The growth in functionality and scale of meetings data consolidation technology during the past several years—which has offered corporations the ability to gather and combine meeting expenditure data regardless of which planner and department hosts the event—has played a key role in strategic meetings management initiatives. Today, no such initiative legitimately can proceed without some sort of technological implementation. Yet, even with all the development that has occurred, analysts warn that the best consolidation technology will fail if strategic processes and policies are not geared to its use.
Once the province of only a handful of large meetings management firms, meetings data consolidation technology today is offered by a number of enterprises and in many forms. Such meetings technology companies as StarCite Inc., GetThere's DirectMeetings division, SeeUthere Technologies and PlanSoft all market internally developed consolidation solutions. Meeting and travel management companies Maritz Travel Co., WorldTravel Meetings & Incentives, Carlson Marketing Group, Navigant International and American Express either have developed their own such technology or offer a private-label version. With interest in meetings consolidation rising
(Meetings Today, Dec. 8, 2003), buyers will have a wide variety of options open to them.
Successful implementation of data consolidation technology, if done appropriately, can give the corporate buyer the necessary data and justification to enact new meetings policies and implement best practices surrounding consolidation, said SeeUthere Technologies CEO John Chang. Some of those best practices, he said, include meeting request and approval processes, defining meetings as possessing a minimum number of room nights, establishing certain criteria that automatically would require executive approval to move forward with the planning of an event and developing standard contractual language.
"It's not about centralization, it's about visibility and control," Chang said. Still, he warned, though the result of successful consolidation technology implementation can be financially beneficial to a company, a sloppy or unmanaged implementation can be pointless.
"Just collecting the information is not good enough," Chang said. "The old saying 'garbage in, garbage out' applies here. If there's no effort, nothing will result. If the technology is just thrown out there and the company just hopes people will use it, it will not happen. There must be training and an emphasis on using the system for registration, sourcing and management. The whole reason for the situation is that there's a bunch of mavericks running around and spending money without control. There must be an organizational commitment."
"The ability of these tools to collect and distribute data is light-years ahead of where they were even five years ago," said Dick Zeller, vice president of consolidation solutions at meetings management firm Maritz McGettigan. "What has helped us significantly is the evolution of the understanding of the process required to deliver that data. You must be mindful, and this is true around the technology but also the strategic and logistical process, of where you want to be three years from now. The data is a good case in point: What kind of data does a corporation need to collect to manage the process more efficiently?"
Zeller pointed to the changes in vendor management processes that data consolidation technology can provide, including the ability to leverage aggregated spending with hotel chains, individual properties and airlines. By taking meetings data management a step further, he said, corporations can determine the cost each attendee incurs during each meeting and search for anomalies.
"With mature meeting clients, you can see the cost per attendee of an average sales meeting, for example, in terms of room cost, food and beverage and air. There could be a 50 percent variance between meetings, and standards could then be set. If there's golf and an expensive banquet at one sales meeting, and nothing at another, you can set a standard of what you want a meeting of that type to look like and what those best practices should be. Because you have cleaner, more complete data and you know the stakeholders, you can do that."
WTMI, which offers its internally developed Plan2Attend meetings management technology, recommends that corporations implement consolidation tools in stages, beginning with a particular corporate department or division and allowing three months to six months of data collection before expanding the rollout, said president Scott Graf. "A phased, very methodical implementation process, with a lot of communication from senior management about why the initiative has been put into place, how the department will proceed and the expected result, is ideal," he said. "There must be that buy-in."
Though some companies have attempted to implement the technology throughout the entire company all at once, Graf said, "immediate, full consolidation, with maximum savings garnered, can't happen. From our experience, there has been a case or two in which corporations have tried to tackle the whole thing and failed. There are too many reasons for that to happen, including too little communication from senior management. Employees can figure out ways not to support an initiative if they don't want to."
Maritz McGettigan's Zeller does not recommend exposing data consolidation technology to every employee who handles meeting planning. "That would be better than nothing, but if you have 150 people that touch meetings, you'll get 150 ideas of how data should be reported," he said. "Everyone has a different definition of property spending, for example."
The data consolidation tool that comprises part of PlanSoft's Meeting Management Solutions technology is key to the company's strategy of developing strategic sourcing-based methods of meetings process management, president Ed Tromczynski said. "There's lots of requests and customer focus on budgeting and consolidation tools, and we've added attendee management tools because it's the initial nosebleed for customers, which is nice but it's secondary to the big initiative," he said. "People want help with strategic sourcing tools and services. All of the information necessary for that resides in the consolidation application and is served by the attendee management application. It's a big change. Strategic planning has moved to strategic sourcing."
In Tromczynski's eyes, the top long-term benefit of the implementation of consolidation technology is the ability of meetings managers to use that data to develop a comprehensive supplier strategy, including the ability to negotiate better long-term costs, capitalize on distressed hotel inventory, restrict the roster of suppliers and direct share. Given PlanSoft's initial business proposition as an online site selection resource with a database of tens of thousands of hotels and other venues, Tromczynski sees strategic sourcing as a natural extension. "It's a different story that lets buyers focus on consolidation and sourcing," he said.
Though the basics of the actual technology are well established, WTMI's Graf said buyers always can expect additional development, particularly in the delivery of expenditure data. "The current level of technological sophistication is adequate to run a successful meetings consolidation program," he said, "but it will never be complete. All of us in this space will have to adjust to a wireless environment. Everything needs to be mobile. Aside from delivery, there is enough technology and data, but there will be better technology and more data."