Managing Meetings At: Hewlett-Packard--HP Plans $23M Savings Through Tech Rollout

Decentralized Hewlett-Packard Co. saved nearly $2 million in the first half of 2005 through an ongoing pilot program of a comprehensive meetings technology system that includes a new payment process, sourcing procedures and online booking and attendee registration tools. The company's meetings and hotel program manager said program standardization has been the key to generating cost savings in HP's silo environment.

Deborah Matarazzo, manager of global strategy for HP's meetings and hotel program, said the "SmartMeetings" tool provides a central repository for the company's meeting spend and is comprised of four pieces of technology: OneForm, RegWeb and RFP Marketplace, each provided by StarCite Inc., and Outtask's Cliqbook online booking tool. Although Matarazzo said HP still is in the process of identifying its total meetings spend, it is estimated in the "hundreds of millions of dollars." A previous estimate was $170 million, she said.

"We've usually used a percentage of our T&E spend and came up with about $170," said Lea McLeod, director of travel and meeting services for HP. "The problem with using the old percentage of travel spend as a guideline is that a lot of those savings come from outside travel in the event and marketing realm—under registration, fees to third parties, meeting companies, commissions and rearranging contract terms."

Matarazzo said she expects to know the total meetings spend by the end of this year.

"We needed something to help us pull all of the information into one central repository, and that's when we went out and went looking for a meetings management solution to help us to do that," Matarazzo said. "We realized that standardization would be the only way to pull the information in a decentralized environment."

HP has not consolidated its meeting planning and any employee can plan and hold a meeting. The SmartMeetings tool guides those employees through an approved sourcing and payment process, she said. HP has had a meeting service bureau since 2003, Matarazzo said, that helped employees with group air booking and hotel sourcing and tracked spend through spreadsheets.

The meetings management team has set a savings goal of $23 million over the next three years, Matarazzo said. "We truly believe that's an extremely conservative number," she said. The team saved $1 million in just six weeks after the pilot was launched and savings should cover the cost of the new system by the end of the first year, she said.

McLeod said HP previously attempted to consolidate the company's meetings spend, but the SmartMeetings tool has yielded greater success because of its procurement-based approach.

"One of the value propositions that the indirect procurement organization brings to the company and to our shareholders is that we have the ability to see horizontally across all of the vertical business units within HP. What really instigated the whole meetings concept is we were taking a look at the business in a way that none of the verticals really were," McLeod said. "We're looking across all of the business units and functions and we see some synergy, we see some opportunity that if we standardize processes and centralize procurement, we have an opportunity to really take some costs and a lot of work out of the system."

Although StarCite is the engine of SmartMeetings, McLeod said the process is focused on the concept of business transformation.

"We're changing the way from end to end that we do the planning, the sourcing, the acquisition and the payment for meetings services," she said.

Matarazzo said the online attendee registration tool has generated the most savings for HP, and the group air booking tool and hotel sourcing process also have yielded results. A new meeting-card based payment system with American Express also has been implemented and has helped drive compliance, she said.

"That has been a real carrot for people because we simplified the form of payment process," she said. "The card follows them through the process and a meeting ID number is embedded in the card, so a planner with multiple events can keep track of spend per meeting."

The actual spending then is imported automatically back into the planner's budget, Matarazzo said, making reconciliation easier.

As happens in many companies, Matarazzo and her team met some resistance from prospective users of the SmartMeetings tool.

"With events and marketing, meeting planning is the fun part of a lot of people's jobs and they get protective," she said, "but we weren't taking that part of the job away. We just made it easier."

McLeod said the meetings management department spent time learning about the marketing organization within HP and how it plans meetings.

"When you get into really hardcore marketing, a lot of it is customer-facing," she said. "It's extremely visible, and some of it is very high-risk with high-end customers. There's a reluctance to just assume that the next greatest thing is going to work for them, because what they're doing is so obviously successful."

Through months of cooperation and research, McLeod said the new sourcing process has made marketing events easier.

"Now that they know we understand their business and we're trying to ensure they deliver their value proposition appropriately, what we're able to do is take a look at functionality," she said. "How do we make this simpler, faster, less expensive and still get the same result?"

Once the meetings management team was able to show the amount of savings it could achieve, HP senior management offered full support, Matarazzo said. HP's travel department also has an internal governance team with representatives from various corporate departments that Matarazzo said she used as a sounding board for meetings management proposals.

"We actually have a demand created now where people are calling Deb and the people on her team and saying, 'How do I sign up?' " McLeod said. "If you can do more with less, then we really bring a strong value to the party."

The process eventually will be piloted and implemented on a global scale, Matarazzo said, with the next pilot probably to launch in Europe, Middle East and Africa, followed by Asia/Pacific.