Vital, Government’s shared services department under the Ministry of Finance has reaped savings of over US $1 million (78%) in travel insurance premiums for the whole of Government. Vital is Singapore’s largest back-of-house shared services centre for the government’s public sector provides centralised travel insurance programme for its public officers.

This Whole-of-Government programme is currently subscribed by about 80 public agencies and more than 20,000 government travellers from Ministries, Organs of State, Departments, Statutory Boards, Polytechnics and Schools. The coverage includes official overseas travel, training, study trips, postings, secondment, international relief efforts, overseas studies of government scholars as well as students’ overseas educational trips and student exchanges.

Point of View: Travel expenditure is an area of expenditure that, when transformed, can generate considerable savings. Vital noted that there was no centralized travel management function to oversee the overall government travel and related expenditure and public agencies bought travel services from a panel of travel agents.

Many organisations suffer from the same combination of issues in travel including no focus on targeted savings, a lack of reporting capability, absence of an online travel portal that is actively used by staff, and a test of the quality of travel services.

Given these circumstances, with the right focus, the savings like those that have been achieved by Vital in Singapore can be significant!

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