Streamlining

ERP

Workflows

for

a

Global

Travel

Company

In the travel industry, speed is not a luxury — it is survival. Airlines adjust fares weekly, hotels shift rates daily, and partner promotions can appear and disappear within hours. For a global travel company managing thousands of contracts across continents, this constant churn created an unseen operational strain: every update demanded manual entries, endless cross-checking, and a level of vigilance that simply wasn't sustainable.

The ERP system wasn't broken. It simply wasn't designed around how real people work when the stakes are high and time is short. Teams often worked late into the night to complete rate changes, verify details, and ensure global accuracy.

"Every time the rates changed, I felt like I was racing the system — not working with it. One mistake could affect hundreds of bookings."
_{― Reservation Agent, Global Operations}

This wasn't just a workflow problem. It was a human problem.

Understanding the Real Problem

Shadowing teams across multiple regions made the friction visible. Staff bounced between spreadsheets, emails, PDFs, and ERP modules, performing mental gymnastics to keep everything aligned. The work required focus, pattern recognition, and constant re-checking — all while facing the pressure of time zones, partner expectations, and global demand.

Three insights shaped the foundation for redesign:

• Users were forced to navigate far more steps than the task required.
• The interface exposed too much information at once, creating hesitation and bottlenecks.
• Teams relied heavily on external tools to validate data the system should have supported natively.

Accuracy wasn't failing because employees weren't careful. It was failing because the system wasn't built for the realities of their day.

Designing Flows That Cut Through Complexity

Our goal was not to "simplify" the system, but to align it with human behaviour. We mapped every step of the rate-loading journey, identifying where people slowed down, looked away, switched context, or felt uncertain. Each of those moments became a design opportunity.

The redesigned experience grouped tasks by purpose rather than database structure. Critical fields were surfaced with clarity, while supporting details lived in expandable sections. Intelligent validations guided users in real time, catching potential errors early — not after the fact. This shift transformed the ERP from a rigid form into a guided, intuitive flow.

Three principles anchored the redesign:

• Reduce cognitive load by structuring tasks in the order people naturally perform them.
• Prevent mistakes early through contextual, real-time validation.
• Shape a consistent global workflow that different teams could adopt without retraining.

The result was an ecosystem where complexity still existed — but it no longer burdened the user.

The Impact

The change was immediate. What once took teams hours now took minutes. The emotional burden of rate updates lifted, and the accuracy gains rippled through customer-facing channels. Teams in different regions finally worked with the same clarity, the same structure, and the same sense of control.

Clear outcomes followed:

• Rate and contract update times were reduced by 60%.
• Manual errors dropped significantly, cutting down customer escalations.
• Global coordination improved as teams adopted a single, intuitive workflow.

Instead of racing the system, employees could finally trust it.

Why This Matters

ERP systems rarely fail because of technology. They fail because they overlook the people who breathe life into them every day. In this project, the breakthrough wasn't a new feature; it was a shift in philosophy — from designing for data administration to designing for human capability.

At Sygneo, this is the essence of CX in operational environments: make tools that think with people, not against them.

When you do that, performance, accuracy, and global alignment stop being goals — they become natural outcomes.