One of the earliest adopters of online meetings registration technology, Cisco Systems Inc. last year embarked upon a worldwide implementation of its new philosophy governing use of the technology, which involves a single registration system managed by a service center within its travel department.
The move anoints Palo Alto, Calif.-based Cisco as one of the few companies that has developed a comprehensive strategy to manage meeting attendees internationally, using a single system and concept. The company in the summer of 2002 rolled out the service center concept to support attendee management in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and plans further expansion to Asia soon.
The move should generate significant savings for the company, as the creation of the domestic service center and unifying registration technology procurement processes has saved Cisco about $1 million per quarter since its 2001 development, said Michael Benedict, global manager of travel, Metro and meeting expense data systems. Metro is Cisco's name for its internal expense management system.
Cisco's service center concept is based on the use of online meetings management firm StarCite's RegWeb attendee management technology for all events that require registration and the use of Benedict's team to create and manage internal Web sites to manage that registration. Though use of the service center or RegWeb is not mandated, Benedict estimated compliance at about 70 percent of all event registrations, representing about 110,000 individual transactions for about 450 separate events annually.
The service center was borne from a registration technology procurement and management process that, though it marked Cisco as an early innovator of such systems and allowed for some savings, had become costly and cumbersome by 2000. The company since 1996 had allowed its internal planners to select and use a mélange of internally created and outside registration technology providers, as well as non-technological services provided by event management companies, which allowed neither comprehensive data management nor the ability to leverage transaction volume for cost efficiencies. "We were very aware that the company was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on registration systems," Benedict said. "It had become standard operating procedure for planners. Everyone was hiring someone else to do it, and that data was not managed particularly well."
Plus, much as many meeting buyers have removed hotel contract-signing authority from nonprofessional planners because of the financial repercussions of poor negotiations, Benedict found a similar situation involving the various technology providers. "Administrative assistants would find and negotiate for services but didn't know how to properly evaluate them and overpay, much like with hotel contracts," Benedict said.
By this time in 2000, attendee management technology had advanced to the point that several Internet companies were offering registration technology at relatively competitive prices that were fixed and transaction based. Seeing an opportunity to leverage its considerable transaction volume, Cisco embarked upon a thorough review of the market and selected RegWeb—then a StarCite partner, now fully owned
(Meetings Today, July 15, 2002)—and decided to house its management through a service center.
There were several advantages to both moves. Using external technology instead of internally developed tools saved the company money and removed the burden of maintaining the system from Cisco's information technology department. Developing the service center ensured that those planners who plan only a meeting or two annually could benefit from using the technology without undergoing a significant education process.
But Cisco, like many technology companies, is loath to mandate. The growth of the service center concept was then dependent on its ability to be a proven savings generator. Almost concurrently with its establishment, though, Cisco began a significant move to cut costs throughout the company.
"It was kismet, actually; dumb luck," Benedict said. "When this first began, we had to sell the value proposition, but in the spring of 2001 there were dramatic changes and Cisco's only layoff. Every budget was slashed, and everyone began looking for solutions. As a service center, we were able to distribute to the enterprise." The ability to offer a flat per-registration cost was compelling, Benedict said. "They all knew what they were spending, and in some cases this represented a factor-of-10 savings."
Today, compliance is high without a mandate, and the service center can create registration Web sites for individual events in a matter of days or even hours. Moving the concept overseas with the establishment of a London-based service center has been successful, Benedict said, as international planners have embraced the center's ability to match short meeting lead times with quick registration technology deployment.
Benedict reports to senior manager of global TMME systems Ralph Colunga, who will lead the department to focus on fully integrating all relevant travel and registration information.
"Procurement is really the key here, and management of this data is huge," Benedict said. "We will better understand the cost. We're going to tie all the registration spending information to the costs of that event—hotel cost, food and beverage—and bring them together with other event costs, like air travel. We'll unwrap the information per attendee per cost. Ralph has done some exciting things in travel data management, and integrating everything is absolutely possible."