Managing Meetings at Hewlett-Packard: Intranet Page Yields Results

<B> Managing Meetings at Hewlett-Packard: Intranet Page Yields Results</B>

By Chris Davis

While the establishment of a corporate intranet page for meetings management at Hewlett-Packard has saved the decentralized company millions of dollars, its first-ever meetings program manager said the company could decide on some changes as early as this month.

"In the middle of the month we're meeting with a bunch of our own folks--planners and my manager--to figure out our next steps," said Rich Del Colle. "We have to look at where we want to be five years from now." One facet of meetings management Del Colle said he'll be considering is a meetings software package to help lead the high percentage of H-P employees who aren't meeting planners through the process. "What I really want is Web-based software that can do everything," he said. "But although there are some companies out there that are working at it and have pieces of it, they haven't gotten it altogether yet. That's part of my long-term vision, where a meetings program would prompt the meeting planner through the whole process and guide him within our guidelines, or go to an outside preferred supplier and let them do it."

Hewlett-Packard's current system requires that all employees planning meetings register their events on the intranet. "We're saying that 20-30 percent of our total T&E of $800 million--or about $200 million dollars--is spent on meetings," Del Colle said, estimating that the intranet saves about 5 percent on that volume. "I can't prove that I save 5 percent, but we're reaching people," he said.

The savings come from two sources: First, employees planning meetings can research past meetings and learn how much was spent in a particular city or property. Secondly, the intranet features a copy of the Certified Meeting Planner instructional manual, enabling inexperienced planners--70 percent of his user base--to wade through the tangled morass of meetings contracts. "The networking ability helps, but more important is the educational material that tells them how to negotiate cancellation fees and deal with hotel contracts," Del Colle said.

The trick, though, is making sure employees are following procedure and registering the estimated 2,000 meetings planned annually on the intranet. "I'm reasonably certain that we're getting 95 percent of the high-end and large meetings, because they're coming after the zone fares, etc. These are the best planners in the company, a core group of about 100 that spends most of the money. But still, we have to educate all of the employees, even those doing just a couple meetings a year of 50 to 100 attendees. It's all money spent, and it adds up because there are so many of them."

Del Colle's next project is to take the current registration system and automate it even further. "We want them to register meetings as soon as they set them up, and then go back in and post comments about the meeting as a post-evaluation," he said. "Now, when we see a meeting with no evaluation posted, we call the planner and ask them to put one in. But what we're working on next is a program that will e-mail planners asking them for an evaluation on the hotel a week after the meeting's over. We should have that in a month or two."

Meetings registered on the intranet are password-protected, so planners can look at descriptions and details of other meetings, but can only edit their own. This is the major change made to the intranet in January from its original version, which was launched 18 months before that (<I>Meetings Today,</I> April 29, 1997). "In the old version, once you input something, you couldn't change it," he said.

The intranet's construction cost between $8,000 and $10,000, but took nearly a year. "There wasn't a lot of money invested, but a lot of time," Del Colle said. Despite the availability of the intranet, though, H-P employees are not required to plan their own meetings. The company uses three preferred suppliers--American Express Group Travel, Quality Solutions and Travel of Los Angeles and a third Del Colle declined to name because of ongoing contract discussions.

The evolution of H-P's meetings program bears watching. Building a cohesive and cost-effective meetings program is extremely challenging, since few other companies are as large or as decentralized. H-P management does not interfere or mandate in planning or site selection. "It kills us in leveraging, and we realize we leave something on the table when we go out to bid," Del Colle said. "But we want to keep the responsiveness in the individual units, so they can turn on a dime for a customer without having to go through a centralized system."

H-P's combined size, technological capability and corporate culture give it a fairly unique standing in the industry, so while its intranet certainly has worked for its bottom line, a similar solution may not be feasible for other corporations.

"The real key here is desktop access to the Internet. I talked to a guy in California recently who works for a $2-billion grocery chain. He thought what I was doing would work for him, until we got to the point of how many people have laptops and desktops and access to a common network. You need to have that network--that's the big enabler.