Managing Meetings At: Pitney Bowes Inc.--Card Is First Move For Small-Mtgs. Mgmt.

Pitney Bowes Inc. this year began using a meeting card to capture group travel expenses as the first step toward the possible creation of a program to better manage hundreds of small meetings.

The Stamford, Conn.-based mail and document management solutions provider likely spends more than $2 million annually on those meetings, said director of global travel management Connie Cirillo Freeman. Pitney Bowes' large-group incentive travel program is highly managed and centralized, and the company spends an additional $2 million to $3 million annually on those events.

Pitney Bowes in the spring began using American Express' Meeting Card to track meeting expenses throughout the corporation, Freeman said. "We want to see how much is being booked, where and at what types of properties," she said.

Unlike some companies, Pitney Bowes does not distribute meeting cards to the planners or administrative assistants charged with arranging the event. The company houses an internal online purchasing system into which purchase orders for future meeting services are submitted, once meeting requests are approved by senior management. While those orders then typically would be transmitted to hotels for electronic fulfillment of the request, instead certain meetings are removed from the system and charged on the meeting card.

Since the card allows corporations to separate meeting expenses from other travel bills and sort group expenditures by internal department, specific event or supplier, Freeman's department has the ability to aggregate spending data.

"It's a baby step," Freeman said. "It's a way of looking at all of the meeting activity in one place."

So far, Pitney Bowes has booked about 100 small meetings with the card, which Freeman estimated was less than 20 percent of those meetings. The money spent on those meetings "was probably a little more than we thought," Freeman said. "We knew it was a lot, so it proved what we thought, and it showed we can get a little bit closer."

Freeman said the card is viewed as another tool for managing spend, and while she said it has certain advantages in tracking small-meeting activity and is relatively easy and inexpensive to use at nonpreferred hotels, the company still is evaluating its value in the long term.

Pitney Bowes has a thoroughly and heavily managed transient travel program and group incentive program, the latter of which is housed in the company's main business unit and tightly and centrally controlled. Yet, small meetings are not managed to the same extent, a situation the company plans to address, but not before it felt it had a better handle on exactly what and how many meetings the company booked.

"We made an attempt for data collection," Freeman said. The company chose to use the card to do so, she said, because it would permit Pitney Bowes to easily gather that data, while still serving as a tool for quick supplier payment.

No decision has been reached as to the direction of Pitney Bowes' nascent meetings program. "That's our next step," Freeman said. "We will formulate a master plan."

Yet, Freeman, now armed with better overall travel and meeting spending data, does plan to leverage that spending with hotels. "The jury's still out, but we could have some leverage," she said. "We can go back to the individual properties and let them know that we want them to take into consideration not only out transient spending but meeting spending as well."

The use of the meeting card does not address other issues that Freeman will emphasize as part of whatever structure any further meetings management initiative will take. One major component will be centralizing contract authority with Freeman's department, which was addressed, but not mandated, in the new travel policy rolled out by Pitney Bowes this spring.

"The card doesn't address who signs what," Freeman said. "Our new travel policy does let people know what they should not be signing. It advises planners of meetings of the need to contact us at a point before they sign anything. We need to see it."

Many corporations have introduced or expanded the use of corporate meeting cards since American Express Corporate Services introduced the service in 2000. The number of corporations currently using it is "in the hundreds," said Amex corporate meeting card manager Marie Predestin. Although some corporations distribute cards directly to the employees planning meetings, she said, Pitney Bowes' use of the card to begin the development of a meetings management initiative is fairly typical.

"The card is deigned as a tool to get your arms around meetings," Predestin said. "Even if it's not part of a meetings consolidation program, companies often implement the card to get the scope of what their meeting spending is. Some give it to admins and professional planner, others will just focus on one area."

Typically, Amex's clients have developed specific policies governing the use of the meetings card, Predestin said. She added that a minority of meeting card clients fully had managed or consolidated their meetings programs before the card was introduced. Those clients often then use card data to leverage meetings and transient volume with hotels.