KAYAK, founded in 2004, is a successful travel fare aggregator and meta-search engine that lets users search hotel sites and flights with ease. As one of the world’s leading travel and search websites, KAYAK has made its name among vacation-goers and travelers alike, helping to book and manage travel at competitive prices.
KAYAK aims to reduce the hassle of travel for people all over the world, with mobile apps designed to provide users with real-time updates, useful alerts, and forecasting modules. The company employs 550 individuals, with its operations spread all over the world – from the United States to Asia Pacific.
Growing Pains: New Employees, Old Fashioned Asset Tracking
For a steadily-growing company like KAYAK, hiring new employees is par for the course. However, each employee brings administrative overheads that can be taxing on the company – be it in terms of management or budgeting. A ten-fold increase in the employee count meant fifty times more equipment being procured as routine. There were workstations to be allocated, IT devices to be shared, and communal resources that had to keep increasing for the newest additions to the KAYAK family. Assets that are well-maintained and well-logged are less likely to cause interruptions in daily business operations, but dealing with such administrative concerns is quite a significant drain on time, resources, and energy. With this in mind, KAYAK summed up the major obstacles to efficiency as follows:
Static Logs
KAYAK was handling all its equipment through Google Spreadsheet, updated and maintained by the IT support engineers. This included tediously logging custody details and due dates relating to rising numbers of office equipment. Their method did not allow for any kind of flexibility, and was also prone to errors because of an inconsistency in naming convention.
Underutilized Asset Tags
KAYAK was managing everything from large workstations to office furniture. Barcodes were used as a record rather than a way to quickly pull up an item and take actions on it. This led to other problems, such as the inability to perform quick Barcode-based audits which would improve the tracking of old and new machines through their company IP.
Transition to EZOfficeInventory
KAYAK’s search for the right asset tracking software led them to a few criteria that they were determined not to compromise on. Efficient tracking of equipment was their leading objective, but they also wanted a solution that would be easy to use, have a clean user interface, lower long-term costs, and enable seamless login with their existing authentication system.
EZOfficeInventory checked all the boxes, and KAYAK began using the IT asset tracking software in 2017. About the decision to choose this solution, Samarth Rajendra, Financial Systems Analyst at KAYAK says,
“It became an easy decision to adopt EZOfficeInventory as our preferred asset management software, after taking a test drive of the system and seeing how it fits our needs. The aspect that really made it a shoe-in was the ability to print QR codes and track it via the mobile app. For a tech company, that was a feature we really wanted.”
Real Time Data Tracking Means Lower Administrative Overheads
Dynamic Records, On the Cloud
KAYAK’s employees are able to update asset details from whichever global office they’re working out of. In addition, multiple users can log information simultaneously, and use the mobile can to add details on the go. This improves information accuracy, makes the updates instantaneous, and enables employees to get their jobs done without administrative hurdles.
QR Code Based Asset Tags
KAYAK now uses QR Codes to track equipment, scanning them with a third-party scanner or EZOfficeInventory’s very own mobile app. KAYAK has been using this feature for effortless audits, breezing through hundreds of items by simply scanning them in bulk and later bringing up a report to see what’s missing or inaccurate. The same scanning process is used to check items in and out to employees quickly, cutting down on both errors and processing times.
Lowering Employee Acquisition Costs
The better we were at what we did, the less the employees at KAYAK noticed or thought about their equipment. Using EZOfficeInventory, however, KAYAK was able to manage all incoming equipment without allocating additional resources to IT Support. This means that the 10x increase in employees at KAYAK that would ordinarily lead to a 50x increase in equipment was able to be reconciled without the need to hire any additional administrators!
In addition, EZOfficeInventory’s routinized maintenance management, service alerts, and open API ensured quick action and automated additions and subtractions from the member list, which helped IT support engineers assign assets to users before they actually started work, so that everything was ready for their first day.
The Value in EZOfficeInventory
KAYAK needs to ensure high availability and regular improvements in its platform due to the time-sensitive and competitive nature of their industry. Prices for hotel rooms and airline services fluctuate all the time; it’s up to KAYAK to ensure all their information is as current as possible. Any inconsistencies because of ineffective workflows or unpredictable bottlenecks severely reduces the ability of the company to respond to consumer needs the way it would like to.
With this in mind, EZOfficeInventory has enabled KAYAK to manage assets, maintenance workflows, a great deal of data, and even manage the needs of new hires! This has helped them seamlessly transition their assets into a unified system of administration over the period of a single year. KAYAK can now boast increased operational efficiency, ensuring that their IT Support has all the right tools to get the job done right every time.
