Best Practitioners Of 2001-02

During the past 12 months—some of the most trying times the meeting industry ever has experienced—the two-pronged assault of an economic recession and terrorism led most corporations to seek savings through their group and meeting travel spending. However, in many—if not most—cases, corporations took the path of least resistance, slashing or forbidding meetings that did not directly involve customers or didn't turn a profit by themselves. The result of this is that many meeting buyers and managers had less opportunity to demonstrate their strategic skills by crafting measures to reduce costs without sacrificing the benefits corporate meetings engender. Many were happy simply to keep their jobs, and some were not that lucky.

Many corporations, however, did not approach the past year in that manner. Instead, they turned to meetings management professionals to control costs and ensure that necessary meetings were as productive as possible. Several took the steps of rewriting policy, bringing meetings under more executive control, or reworking deals to ensure a higher return on investment.

Representing those who demonstrated the value of meetings management expertise and who raised the bar by advancing best business practices during dire times, Meetings Today is proud to announce its Meeting Best Practitioners for 2002. They are: Betsy Bondurant, assistant director of meeting planning and trade shows for Amgen Inc. of Thousand Oaks, Calif.; Erin Dunn, director of travel and meeting services for General Mills Inc. of Minneapolis; and Terry Sullo, manager of meeting and travel services for Akamai Technologies Inc. of Cambridge, Mass. The above three were named for specific practices implemented in the past 12 months that advanced methods to better manage their companies' meeting processes or expenditures.

Meetings Today solicited nominations from throughout the industry, including buyers, suppliers and consultants. The caliber of responses was high, but the Meetings Today's editorial team narrowed down the list to the aforementioned three practitioners, who, taken collectively, demonstrate that wholesale slashing of meetings is not the only way to generate savings and control the corporate meetings program. Though each of the practitioners took a distinct path, the goals are similar: more control of meeting decision-making shifted away from the individual employee and to the meetings department or senior executives.

Meetings Today congratulates these Best Practitioners and thanks all those in the industry who participated in the selection process.

Amgen's Betsy Bondurant

During the past 12 months, many companies have tightened their meeting approval policies, but few have instituted the consequences for noncompliance as has Thousand Oaks, Calif.-based biotech firm Amgen Inc.: The company's internal hotel sourcing group not only will report to vice presidents the internal meeting sponsors who do not use its services, it also will report the actual cost to the company, in dollars, of that noncompliance.

The new policy was the latest move in an overhaul of Amgen's meetings program and travel policy, which includes a meetings consolidation program and the development of an intranet-based meetings registry, said assistant director of meeting planning and trade shows Betsy Bondurant. Yet the new policy, only recently instituted, arguably will have the greatest impact.

"Amgen's policies used to be very loose, and we knew we had to construct a policy with teeth," Bondurant said. "We had a new meeting sourcing group, and we knew that compliance would be critical. So we wanted to point out not just that a sponsor didn't adhere to policy, but, because of it, the company paid 25 percent more for sleeping rooms, paid for meeting room rental, didn't have a rebooking clause and led to $18,000 in additional spending."

Noncompliance is tracked by use of an identifier found on post-event hotel bills that indicates the meeting was contracted by someone outside the meeting sourcing department.

The noncompliance reports are directed to Amgen vice presidents, who determine the next step. It's not inconceivable that, depending on the size of the event, or the risk the noncompliant contract entails, that such reports would be directed to a higher level of senior management, Bondurant said, but she expects most issues will be resolved at the VP level. Communication about the new policies also begins with senior management, as every employee received notification from the company's executive vice president of finance.

The decision to move Amgen in this direction was neither difficult to make nor were other alternatives deeply considered, Bondurant said.

"We saw the process play out with changes that were made to our corporate travel policy," Bondurant said. "Policy adherence was the first step. We wanted to do something similar for meetings, but elevate noncompliance reports to a higher level. Otherwise, people might not want to take the time to do this."

Though the most immediate impact on Amgen's bottom line of the new policy will be less exposure to bad contract risk, there will be other benefits as well. Amgen, with $13 million in corporate meeting expenditures, already slashed about $3 million in 2001 through its three-year-old meetings consolidation program, almost all of which was derived through negotiated hotel sleeping room savings.

