Taking advantage of a lull in its meetings activity, midmarket manufacturing firm On Semiconductor Corp. within the past few months introduced a complete meetings policy that created a strict structure of meetings approval and mandated the use of meetings technology. The moves could save up to 10 percent of the costs of the firm's currently scant meetings expenditures.
The policy mandates the use of a standard American Express corporate card for all meetings payment and the signing of all contracts by the firm's supply management division. It also encourages the use of preferred transient hotels for all meeting sites, said strategic sourcing manager for travel and telecommunications Colleen Guhin.
A severe cutback in the number of On Semiconductor meetings left the program essentially dormant in 2003, prompting Guhin to create a meetings program from scratch, a feat she previously accomplished with the Phoenix-based company's transient travel management
(BTN, Nov. 10, 2003)."It was a good time to line up a structure for meetings, because we were in a complete dry spell," said Guhin, who was BTN's 1996 Travel Manager of the Year
(BTN, Aug. 19, 1996). "When meetings would eventually come back, we would have a process and control over it. I've learned that that's the best time to put in some controls."
The company's travel and meetings department consists only of Guhin. On Semiconductor has a decentralized meetings management process in which administrative assistants and other nonprofessional meeting planners handle most of corporate event and logistical planning. When Guhin took her first step toward finding meetings technology as the front end of what eventually would become the meetings program, she heavily relied on the admins' input.
A customer of GetThere's DirectCorporate online self-booking tool, Guhin explored what was then GetThere's separate meetings management offering, DirectMeetings, along with a handful of other technology tools. "It's a more complete tool, and it coordinated with DirectCorporate by automatically linking at registration to something they were already used to using," Guhin said. "The biggest customers are the admins. We showed them DirectMeetings, told them what we wanted them to do and asked them what they thought. They liked the idea of having some controls and thought it would make things easier."
Several administrative assistants joined a team dedicated to the deployment of DirectMeetings, Guhin said. "With the admins' buy-in, I knew it would work," she said. "They were very receptive."
GetThere since has discontinued the sale and marketing of DirectMeetings as a separate tool and fused its functionality into DirectCorporate
(Meetings Today, Aug. 2). "That only affects us from a contractual standpoint, and it's actually much more pleasant to do business," Guhin said. "How we pay for it certainly is better."
Guhin's next step was to formulate a full meetings policy, a process she started by soliciting the policies of other travel managers. "We did a lot of benchmarking and asked our peers if they would show us their meetings policies," she said. "We sent out 60 or 70 requests but got only four or five back. Some were 10 pages long and some were two sentences. Others wanted to see our policy once we were done with it."
Guhin sold On Semiconductor's senior management on the idea by estimating the potential savings on theoretical future meetings volume. Guhin estimated the savings from the formalization of the procurement of meeting space though a formal request for proposals process—instead of allowing meeting sponsors simply to choose a hotel without one—would decrease costs by 3 percent. Additionally, she said, compliance with policy, including following the budgetary approval process and directing meetings to preferred transient hotels, would save another 3 percent.
That projected savings would exceed the cost of using DirectMeetings, Guhin said, which convinced management to sign off on the plan. However, Guhin anticipates an additional 3 percent savings from such soft efficiencies as the time savings the technology would offer admins and planners, but, since no employee would be laid off as a result of the tech adoption, Guhin did not include this calculation in her savings estimates.
As recently as 2002, On Semiconductor spent about $900,000 on meetings, Guhin said, and a recovery of that volume has proceeded slowly, inextricably tied to the performance of the very slowly recovering semiconductor industry.
"We're holding some small meetings, but we're probably not going to see anything for the rest of this year," Guhin said. "We're hoping things turn around soon."