Case Study:
How Illumina Gained Control of Global Travel Data with graspDATA
How Grasp Technologies Solved Data Complexities For Illumina
Background
Illumina is a global organization at the forefront of applied genomics through advanced research and product development. The multi-tier public enterprise operates out of 12 commercial offices throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia with more than 5,500 employees throughout the globe. On the technology side, Illumina faced two challenges in realizing efficiency given the immense amount of corporate travelers.
Challenge
Illumina, a global leader in genomics with over 5,500 employees across 12 international offices, faced growing complexity in managing travel data. Their decentralized data landscape made it difficult to consolidate travel and expense (T&E) reporting across multiple regions and partners. In addition, their existing TMC solution through the GLOBALSTAR network lacked the flexibility and data quality needed to support a proactive, analytics-driven travel program.
Solution
To solve these challenges, Illumina partnered with Grasp Technologies and implemented graspDATA, a robust data aggregation and reporting platform built specifically for corporate travel. Within weeks, Grasp developed a custom integration to capture, standardize, and deliver Illumina’s global T&E data across departments. With built-in data quality controls and flexible reporting formats, graspDATA gave Illumina the visibility and reliability their global travel program required.
Results
Illumina gained faster access to clean, actionable travel data—improving vendor negotiations, internal reporting, and overall program strategy. Ad hoc reporting became seamless, audit capabilities were strengthened, and Illumina could finally visualize and manage global travel data in a unified, scalable way. The partnership empowered their travel team to move from reactive to proactive management.
“Grasp’s solution works because it’s flexible and it’s clear they’ve listened to their customers in implementing graspDATA. As we continue to merge travel data with expense data, the need to report out for questions in an ad-hoc fashion increases. Grasp’s independent approach to our travel and expense data turned out to better than any of the ‘trusted’ methods we’d been previously recommended.”