After five years of intensive consolidation and cost-saving efforts, Cisco Systems Inc. this year is set to shift its strategic meetings management processes to focus on return on investment and plans to outsource or decentralize back-end logistics for the smaller events that account for about 65 percent of ad hoc meetings at the company, according to its head of meeting services.
Michele Snock, manager of global meeting services for Cisco's Americas operations, said smaller, offsite meetings may be handled by a third-party meetings management service or sent back to administrative assistants for planning. Cisco holds 850 to 900 ad hoc meetings per year, Snock said, and 65 percent of those have 25 or fewer attendees. The global meeting services department will retain control over sourcing, she said. The shift is part of a new focus on ROI to be launched this year on Cisco's estimated $60 million in meeting spend.
"I thought cost consolidation was the ultimate goal, but now I'm learning that there's another step you can take—now you can show ROI," Snock said. "It's a whole other ballgame."
Part of that ROI is to use planners' services to their greatest value, Snock said, which does not always mean time-consuming logistical support for the arrangement of meeting services.
"We were doing logistics support for every single small and large meeting. We were insourcing instead of outsourcing, and that's where we thought we added a lot of value," Snock said. "We have since determined that perhaps that's not where we add the greatest value." Three meeting planners at Cisco work full-time on smaller meetings, she added.
Previously, the value of Cisco's meeting management policy was measured by cost savings—leveraging meetings volume and negotiating for lower rates—and cost avoidance through the evasion of outsourcing, Snock said.
The new challenge of measuring value through ROI is more difficult to define, she said. ROI on incentive sales meetings can be tracked by revenue statistics, for example, but the effectiveness of a meeting of finance managers to set objectives for the next fiscal year can be unclear, Snock said.
"How do I measure that the money we spent on that meeting really got what the managers needed? I assumed it was immeasurable," she said.
Post-event surveys are used to measure attendee satisfaction and to adjust agendas for the next year, but tracking hard data on value has been difficult, Snock said.
A project to create metrics to measure ROI has been set in motion, Snock said, as well as projects to expand Cisco's internal meeting planning Web site with a how-to guide for meeting planning, educational workshops and a comprehensive communication plan to inform Cisco employees which elements of meeting planning are back under their control, and which will be retained by the meeting services department.
Cisco's meeting service center concept is based on meetings management firm StarCite's RegWeb attendee management technology
(Meetings Today, Aug. 11, 2003), and has a "99 percent adoption rate in North America" for internal meetings, Snock said, without the use of a mandate.
Cisco's meeting services department works with the finance department to funnel stray check requests back through the approval process.
Snock stressed that her department will continue to handle all contract negotiations and site selection, but said ordering food and beverage, audiovisual or other services would be decentralized or outsourced for the smaller meetings.
"It's a self-service model we're creating with the resources in place, but with our controls and management up front in the sourcing," Snock said.
The three corporate meeting planners assigned to smaller meetings may work in more strategic roles of setting meeting management processes and providing oversight.
For outsourced meeting logistics, Snock said her planners would detail step-by-step processes of how events should take place and regularly review the work of third parties. Eventually, back-end logistics for Cisco's 1,200 yearly seminar programs may be decentralized as well, she said.
Cisco has saved millions through meetings consolidation in the past five years, including $4.5 million in 2001 with an insourcing drive and launch of an online meetings registration application
(Meetings Today, Nov. 12, 2001).The consolidation initiative actually was aimed to prevent the outsourcing of the meeting planning department itself, Snock said. Top Cisco executives in 2001 launched an enterprisewide effort focused on defining core business processes and outsourcing work that was not bringing value to the company.
"It was about increasing your shareholder value by focusing on your core competencies and outsourcing everything else," Snock said.
Saving money on meetings through consolidation was how meeting planners could show their value at Cisco, she said.
Compared to the consolidation drive, the new focus on return on investment and decentralized back-end logistics is easier but more time-consuming, Snock said. The goals are clear and the foundations have been put in place, but the process of achieving those objectives is more complex, she added.
"We were very fortunate to find out that we had impressed people enough that they did see value in what we did," Snock said. "They just wanted us to get even more strategic."