Managing Meetings At: Aventis--Mandates Policy, Urges Remote Alternatives

The North American operations of French pharmaceutical giant Aventis this year implemented a mandated meetings policy designed to gear meetings to a limited set of suppliers and improve overall program efficiency and service. The policy also encourages the use of remote conferencing as an alternative to offsite events.

Though Aventis hopes to reduce meeting costs by 10 percent, cost savings are neither the main rationale for implementing the new policy nor the basis by which its success will be judged, said Bridgewater, N.J.-based director of North American travel management Armand LeCompte. "Five percent wouldn't be a failure at all," he said.

Due to its decentralized operations, it is unclear precisely how much Aventis annually spends on meetings, LeCompte said, but reducing costs by 10 percent likely would result in $5 million to $10 million in cost savings, a figure that includes events staged by the company's medical education and commercial operations divisions.

The policy aims to restrict meetings supplier selection to a few airlines, hotel chains and individual properties with which LeCompte already has negotiated meeting contracts, he said.

"We've negotiated meeting packages with selected suppliers," LeCompte said. "We want to direct that business in an efficient manner. We did this not really to lower cost, but to get greater value. It doesn't mean, for example, that five-star hotels would not be utilized. If the value is there, we'd love to and we have done so. It's about value, and we mean that."

The policy affects meetings of 20 attendees, 20 room nights or with budgets north of $20,000. Aventis corporate policy prohibits dissemination of specific policy language. As such, LeCompte was unable to describe the tenets of the meetings policy, implemented in April, in specific detail. Yet, those details are mandated, a word normally not associated with meeting policies, as many corporate cultures shy away from the concept.

"We don't like the word 'mandate' either," LeCompte said, "but it's necessary because it gets attention focused on the issues. There are penalties for noncompliance, but not for the first violation. We want people to recognize that we're providing a valuable service, and we've been nipping at this thing with only moderate success. The idea is to take a strong hand."

The policy, LeCompte said, instructs meeting sponsors to consider videoconferencing, teleconferencing or Webconferencing as options before using external facilities. Aventis operates about 200 videoconferencing rooms throughout its corporate offices, and the policy stresses their use, as well as the use of other technologies, to avoid meeting and group travel.

LeCompte said Aventis decided to implement the new policy as its method of increased meetings management after he benchmarked the meetings program with a handful of other large corporations. Though the pharmaceutical industry, generally speaking, arguably sports the most extensive comparative level of meetings management, LeCompte, a former chairman of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, said that he looked at corporations from other industries as well.

"We benchmarked against three other companies," LeCompte said. "I've got a long history with ACTE, and from that I looked at those I recognized as best in class."

The six-month-long period of developing the policy, and garnering the support of senior management at Aventis required a deliberate and formal process that entails extensive research and justification for the move before the policy could be implemented. "We had a formal strategy and built a business case around a whole project," LeCompte said. "The project had a formal organizational structure, with sponsors at a very senior level, steering committees and working committees."

The business case entailed projecting existing spending and possible savings. "We surveyed the area as best we could to find out the kind of savings it would bring in," he said. "We conducted a thorough review of spending and made formal suggestions."

That review resulted in the goal of generating cost savings of 10 percent. LeCompte has found, though, that implementing initiatives not only can be politically trickier than for transient programs, but that cost reductions cannot be the overriding philosophy behind a meetings program while expecting the same level of success or productivity from the individual events themselves.

"We cannot put people in a box," he said. "Meetings are too important. They must achieve their objectives. You can save $100 million, but if the meetings don't achieve objectives, what's the point?"

Aventis has an extensive transient travel management program, which has operated as an ARC-accredited Corporate Travel Department since 2001 and saved millions on hotel, car and airline contracts following a travel agency consolidation that same year. However, LeCompte said converging meeting and transient volume for the purposes of negotiation, although a goal, was not the point of the new policy. "You must have your meeting calendar down pat," he said. "We're always trying to bundle, but we have not been very successful. Hotels use yield management techniques. It's their reason for being."