To streamline the consolidation process, Bondurant introduced an intranet meetings registry, allowing sponsors to alert the meeting sourcing department of specifications online. The form was simple, underscoring Bondurant's belief that compliance would grow in relation to the registry's ease of use, including only proposed budget information, meeting dates and choice of property or hotel chain.

As compliance grew, Bondurant believed the level of captured volume would be better handled by an outside vendor and turned to Philadelphia-based online meetings management firm StarCite for a data consolidation solution. Since Amgen was not seeking full, consolidated online meetings management, she felt the portal's solutions fit better than would an offline agency's or meetings consolidation firm's. The new online capabilities were beta tested in the spring of 2001 and Amgen signed a contract with StarCite that runs through the end of the year.

Employees using the intranet registry will have their meeting specifications concurrently transmitted to Amgen's meeting sourcing department and StarCite.

Key to the contract was StarCite's agreement to use hotel national sales representatives whom Amgen had developed relationships with instead of the portal's own contacts. "We've spent a lot of time cultivating those relationships, so this is just the right thing to do," Bondurant said.

Before consolidation, Amgen employees planning meetings used a group of company-qualified meeting planning companies and independent planners, mostly in Southern California. While this structure still exists in some parts of the company, notably in some research and development areas, the new policy mandate to register meetings soon will make it a thing of the past.

General Mills' Erin Dunn

The acquisition of The Pillsbury Co. by General Mills Inc., which finally closed in October, more than a year after the deal was announced, afforded General Mills the opportunity to make significant changes in its meeting and travel management programs, including the manner in which meetings are purchased. The Minneapolis-based company has eliminated most meeting invoices by combining travel and entertainment spending and general company purchasing on a single corporate card, allowing for administrative cost savings and better card negotiations.

The move was part of an overall realignment of the larger company's travel and meetings operations that included shifting Pillsbury travelers to a new travel agency and card provider, said Erin Dunn, General Mills director of travel and meeting services.

The new "one card" system, combining T&E and purchasing on one card, assists in paying meeting deposits and invoices, Dunn said.

"When it is time to make the deposit, employees work with the hotel to put the payment on their corporate card instead of having an invoice sent," Dunn said. "Whenever possible, we also try to settle the final bill with the corporate card. Not all hotels are willing to charge such large balances, but on the whole, our use of one card is dramatically streamlining and improving the process."

Removing paper invoices from the meeting reconciliation process not only allows for easier and more comprehensive bookkeeping, it saves money, Dunn said.

"First, costs are lower because there is a reduction in administrative processing with fewer invoices," Dunn said. "To reduce bad debt or charge-offs and further increase our volume and leverage with our card company, General Mills has gone to corporate liability/corporate pay. This is a corporatewide initiative, not just within travel and meeting services, and it has significantly reduced our number of invoices. Second, because all credit card balances are paid on time by General Mills—and because we have been successful, in large part, due to our business shared services department, at moving many of our transactions to the card—we have been able to negotiate significantly better terms on our corporate card contract."

The changes have not directly affected General Mills' internal meeting sponsors or meeting attendees, as sponsors are still to contact the company's meetings department to initiate the planning process and corporate planners still review and sign all contracts.

Dunn characterized the decision to move in this direction as a chance to simultaneously minimize corporate risk and cut costs.

"As the discussions progressed, and we understood more clearly the importance to the card issuer of minimizing risk, we decided that our risks were minimal in taking on the liability, because our Web-based expense reporting system prepopulates the data, but our potential for financial gain was significant," Dunn said. "Travelers and travel planners were advised in a companywide education campaign that focused on use of the expense reporting tool, easier reconciliation of corporate card balances and benefits to the company of moving in this direction. It's been very successful."

An important factor of the success of the program was its timing. Given the significant changes that were occurring throughout the corporation as a result of the merger, Dunn's team felt that the overall corporate climate was conducive to introducing the new program.

