Bank Migrates Meeting Methods

Deutsche Bank this month is rolling out a technology-based strategic meetings management initiative to three Asia/Pacific countries as part of the next phase of a two-year project to reengineer its more than $150 million global meetings and events program.

Along with centralizing the company's meeting planners, taking ownership of the meetings procurement process and migrating the traditional request-for-proposals format in seven countries to an electronic system, Deutsche Bank's efforts also helped develop meetings management reporting and data technologies now in use by hundreds of major corporations.

Under the stewardship of global head of travel-related services Debbie Dayton, the Frankfurt-based financial services company in 2007 began stitching together its fragmented meeting planning and procurement operations in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. To organize 45 meeting planners and administrative assistants across several countries and various business lines, Dayton and her team worked with meetings management technology provider StarCite to develop customized data modules and electronic processes to manage meetings of all sizes, from budgeting and requests for proposals to reservations and back-end reporting and reconciliation.

Six months after the project's launch, Deutsche Bank was operating its new meetings program in the three countries that comprised the bulk of its expenditure. In 18 months, Dayton has started to incorporate Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore and the reservations processes for some of South America. Year-over-year savings measurements were unavailable, but the company negotiated on average 20 percent reductions from the first round of proposed meetings pricing to the final round.

In building its meetings technology portfolio, Deutsche Bank helped StarCite revamp its little-used budget analyzer tool, which now is much more widely used by StarCite clients. The enhanced tool provides the projected total cost of an event, including transportation spending, before the meeting approval process. Deutsche Bank pre-loads the tool biannually with its average negotiated hotel rates, airfares and other key metrics, including average food and beverage costs. Meeting planners then populate the guest fields and other parameters and can compare costs across multiple cities. For cities where the bank typically does not do business, average costs are populated from StarCite's database.

"The vendor had this tool and wasn't sure what to do with it," Dayton said. "They had the mind to fix a problem in the meetings space, which was how to manage room blocks and the logistical movement of people and less about the procurement and the budgeting components. We grabbed that analyzer and said this is probably the most important piece of what you offer."

The bank had StarCite build about 40 new features into the platform, primarily around the expansion of the budgeting and reconciliation processes that the magnitude of its meetings program requires. The melding of transportation costs into the equation provided a new level of budget evaluation. The expanded system now has more than 200 line items, which deliver pre- and post-event reporting from multiple views and can be broken down to a cost-per-attendee basis. As the program matures and more comparative data becomes available, the level of reporting will enable Deutsche Bank to measure its meetings' return on investment.

"A lot of companies, including us were guilty of looking at how much a meeting was going to cost for sleeping rooms and meeting space and speakers and the event itself, but never how much it would cost to move people from all over the world to this event," Dayton said.

Many of Deutsche Bank's customized reporting features found their way into StarCite's standard platform, as have other customized elements since the bank became a customer in 2007. The bank, a member of StarCite's development advisory group, helped shape StarCite's integration of dashboard reporting technology.

"We align very closely with how Deutsche Bank forecasts their business requirements and what they believe they need to do within their meetings program," said StarCite senior vice president of global account management and implementation Betty McNulty.

That dashboard technology integration, built with IBM's Cognos business intelligence software, provides instant reporting across business lines, corporate hierarchy, regions and attendees. Previously, reports were culled manually and consolidated into spreadsheets.

Dayton now also has visibility into the performance of the company's meeting planners through the Cognos performance management applications. "We are actually looking at why they declined the spend view if there was an opportunity to reduce the cost further," Dayton said. "We have disposition codes for tracking to understand more about the event and why a meeting sponsor chose a facility and then go back to show them opportunities for further cost reduction in the future."

Meanwhile, Deutsche Bank also underwent a 32-country transient data consolidation project with one of its three travel management companies, which has been "one of the biggest contributions to reducing costs," Dayton said. It involved standardizing the point-of-sale process across the entire program. As with the meetings data, new reporting elements are now given to senior management. The bank generates more than 700 reports monthly about the travel of its 78,000 employees.

Armed with hundreds of different data elements for supplier negotiations, including current global hotel program discussions and this year's global air program consolidation efforts, adding meetings program data has given Deutsche Bank the new leverage of a combined buying power of about $700 million.

While Deutsche Bank's innovations helped it achieve several notable successes, including the launch of meetings technology in Asia, which StarCite's McNulty called "the last horizon in the meetings world," Dayton and her team of two procurement professionals, a strategic meetings management project leader and three regional travel managers had to navigate a series of challenges along the way.

After identifying senior management project stakeholders across each of the company's global business lines, Dayton and her team organized the company's meeting planners and evaluated the current technology portfolio. What they found was a variety of disparate homegrown systems in several operating countries with no common platform, including synchronized calendar software.

To standardize the planning process, professional planners were trained on the tools and given a Web-based portal to access all of the tools at a single entry point. Administrative assistants with some planning responsibility underwent training on how to organize, then defer to meeting planners and the procurement team when necessary.

While internal buy-in came quickly, a significant roadblock came from suppliers in Germany that were unaccustomed to the new meetings procurement process. "That was absolutely new for that market," Dayton said. "Suppliers were not real thrilled to be participating in an e-RFP process."

Dayton and the local team changed that perception through workshops, town hall meetings and training.

Without a mandate, the company has 40 percent adoption in Germany, but 100 percent use among the supplier base, she said. The education initiatives carried over into the United Kingdom rollout, "so suppliers understood the way we're going to procure our space and the obligation that they had to be one of our preferred suppliers."