What Anthem Wanted:
Visibility into true and total meetings spend
How It Went About
It:
Partnered with expense management provider Chrome River to build a meetings and
events reconciliation solution
What Anthem Got Out of It:
A manageable way to track spend for multiple meetings; real-time meetings
spend, regardless of the form of payment; time saved on creating reports; and a
saleable product that other corporations can use, comment on and improve
Every year, Anthem holds as many as 1,000 meetings. The
planners may work on 15 simultaneously, as far as three years in advance. To
stay within budget and update budget owners, they've relied on Excel
spreadsheets to track spend, but in October, Anthem and expense management
provider Chrome River launched a meetings module. "The goal is to finally
figure out what we're really spending on meetings," Anthem director of
travel and events Cindy Heston said.
Anthem planners resort to Excel spreadsheets because
American Express meetings card does not integrate with Cvent, Heston said.
Eighty percent of the company's meetings charges go on Amex meetings cards, and
the rest go through the Ariba procurement tool, a check request or another form
of payment. "This put a lot of burden and responsibility on the meeting
planner to architect all that data back out and put it in a presentable manner
back to the budget owner," Heston said. It also clouded the true spend of
an event, based on when and how often planners input charges and reported to
the budget owners. Without a transparent, real-time process, Anthem might not
discover an overage until an event was over.
The company included meetings and events reconciliation in
its 2015 expense management request for proposals, but no plug-and play
solution existed. Chrome River, however, offered to co-build one. Anthem launched the
expense tool in September 2015, and in January, its accounts payable team and
Chrome River began development.
Cvent feeds Chrome River such details as the budget number and
owner, the approving manager and the cost center, whether split or not, Heston
explained. Amex meeting card charges also feed into Chrome River, and meetings
planners can add line items for expenses paid with other methods. Within
Chrome River, planners select the meeting's Cvent ID from a drop-down menu so
expenses are grouped. The system builds the event's unique budget and
reconciles the Amex charges, Heston explained. "It can really bring such
transparency to the budget owner, reviewer or manager so they know step-by-step
what's going on with that event, what the charges are and they can ask
questions as things are being entered."
When new items are ready for review, budget owners receive
emails or mobile push notifications with a link to a Chrome River dashboard that
displays expense data for the lifecycle of the event, as well as charts
detailing budget, spend and spend categories. Such instantaneous visibility
allows budget owners and planners to adapt budgets or spending as needed, Heston
said. The data also is available in Cvent, though without the reporting
visuals.
Heston expects to collaborate with other
corporates to improve the tool: "The goal is to launch it to other
customers so we can have more of a collaborative environment to build out the
next couple of phases." For Phase Two, she hopes to feed Ariba expenses,
check requests and other non-Amex meeting card expenditures into Chrome River.
In Phase Three, she wants to incorporate business travel expenses that are
related to meetings with API integration among Chrome River, Cvent and Sabre. "Sometimes,
we'll only pay for food and beverage on the master bill … but we want to bring
in that sleeping room as a budget item," Heston said. "I get that
this particular department only has budget for specific pieces of meetings, but
the cost to the organization is a true number. It's just a matter of getting to
that information and compiling it."