate (%).

 Transaction tax amount

Tax code.

Department code.

Customer product code.

Expense type code.

Expense type/category name.

Merchant Category Code (MCC).

Who purchased the Expense?

What Payment Method was used?

Who owns the card used to process the transaction?

Who in Finance approved the expense? Finance approval must equal the transaction amount i.e. If finance approval was given at booking for 350 EUR and the expense value is < 350 then that is ok, if > 350 finance needs to approve again the exact expense amount).

Who benefited from the expense? i.e Who stayed in the hotel / took the flight?

Who from the business (not finance) approved that this expense was appropriate (typically their boss)?