Managing Meetings At Aetna Inc.: Mandate Centralizes Data On Events

Aetna Inc. this year slashed its meeting expenditures by more than $1.5 million by mandating that all meetings be managed through a central department and all contracts negotiated and signed by meeting managers. The new program substantially increased the number of events managed by the company's meetings department, to 200 since May from 38 in 2001.

The Hartford, Conn.-based company has tied its meetings operations closely to those of procurement, using a purchasing card to pay for meeting expenditures and maintaining close contact to speed reconciliation. The latter also benefits compliance with the mandate, said manager of strategic sourcing for meetings and travel management Deb Fouche, as noncompliant meeting sponsors find it difficult to get event invoices paid. Though there are no actual penalties for noncompliance, Aetna will document the impact of actions outside of policy, though in most cases noncompliance is simply a product of policy unawareness, Fouche said.

Aetna's meetings department cannot command site selection nor can it approve budgets, since meeting budgets are the domain of individual departments and therefore subject to internal departmental approval.

The company reached its decision to mandate after it studied how best to manage data and expenditures of its largely decentralized meeting operations. "We conducted a lot of benchmarking and research," Fouche said. "This way was the most cost-effective."

One key to the success of the program was Aetna's ability to wrest all contractual functions from nonprofessional planners. Fouche's department has alerted hotel chains that their properties cannot accept contracts with signatures other than those of the company's meeting planners. "They've been very helpful. They will call us when that happens," she said.

Aetna has worked with hotel chains in other areas as well, particularly regarding data consolidation. The company has been able to leverage that volume with particular properties to some degree, but mostly on a meeting-by-meeting basis: If Aetna has held a few meetings in a particular hotel, a subsequent event should yield better rates, Fouche said. "Our goal is flat rates and standardized contracts," she added, "but we can't guide site selection."

However, Aetna has been successful in negotiations with properties in and around the company's Hartford headquarters. Those properties handled about half of the company's meetings this year and a good deal of transient volume as well, offering Fouche the advantage of leverage.

"We can promise volume in this area," she said. "We can get flat meeting rates or meeting space fees waived."

The company, cognizant of the impact of the mandate, offers an intranet-based meeting request form and detailed service-level agreements that assure all requests would be responded to within 24 hours, as well as case studies of department-generated event savings. Requests for meeting services are assigned to one of Aetna's four centralized meeting planners or outsourced to a third party, depending on the given workload, Fouche said. The department does not charge back for its services. Though there was some pushback from certain meeting sponsors, she said, the department has been able to allay the concerns by demonstrating specific savings data and proving value through leverage in negotiations with hotels.

In a sense, the mandate may have worked a bit too well upon its introduction, leaving Fouche and the centralized planners swamped with meeting requests from the outset. The department worked with its procurement colleagues to develop technological solutions. Aetna, already a user of Westport, Conn.-based B-there's attendee management tools, decided to expand its relationship with B-there to include its OneForm data management and consolidation tools.

"When the mandate went out, meetings management was slammed with requests," said Aetna procurement business project manager Chris Wilkinson. "We were using B-there from an attendee registration perspective. We spent a lot of time looking at several vendors and ended up back with B-there."

Wilkinson added that Aetna sought a quicker method of managing the meeting process and storing its data than the previous system, which included several methods of communication and Microsoft desktop tools.

"We would receive a meeting request via e-mail, re-key the information into an Excel spreadsheet, create a request for proposal in Word, send it to a hotel through e-mail and receive responses in a variety of manners—e-mail, phone, fax," Wilkinson said. "We'd re-key the information again into a budget form, e-mail the spreadsheet to the internal customer and create a new spreadsheet after the winning bid was selected to track savings and actual versus budgeted expenditures."

The new system allows the meeting sponsor-submitted data and figures to be electronically populated into a standard RFP, Wilkinson said, responses to which also are standardized and able to be transferred into a budget form.

The company also benefits from B-there's alliance with American Express, Aetna's consolidated domestic agency and supplier of Corporate Travel Online, the Amex-branded GetThere tool that Aetna uses for online transient self-booking. Meeting attendees can book flights through CTO, Wilkinson said, and B-there will access reservations through Amex and pull those that match a given list of meeting attendees. This, Wilkinson said, allows Aetna to compile air expenditure data for a specific meeting and consolidate those numbers into overall group travel spending figures.

That strategy also shows the meetings department when attendees book flights, giving them the data needed to persuade travelers of the financial benefits of booking early.

The selection of B-there to provide such services was made after conducting extensive research into other meeting management technology providers, Wilkinson said, with the existing relationship with the tech company and its Amex relationship key factors. "Cost was an issue. Most of these providers are ASPs, and licensing that software and changing from B-there to another company would have cost Aetna information technology dollars," Wilkinson said. "We just wanted to make sure the model would work the way it was supposed to. It was a good option for us, because it was already there."