Poll: Planners Using More Mtg. Data Consolidation Tools

New data from an exclusive Meetings Monitor survey show the use of technology to consolidate meeting spending information is growing quickly, offering further evidence of the continually maturing industry of meetings technology, its acceptance by corporate meeting buyers as a legitimate part of a comprehensive meetings strategy and the further indoctrination of procurement-based philosophies into meetings management.

Thirty-one percent of the 101 corporate meeting buyers polled said their companies use online meetings consolidation tools, with an additional 6 percent indicating that their companies plan to start doing so later this year. The Monitor is designed to be a snapshot of the industry, not a comprehensive, scientific study, and these numbers represent higher percentages of use than anecdotal evidence suggests. Nevertheless, it seems clear online consolidation is, at least, under consideration by many large companies and actually being performed at a healthy minority. This is a substantial leap for an industry that thus far has been much quicker to embrace transient travel and expense reporting technology than meetings—and especially meetings consolidation—technology.

Both the supply and demand sides of meetings technology have matured. There are several Internet companies that offer consolidation tools in addition to traditionally more popular attendee management systems, and several travel and meetings management companies either have allied with those online companies or developed such meetings technology on their own. The downturn-spurred development of more comprehensive meetings management philosophies, including procurement strategies, has led many companies to embrace meetings consolidation technology, as has the cost-saving success of transient travel technology, particularly online self-booking.

Hartford, Conn.-based insurance and financial services firm Aetna Inc. in early June began consolidating its meetings data with Westport, Conn.-based online meetings management firm B-there's OneForm tool, said manager of strategic sourcing for meetings and travel management Deb Fouche. "All data come through the meetings management department," she said. "We have a detailed request for meeting form that includes all cost-center, proposed budget and logistical data that resides on our intranet. The request is sent through our internal e-service site, not OneForm."

Currently, Aetna's meetings management department manually imports all meeting expenditure data from its internal form into OneForm, as internal information technology issues, for now, limit the interaction between OneForm and the internal site. That should change at some point, Fouche said. In the meantime, the department retroactively is importing all information from meetings already held in 2003. "It's laborious to accomplish, but it is good to have a place to house all of our data where we all can get it," Fouche said. "This will make it easier on meetings management."

The suppliers of consolidation technology have different takes on the impetus behind the demand. Mike Malinchok, manager of Menlo Park, Calif.-based GetThere's DirectMeetings product line, said it is due to the different definitions of return on investment in the procurement and transient travel spheres seeping into meetings management departments.

"The buzz about this has definitely increased, and a lot more companies have moved beyond thinking this is a good idea to actually doing something about it," Malinchok said. "The return on investment models that we've all put out there are now being heavily scrutinized by executives who want to know when they'll see the benefit. A CEO will say, 'no way' to ROI models based completely on soft dollars. This may finally be the trigger that keeps the momentum going."

The current corporate focus on generating actual meeting cost savings, instead of time savings or other soft-dollar benefits, Malinchok said, is a significant change for the meetings industry, compared with the travel industry, which traditionally has placed a higher emphasis on actual cost savings. This leads to procurement and travel executives seeking methods to provide dollar savings, Malinchok said, online data consolidation being one.

"With travel and meetings departments working together, corporate meeting planners are no longer out there doing their own thing," Malinchok said. "ROI has been two completely different mindsets in the meetings and travel industries. I think this has contributed to how slowly it has caught on. Two or three years ago, nobody submitted an online request for proposals for meetings technology. Now, they all do. It's not just interest, they want to put a plan into place."

Santa Clara, Calif.-based SeeUthere Technologies CEO John Chang posits the increase in demand as a result of companies seeking to consolidate meetings data without actually altering their internal meeting structures. "Companies are looking for a technological tool to achieve the benefits of centralization without actually centralizing," he said. "About 90 percent of companies don't want to centralize, but they want technology to be a funneling tool through a coordinated buying unit with guidelines to raise warnings if policy is violated. A small percentage do it, but a large percentage want to do it."

This decision, Chang said, tends to emanate from senior management. "Those who initiate this tend not to come out of meeting planning," he said. "More likely, it's the CFO."

In addition, Chang said, the time it takes corporations to decide that they are interested in consolidation technology to buying a tool tends not to be short. "It takes a lot of time for customers to eventually reach a decision," he said. "There are quite a few companies with which we're closing right now, but we started the process a year or longer ago."

Still, with all of this, the number of companies actually consolidating their meeting data online is still a minority. Many are strapped by understaffed meeting and travel departments, and other executives have little interest in spending money on online consolidation tools when they aren't holding very many meetings to consolidate.

"We're going to look at it just as part of our due diligence, but we are nowhere near that point," said Mike Doran, director of travel services for Kenilworth, N.J.-based pharmaceutical firm Schering-Plough Corp. "We haven't had the time to study this."