Co. Reaps Rewards From StarCite Mandate

In one of the most comprehensive moves toward online meeting management to date, food and beverage maker Quaker Oats Co. has mandated that all employees planning meetings use StarCite's online request for proposal and calendaring services. Chicago-based Quaker Oats estimated that the move will save the company about $1 million in the next year.

The savings will be generated by better negotiations and hotel contracting, as the company's meeting planning operations are decentralized and handled by nonprofessional planners, often administrative assistants, said Mollie Dierckman, Quaker strategic sourcing team leader.

"There will be more competitive bidding," Dierckman said. "Since we'll be educating planners, they'll be able to understand better what they can and can't get from hotels, especially concerning attrition and cancellation."

The companywide deployment, which began in July, includes a secure Quaker page on StarCite's Web site—not Quaker's intranet—for RFP creation and transmission and calendaring. StarCite also will train the 100-plus Quaker employees planning meetings and serve as a consultant in implementing process improvements. "This is one of the fastest, most extensive StarCite deployments we have created to date," said StarCite CEO John Pino. The portal has a one-year contract with Quaker Oats.

Quaker's implementation of StarCite is different and more extensive than deployments of meeting portal services at other large corporations. Many others have chosen to offer the tools to a select cadre of professional meeting planners, then direct internal meeting sponsors to register their events with those planners (Meetings Today, Jan. 29).

"This lets those planning meetings to still handle the sourcing," Dierckman said. "It's just a behavior change regarding the resources they use. We'll get competitive rates and we'll use structured RFPs, which was not always done. Plus, it lets us track all this data."

The genesis of the move to StarCite was an analysis of Quaker's nontraditional purchasing departments two years ago. A specific analysis of Quaker's decentralized meeting services approach revealed not only that the number and cost of events staged—neither of which Dierckman revealed—were higher than expected but that a variety of suppliers, including third-party planners, were used. "It was clear the process was not optimal," she said.

The company decided to create and provide a process that would allow Quaker to capitalize on its spending power and consolidate meeting purchasing data, without, Dierckman stressed, centralizing the details of each and every meeting away from those who had planned them. "We wanted to approach this strategically but in a way that made sense," Dierckman said. "We have no formal meeting services department, but those employees planning meetings have a lot of contacts and skills, and we didn't want a drastic behavior change. It's very cost-effective to have them continue to plan meetings."

Though Quaker decided to keep the decentralized structure, the company still wanted to employ better methods of capturing meeting data. For example, there was nothing in place to prevent registering multiple meetings at the same hotel without negotiating subsequent lower prices.

Dierckman's team, which entailed representatives from the meeting, travel, purchasing and sales departments—the latter because of its volume of meetings— was aware of the number of online portal tools in the marketplace and decided to explore the issue further by hosting several demonstrations. "We were looking for a combination of tools, functionality, user-friendliness and support services," Dierckman said. "Some were really robust."

Dierckman's team, though, felt StarCite's offerings melded best with the company's decentralized focus while offering data consolidation capabilities.

Before alerting Quaker employees of the new program, which will be administered by supervisor of meeting services Lisa Goodwin, Dierckman's team solicited senior management support for the move to StarCite. Given that the level of cost and risk relatively was low, versus the potential cost savings, Dierckman said, senior management was satisfied with the new program and gave their blessing before notification of the rollout.

As with most changes companies make to their meetings program, Quaker, at first, found pockets of resistance. "There is always hesitation," Dierckman said. "They can still do meeting planning, which is good, but any change can be challenging. Using senior management as the method of communication helped. And though there was some resistance, there was excitement as well." One facet of the new tool was positioned in a way to avoid the tedium of RFP duplication by using the portal's ability to copy some specifications into multiple RFPs. Through StarCite, Quaker also will be introduced to the portal's partnering attendee management module, Cardinal Communications' RegWeb.

After the dust from the StarCite implementation settles, Dierckman and Goodwin will turn to Quaker's meeting and group air spend. Currently, company attendees use Quaker's negotiated corporate airfares. "That is an area of opportunity," Dierckman said.

However, Quaker Oats was acquired by Purchase, N.Y.-based PepsiCo last month for about $13.9 billion. The move has not yet directly affected Quaker's meetings department, and it is too early to determine any future effects.