Banc One Eyes Meeting Spend

<B> Banc One Eyes Meeting Spend</B>

By Lauren Bielski

Banc One is taking steps to identify its meeting spend as the next phase of steamlining its travel purchasing, prompted by a massive restructuring that began in 1995.

The company saved millions by consolidating its transient travel program last year. For 1998, it will focus on finding a long-term fix for meetings as well.

The decision to go after meetings was made at the Columbus, Ohio-based bank in the third quarter of 1997. Large meetings, incentives and key events for corporate officers, which have been handled for more than 12 years by veteran planner Betty Garret, will continue with in-house management, though Garret may expand her in-house staff of four full-time planners significantly. But smaller meetings, which now are often handled by overtaxed administrative assistants, will require a less obvious solution, said national travel manager Wini Cloran.

Cloran is heading up the consolidation project for Banc One and acting as liaison with the company's travel management firm, BTI Americas. "We're really scrutinizing the meetings that generate travel, and considering videoconferencing as an alternative to meetings," she said. "We want our people to have a clear understanding of why they're meeting, and how the information they are exchanging at meetings contributes to the bottom line."

For Banc One, reorganizing meetings is a microcosm of a company in transition. Once a decentralized banking outfit with a sprawl of independently operating affiliates in 12 states, it has emerged from internal restructuring as the seventh largest U.S. banker, offering commercial banking, investment and management trust, finance and credit cards.

The company last year completed acquisitions of First Commerce, First USA, and Liberty National banks, expanding the breadth of its managed assets and raising the bar on its travel volume.

With managers increasingly reporting across state lines, the bank's travel volume leaped upward from $2 million in 1991 to about $45 million. That, in turn, has put Banc One on the offensive in curbing costs.

In 1997, it used travel-related data gathered in 1996 to wield a big stick in negotiations with air carriers American and America West Airlines. Last year, Cloran and BTI developed the company's first hotel program, pulling data from over 300 hotel in 14 major cities.

"In developing the travel policy and new cost-avoidance strategies, we really focused in on patterns emerging from the top 300 to 400 travelers," Cloran said. "We are the type of company that mostly travels and meets in cities where we have a presence. We don't, for example, often send our people to Disney Hotels in Florida, because we don't have a bank there. Our people go to Milwaukee instead."

In developing the hotel program, Cloran first approached several hotel companies in heavily traveled cities, rather than trying to negotiate chainwide. Travelers began taking advantage of discounted accommodations in October.

Working with BTI, the bank began evaluating meetings while in the midst of issuing a new national travel policy. "It was in discussions with administrative assistants about the new policy that we realized that meetings management should be a top priority," Cloran said.

The company is rethinking its policy on local negotiations, even though it knows that fully realized chain deals may be several years in the making. It will decide this quarter whether small meetings management should be entirely outsourced. But it already is sure that its previous method of every man for himself is out.

In making her recommendations to consolidation, BTI's manager of consulting services Chris Hunnes analyzed Banc One's general ledger, looked at the work of the national accounts payable departments and assessed the comments of heavy-volume ad hoc planners.

Interviewing focus groups also helped to sketch a picture of a company that was generating a rapidly increasing air volume--mostly due to its internal meetings--even as it dealt with the fallout of its new structure and mission.

Making her report late in November, Hunnes recommended that some sort of registration system be installed so that meetings of all types could be centrally logged. With a focus on automation revolutionizing its core competency, Banc One will be a likely candidate for a Web-based solution, Cloran said, although she stressed that no decisions have been made about how to capture critical data.

"While we have a very clear picture of what large meetings cost us, the picture gets less clear with small and medium sized meetings," she noted.

In addition to a central registration of all meetings, possibly on a Website, Hunnes recommended that Banc One make a firm decision regarding the possibility of a mandated meetings program.

In this, the company's first attempt to manage its meeting spend, Hunnes recommended a gradual approach to pulling meetings through a single department that is partially staffed by dedicated BTI employees. Hunnes also recommended that internal staffs be supported by some training, and that they make use of pre-negotiated, all-inclusive meetings packages being offered by many of the major hotel chains.

Cloran, meanwhile, is pleased with the way the consolidation has gotten off the ground, and with her travel-management partner's role in it.

"What I really respected about BTI in all of this was that they looked at the newly emerging corporate culture and tried to be very realistic about what we could accomplish. We're a domestic operation, so certain types of approaches didn't make the same sense for us as they would for an international bank, for example. BTI didn't try to make us fit into a round hole," she said.