Managing Meetings At: American Mgmt. Systems--Co. Debuts Mtg. Packages

American Management Systems Inc. late last year developed meetings packages and began offering internal meeting sponsors a checklist of available hotel and service options for events held in and near the company's Fairfax, Va., headquarters. Since much of AMS' meetings volume is local, said senior principal of corporate travel management Karen VanBuskirk, demand for the packages is high. The programs have been used weekly, on average, since their debut, she said.

The programs are designed to provide sponsors with a speedier and easier-to-use alternative to finding and negotiating with hotels and other entertainment and dining suppliers on their own, subsequently allowing AMS' meetings department to gather meetings data and handle all contracts.

"Our planners have been in the business a long time and have lots of experience," VanBuskirk said. "Developing some standard programs, like a two-day event in Fairfax that includes dinner and transportation, for example, helps with high demand and also cuts down on planning time."

VanBuskirk's department assists in locating and negotiating meeting sites, but does not have the authority to compel internal sponsors' final site selection decisions. Though AMS' unofficial procedures push sponsors to register their meetings with the corporate meetings department, there are no official policy statements or mandates to push that behavior.

At AMS, as at many companies without official meetings policies, initiatives designed to gain more control of meetings expenditures must be designed so sponsors—executive assistants and sales managers—see them as beneficial, saving time or costs.

The standard packages are an example of this, as sponsors still have the ability to choose the services they want, VanBuskirk said, but save the time required to find and negotiate their services.

AMS has not implemented pre-negotiated contracts for those services, she noted. "It's not a contract," VanBuskirk said. "If you use a meeting planning company, it would give you a list of proposals. If you need teambuilding exercises, a speaker for the program, an evening offsite event, we can show a list of these options to the sponsor."

The packages additionally can lower costs by allowing VanBuskirk's department to promote the use of the company's internal meeting space for some conferences. The packages also enable the department to at least identify, and gather data from, a higher number of company meetings.

"Our next challenge is to find everyone who can take advantage of this," VanBuskirk said. "If so, we can identify little meetings that we did not know about. People do their own things, and we try to get a handle on it from a general ledger standpoint."

To that end, AMS last year formed a travel advisory group of executives and administrative assistants from the company's largest business units to meet on a monthly basis. The goal, among others, is to at least make this group of meeting sponsors aware of the potentially time- and cost-saving options available to them from the company's planners. "If there's a 15-person meeting in Seattle, we may not know about it, but we want to, and that's the next step," VanBuskirk said.

Transient travel management also falls under the auspices of VanBuskirk's department, and she has found some benefits to aligning the needs of transient travelers and meeting attendees. "We have been successful in marrying that relationship. If appropriate, we'll guide the choice of a meeting to our preferred hotels," she said. "We will try to do it more, but it can be nebulous if it's outside of our headquarters."

Though many third parties and consultants believe meetings expenditures is one of the largest uncontrolled expenses in many corporations, that is not the case at AMS, which is a business and information technology consulting company. Given the nature of the business, some employees must travel and stay at their clients' locations for months at a time, making corporate housing a significant expense for the company and, according to a 2003 internal audit, far higher than meeting expenses.

"Meetings has been tiny compared with corporate housing," VanBuskirk said. Consequently, corporate housing management is currently AMS' priority, and any large-scale program designed to gain added control of corporate meetings is of secondary importance, given the disparity of expenditures between the two.

Yet, while there are not tremendous synergies between meetings management and corporate housing management, many of the concepts that drive both are similar, and AMS is acting accordingly. "All of it goes to risk management," VanBuskirk said. "We've hired legal counsel to see where there is exposure at AMS, and it's in signing lease agreements and contracts. We need to have contracts reviewed and implement strategic sourcing."

Some changes in AMS' meeting and corporate housing volume will occur in May, as AMS earlier this month sold its Defense and Intelligence Group to Arlington, Va.-based defense contractor CACI International Inc. The transaction is expected to close in May, pending regulatory and government approval.