"Both General Mills and Pillsbury had centralized meeting planning departments, but the timing of the merger was probably in our favor," Dunn said. "We were essentially introducing something new to all employees during a time of change, and that was probably easier than introducing a single change to a group of employees who were wedded to the status quo. Most importantly, General Mills is very focused on increasing efficiency and adding productivity. Our efforts in the travel and meetings group are completely in line with this strategy. So it was actually pretty easy to incorporate this new system in the General Mills culture."

Dunn's department has made other significant changes as well, including the introduction of American Express' CTO online booking tool and its Fee Allocator, which charges employees a fee each time the travel agency is contacted by phone for fulfillment. As a result, online booking use last month was up to 42 percent companywide.

General Mills also will look to the Internet to further grow its meetings program, Dunn said, as the company in the next 12 months plans to implement a meetings management tool to enhance its ability to track, plan and book meetings online.

Akamai's Terry Sullo

Unlike many small technology companies that deeply slashed their meetings budgets during the past 18 months, Akamai Technologies Inc. has developed polices meant to save money by strictly adhering to negotiated group airline deals and developing a central point of negotiation and procurement.

Included among the policies developed by manager of meeting and travel services Terry Sullo is a mandate requiring that attendees book air as early as possible to take advantage of the Cambridge, Mass.-based company's negotiated meeting fares. To monitor compliance, Sullo scours the global distribution systems and surveys bookings through Akamai's travel agency to determine booking traffic, then reports back to the internal sponsor with the amount of money attendees spent on air, and how much an earlier booking would have saved.

The year-old policy, part of an overall centralization of meeting spending, has contributed to savings of more than 20 percent.

"We have to remain diligent and get the attention of the vice president holding the meeting, and that means focusing on the bottom line," Sullo said. "We want to demonstrate that these measures cause nobody any pain but they can have a benefit on the budget."

After meeting sponsors submit a list of attendees along with meeting specifications to Sullo's department, Sullo begins to notify those attendees up to two months before the beginning of the event, notifying them of acceptable carriers and flights under the terms of the company's corporate contracts. Attendees must call American Express Meetings & Incentives for fulfillment, which refers booking information back to Sullo.

"We monitor this every week," Sullo said. "We develop sheets that show who booked what at how much, show that to the meeting budget sponsor and we don't allow changes without approval."

In addition, Akamai has instituted a policy refusing reimbursement for meeting expenditures the company deems wasteful—such as renting a car when the company provides a bus, or ordering room service when Akamai provides meals—but Sullo said that policy has not been used, as of yet.

"We haven't had to use that tactic because we'd much rather educate the employee to understand spending constraints," Sullo said. "When they are about to make a change that is not the right thing to do, then we nip that in the bud."

The new policies are part of an overall restructuring of Akamai's meeting program that entails flowing all meeting site selection, contract negotiation and procurement to be handled directly by Sullo. The changes, in addition to alerting the company to who actually was planning meetings, allowed Sullo to funnel meetings to preferred properties and carriers, allowing the company to save money through negotiations.

Key to the whole restructuring has been Sullo's direct pipeline to senior management, which has encouraged meetings centralization.

"Nothing I have recommended has not been adopted by the CFO and the management committee," Sullo said. "We lay out our options and why we recommend them, and the executives themselves require their staffs to adhere to policy and encourage us to monitor that."

Sullo also has responsibility for Akamai's expense management and reimbursement, allowing her department to monitor exactly who is spending money on meetings.

"One year ago, bills would come in and we'd wonder who authorized a $10,000 expense on a meeting. Now that's budgeted and controlled," Sullo said. "It's a direct line. Many companies do a lot of work upfront but don't check back against expense reports and control reimbursement."

The changes not only have allowed Akamai to save money but also to stay within budgets developed at the beginning of the event planning process.

"The budgets prepared contain provisos that attendees use meeting fares, that people show up and that they're not making expensive changes," Sullo said. "They understand the limits of budgets, and we help them avoid learning it the hard way."

The new meetings policies have helped Akamai from falling alongside many of its tech brethren, allowing it to continue to hold offsite meetings with reasonable expenditures.

"Meetings are important to a young company," Sullo said. "These changes were not done with the intent to hurt anybody, but as one way for a company to remain successful and grow in an environment that has not been very kind to high-tech companies."