Managing Meetings At: American Honda Motor Co.--Manual Revs Up Focus At Decentralized Corp.

Notwithstanding a corporate culture that places a premium upon the independence and entrepreneurial focus of its 21 subsidiaries, American Honda Motor Co. has taken the first steps toward a more comprehensive meetings management program, likely to begin this spring, by stressing the importance of careful and effective meeting planning to employees through a planning manual and a new continuing education course.

Torrance, Calif.-based American Honda, a subsidiary of Japanese automotive giant Honda Motor Co. Ltd., soon will develop more central management of the company's meetings operations, including instituting contract signing authority, in an effort to reduce an annual meeting spend that approaches $30 million, the majority of which is dedicated to large dealer meetings, said manager of corporate services Charles Franklin.

Yet, given Honda's decentralized structure and abhorrence of mandates, creating a meetings management program that centralizes all authority would have little chance of success. "This company has consensus decision making and an entrepreneurial concept," Franklin said. "The 21 Honda companies are allowed to make the decisions they need to make. We have to sell the importance of this to the other companies."

As such, Franklin's department deliberately has broached the issue with employees through the planning manual, which stresses financially sound management while essentially preparing employees for the next steps. "I know how much money we have out there," Franklin said. "The purpose of the manual is to get a gradual, step-by-step acceptance of what is to come."

The manual was created after an internal 2002 survey identified the employees who planned meetings, as well as the number, size and frequency of the events they planned, and was distributed that August to anyone who served in that capacity. The extensive manual addressed every facet of the meeting planning process, from preplanning and building a budget to reconciliation of expenditures.

For site selection, for example, Franklin wanted "to take away any gut feelings they have so that they can evaluate exactly what a property actually has to offer."

The manual also gives detailed instructions on how to construct and transmit a request for proposal, how to negotiate a contract with an emphasis on attrition and cancellation clauses, as well as potential areas of cost-effective negotiation with hotels and airlines. There are also sections of food and beverage management, meeting room design and utility, audiovisual services and guidelines for onsite management.

The manual was well received, Franklin said. "We received good feedback that it was a great help," he said. "We did not measure any savings return from it, but we did measure satisfaction through surveys." The manual was popular enough for the company's corporate training department to adapt it into an upcoming continuing education program, he said.

All of those moves, though, were designed to take American Honda's meetings management processes to the next level. Though the effort has been on the back burner while Franklin's department completes a rollout of TRX's ResX online self-booking technology, to be completed this month, it will be renewed this spring.

Franklin said the first initiative implemented will be to restrict fulfillment of meeting expenditure requests submitted through the company's Ariba automated purchasing tool only to those planners whose meeting contracts have been reviewed by an appropriate manager.

"It's hard to police and I'm sure I will make some enemies the first six months," Franklin said, "but it is the first thing we will do. There will be no money for the meeting until the contract is reviewed."

Once implemented, Franklin's department will spend approximately six months gathering data from those meetings and analyzing hotel and airline usage patterns. Following that process, he said, moves will be made to better align site and airline selection with American Honda's preferred hotel and airline contracts.

Franklin said the department will present the new program to sales executives and planners as a way to better manage the details of a given event, freeing those employees to focus on other needs.

"We have a few organizations that are big and hold several huge events," Franklin said. "Nobody is really combing the details of those events. In a company as large as ours, some executives don't want to comb them because of time constraints. We'll do it for them."