Even though no one is travelling, AU’s travel group has plenty of work to do.
In a new series of articles, university director Arnold Boon highlights important operational tasks being carried out in various corners of the administration. This month, we’re focusing on the travel group in the accounts department, which is part of the AU Finance and Estates Projects and Development. This team recently launched a development project to make travel expense reporting at AU more flexible. And the coronavirus lockdown of the country has given them a task they hadn’t anticipated.
At some point, most employees have encountered AU's travel booking system RejsUd – and most of them have an opinion about it. Many of us use the system so rarely that we never really become familiar with it.
The travel group that administers RejsUd is well aware of this dilemma. So they started a development project earlier this year to make it easier for their colleagues at the rest of the university to use the system.
"Specifically, our goal with this project is to improve the user guides available to RejsUd users. We’re doing this by analysing the mistakes users typically make when using the system. This gives us a clear picture of which parts of the system we need to explain better in the material,” says Arne N. Skov, head of accounting at AU.
The project is anchored in his vision for the accounting department, to which the travel group belongs: the digitalisation of processes in order to make them more efficient. A major motivation for digitalisation is to do a better job of advising and supporting the university’s employees.
“The travel group has worked intensively with digitalisation in order to increase the efficiency of our workflows. This has made room for this kind of development project, which is aimed at helping us to provide better guidance and support to our colleagues at AU. Ultimately, the goal is for us to have an even better settlement process at AU,” Skov explained.
The project was launched in the spring of 2020 and is expected to show results in six months.
"Some of the concrete results I expect from the project are a better understanding of where users most often make mistakes in the system, as well as upgrading the user’s manuals we have – because to be honest, they’re written by accountants for accountants,” Skov said.
Extra tasks during lockdown
Like the vast majority of AU employees, the travel group is also working from home during coronavirus pandemic. And according to Skov, this transition was unproblematic, as most of the unit’s processes have be digitalised. At the same time, the shutdown brought the team an unforeseen new task:
"At this time, we spend quite a lot of resources on helping colleagues cancel trips, conferences and other things which are no longer a possibility due to the shutdown. This is our way of keeping society running – ordering things and then cancelling orders,” Skov said with a smile.
If you want to know more about the travel group’s work, please contact Arne N. Skov, head of accounting at AU.
Read previous articles in the series:
