Already possessing one of the most highly managed corporate meeting programs for a large company, PricewaterhouseCoopers has retained an outside Internet meetings management firm to better streamline its registration and data consolidation process.
PwC estimated that savings generated from contracting with Santa Clara, Calif.-based SeeUthere Technologies will be enough to cover its cost by the spring, one year after PwC signed in late March 2002.
PwC currently uses only SeeUthere's online attendee management capabilities for its large meetings that require registration but do not include a learning or education element. Soon, said director of meeting and event services Debi Scholar, the company will expand its usage to smaller events and avail itself of SeeUthere's data consolidation functionalities. PwC is integrating the new meetings technology with its learning management software, which tracks education accrediting, allowing it to employ SeeUthere's technology for training meetings, as well.
"The ultimate goal is to use it wherever it makes logical sense," said PwC director of travel and meeting management Mark Williams. "We'll continue rolling it out. We've used it on occasion, and the plan is to use it more until it is being used exclusively."
The company first used SeeUthere's registration piece for a series of partner meetings this past autumn, Scholar added, which included more than 1,000 attendees at 17 different locations.
PwC in 2001 spent about $11 million on worldwide meetings air volume. The company in early 2002 began a formal request for proposal process to find an outside meetings technology firm that could assist in the streamlining of its internal attendee management system, which primarily consisted of a series of Lotus Notes databases.
"The firm is migrating to more Web-based systems," Williams said. "The series of databases required a lot of resources. They had to be set up, monitored, refreshed when changes were made. Hopefully, this will require fewer resources to monitor."
One key problem the company hoped to solve, Scholar said, was its inability to allow attendees who were not PwC employees to register for meetings online, as the databases resided inside the firm's firewall. It was quickly determined that the company was not in a position to develop a solution in-house. "It never crossed our minds," Williams said. "With information technology resources scarce, we weren't going to go through the process of developing a system that others had already established."
PwC resolved its search quickly, basing its decisions on the level of meeting management services offered and the technology company's willingness to adapt its offerings to fulfill PwC's needs. "We had a high level of comfort with SeeUthere's level of flexibility and their desire to have us help them tailor and improve their product," Williams said.
The meetings department recommended SeeUthere's services to senior management and compiled an analysis of the rationale behind it, which garnered approval. Though a key to the decision to seek outside technology was the opportunity to streamline processes and save time, the analysis included the contention that the SeeUthere contract would generate enough savings to pay for itself within one year, Williams said.
PwC's meeting department and its travel department work very closely together—Williams heads both, and the two departments consolidate expenditures to fulfill preferred supplier agreements and negotiate more favorable contracts. Yet, the company decided to make its selection based on what was best solely for the meetings operations.
"We didn't want to let the travel side wag the dog," Williams said. "We wanted to do what was best for meetings, and work whatever else out."
For example, PwC's preferred vendor for online transient self-booking services is GetThere, a company that not only offers meetings products of its own
(Meetings Today, Dec. 9, 2002) and is therefore a competitor of SeeUthere's, but has ruled out the possibility of linking its DirectCorporate booking tool to SeeUthere's registration tools
(Meetings Today, Nov. 12, 2001). "That was not an overriding factor in the choice," Williams said.
PwC also uses Atlanta-based TRX Inc.'s ResAssist self-booking tool, however, with which SeeUthere has partnered to enable attendee air booking at the point of meeting registration, a functionality Williams said PwC will explore.