Buyers Drive Maturation Of Attendee Management Tech

Adopting an attendee management system often is the first milestone for companies installing meeting management technology, said service providers, but the ability of those systems to incorporate new tools—from linking to online booking systems to roommate-matching services—has begun to increase dramatically. This year, tech service providers said they expect integration and functionality developments, as buyers continue to look for ways to use the technology to streamline operations.

Chris Maldonado, registration manager of the global conference group of Deloitte & Touche, said one year ago company planners used two different systems to manage event registration. After a three-month search for a new registration tool, Maldonado decided on Certain Software's Register123 product for its ability to interface with multiple systems and completed implementation in September 2004.

"Having a team that was segmented just did not work. It was not beneficial to the group to have one team working on one set of meetings and the other half of the team working on another," Maldonado said. "By bringing it all under one system and one umbrella, it has helped us tremendously. The efficiencies throughout this department have been drastic."

Maldonado said Deloitte & Touche has an annual meetings spend of $49 million, with roughly 950 meetings a year. The group includes 11 registration specialists.

Maldonado said he has seen immediate cost and time savings by adopting a flexible online registration tool, and that purchasing a new system was "an easy decision. The ability to clone a meeting, and have that meeting ready to go literally within a matter of hours is a huge benefit to us," he said. "It might take us two to three weeks to build a meeting Web site, and we now build our initial Web site and have the ability to clone that meeting. It's just cutting down time in all aspects of registration for us."

Register123 in September released a new version featuring customizations requested by Deloitte & Touche, Maldonado said. One feature was a roommate-matching service, he said. "We do a lot of new-hire training, and we try to pair individuals from different offices. We don't like the idea of having individuals in the same office be roommates, we want to encourage networking and fellowship."

Maldonado said he also would like to see a consolidated meeting calendar with the ability to capture meeting finance within the Register123 system. Currently, expenses are tracked through another meeting management system. Maldonado said Deloitte & Touche previously used the B-there system by StarCite. "The biggest thing with Register123 is that we had the ability to be flexible with the system. Also, there's a desire to bring our data in-house, and Register123 offers the enterprise edition, where your hardware is physically located on your premises. That was huge to us."

Vanessa Vlay, chief marketing officer for Certain, said the focus of Register123 is flexibility and data collection. Vlay said the company works with existing systems, rather than try to be "everything to everybody." Register123 is working on an interface with air booking systems that may be released in the spring.

"What we're finding with our corporate clients is that they all tend to be on different systems, so when we've looked at connecting with one online travel provider, say, connecting with Sabre, then we find out somebody else is using Worldspan," Vlay said.

In addition, Register123 has three deployment options, an ASP model, a dedicated portal housed at Certain servers in San Francisco, and an enterprise edition that is housed on the client's servers.

"As we've transitioned from online registration for events to larger solutions for larger organizations, we're dealing a lot more with IT departments and corporate security. They look at all aspects, when they're looking at a service provider, to meet all security requirements that they have," Vlay said.

Most new customers of Register123 previously used a system to handle registration data, even if that system consisted of simple Excel spreadsheets, Vlay said. "Definitely, people think there is a quicker way to do this," she said.

Eileen Locke, associate director of Massachusetts-based pharmaceutical company Sepracor Inc., said data tracking has been the biggest benefit of adopting an attendee management technology system. "We can see our attendees, we can see our air and travel, everything is in one box and you don't have to go around from system to system," Locke said.

Sepracor uses OnVantage to handle its $55 million meeting spend. Locke said the company recently held a multi-city conference with 13,000 total attendees and that the attendee management system helped to organize every city function onto one system.

Although the OnVantage system is more expensive, Locke said the results have been "outstanding." Sepracor has used the system for about one year and Locke said she justifies the expense by driving more volume through the system.

"It's definitely very pricey. The answer to whether it's worth it for everybody is based on volume—more volume, less cost," Locke said.

John Chang, CEO of OnVantage, said customers have three requests of online registration systems: integration, scalability and internationalization. Companies want their registration tool to work with both their internal systems, such as learning management systems, and external travel or expense control systems.

"We integrate to all of the different online booking systems and corporations are demanding that more now," Chang said. "Also, when companies have some sort of accounting system, they want the attendee management to link into that, because during the fulfillment process is when you have accurate cost capture."

Customers also demand online registration tools be flexible enough to handle simple meetings and complicated, multi-day training events, with hundreds of activities, Chang said, and global corporations need a tool that can localize the registration process to multiple countries.

Chang said until this past year, large corporations were interested in registration tools for particular divisions, but now corporations are moving toward single, consolidated systems. Smaller companies also are interested in integrated solutions, he said, but the consolidation is needed more for procurement. He said OnVantage's smallest customer is a shop in Chicago with 12 employees.

Although attendee management has been around since "paper-and-pencil" days, and online registration systems took off three years ago, Chang said there is room for development and innovations in technology. "About half of the development effort is still on attendee management, because it's a very complicated and nasty problem," he said.

Attendee management technology is one of the first areas a company looks at to save money on meetings, but that is rapidly changing, Chang said. "There are customers that come in and say: 'All I want is attendee management.' Two or three years ago, that number was 100 percent. Today, it's probably less than one-third."