As part of an effort to consolidate 55 separate business-unit travel policies into one, Lockheed Martin Corp. earlier this year deployed a companywide meetings policy, mandating the use of GetThere DirectMeetings technology on an event's front end and a U.S. Bank Visa meetings card for payment.
The policy, Lockheed Martin's first to govern meetings operations, will allow the Bethesda, Md.-based defense contractor to consolidate event spending data throughout the large, decentralized company, enabling the negotiation of volume-based deals with meetings suppliers
(Meetings Today, April 26, 2004).Initial results of the policy implementation have encouraged the firm. "Quite a significant" number of meetings of at least 10 traveling attendees already have been registered and their spending data collected, said travel commodity manager for global hotels and groups and meetings programs Frank Melesky. The company will not fully assess the results of the policy's impact on its meetings spending until year-end.
The immediate impact, though, is a far cry from Lockheed Martin's recent past. A conglomerate with many lines of business and locations, the firm essentially allowed each to manage its own meetings operations as they saw fit. By 2002, however, executives realized the company had missed savings opportunities generated by its size. Lockheed Martin ranked fourth on BTN's 2004 Corporate Travel 100 list (BTN, July 5).
In the summer of 2002, the firm decided to explore the creation of a meetings policy as part of the consolidation and development of a new corporate travel policy, spurred by a companywide move to apply Six Sigma strategies to Lockheed Martin's non-manufacturing, peripheral competencies.
"We could apply Six Sigma principles to travel policy and it would result in savings from improved preferred supplier and nonrefundable ticket use," said director of corporate travel services Richard Wooten.
With the centralization of meeting planning never a viable option—Lockheed Martin is too disparate—and with no desire to remove the logistical and content management from meeting planners in individual business units, Wooten instead focused on developing policy designed to support the companywide rollout of tools to collect meetings information. A committee representing several internal divisions—including corporate travel, finance and the groups that manage the firm's corporate card and expense reporting—charged with rewriting travel policy also eventually chose to include language concerning the use of DirectMeetings and the U.S. Bank Visa meeting card.
"Planners who are the meetings' points of contact should make possible the use of DirectMeetings and guide and instruct travelers regarding registration and travel," Melesky said. "The meeting card is required for planners to use for general expenses related to a meeting: the rental of meeting space, food and beverage, any audiovisual needs and other general costs. Individual traveler costs—air, hotel, car—go on the travelers' individual cards."
The names of the suppliers are listed in the policy, Melesky said, to ensure planners are aware that the use of those tools is required. To do that, though, senior management support was required, which Wooten obtained through an analysis of the potential savings opportunities a consolidated meetings program could generate.
"We put together a business case of what we could realize through use of self-service registrations and the meeting card," Wooten said. "That sold senior management on the concept."
The approval process for the policy was lengthy and included extensive review by the firm's legal and human resources departments. It was completed in time for a January 2004 deployment.
"We approached policy deployment from the point of building awareness among meeting planners," Wooten said. Part of that , Melesky added, was a multi-day Six Sigma event of 25 meeting buyers, procurement personnel and internal meeting sponsors charged with studying the new procedures.
"We looked at the constraints of the meeting planning process without the new enhancements and remapped them to include DirectMeetings and the meeting card so we could determine exactly how the process works to support meeting planning operations," Melesky said. "It was very successful, and it went a long way to establish the culture of using the tools."
Additionally, Lockheed Martin has employed its intranet travel portal and several other communications tools to promote the new policy and the new tools and explain the goals of the new meetings program. "We don't want to take over anyone's job. We want to consolidate data and negotiate better agreements," Wooten said.
Those agreements will come in short order, Melesky said. "It's premature for now, but we have identified some venues as popular throughout the corporation, and we will leverage that spend."