The adoption of a meetings management technology tool has helped Santa Clara, Calif.-based Extreme Networks Inc. save 15 percent of its meetings spend during the past three years through reduced outsourcing costs, improved data consolidation and increased senior management involvement in expense monitoring, according to the company's travel manager. Since adopting the tool, all meetings at the company have stayed under budget, she said.
Nancy Garner, global travel procurement manager for the high-tech switch manufacturer, said the company adopted the DirectMeetings tool from Sabre's GetThere with the intent to save time, not money, but cost savings quickly surpassed expectations.
"We started off thinking this would be an easier method than what we were doing in the past, and through that, we have really been able to reduce costs," she said. "It really helped us with organizing our meetings—to keep control of the costs, to know how much things were costing us and know where we were at any one moment."
In gaining that clarity into the company's meetings management, Garner said she saw a need for a formal policy, which states that all meetings must be booked through the tool and Garner reviews every contract.
"I never did a mandate because every time you say that, employees feel they're being forced to do something, and they hate that word," she said. "We brought in trainers and our admins went through the training program with them."
The company now knows what it spends on meetings "down to a penny," Garner said, but declined to specify the amount. The company holds 25 to 30 meetings per year, most with fewer than 300 attendees, and two larger events, she said. Extreme Networks had a 2004 U.S. booked air volume of $3 million.
Savings have continued to increase, as the company is able to reduce the responsibilities outsourced to third-party planners, she said. Garner complies data such as attendee lists, registration and air booking from the tool—activities previously outsourced.
"Now, I don't pay any of that at all," she said. "At one time, doing the manifest list cost $50 per person. If you multiply that by 300, you can see the savings."
Concern about which employees were planning meetings and how much time outside planners needed were the reasons Garner said she adopted the tool.
"I decided to do it when I realized so many of our admins were making meetings on the side, and that even our big meeting planners needed help with organization and keeping our costs down," she said.
Garner said the support of senior management, who can now clearly see the cost of delays and inefficiency, has also helped to avoid potential attrition fees.
"When senior management can see that out of 500 people you invited, you're still down to 200 or less and you're within the 60-day mark, they know that this is going to cost them money if they don't do something," she said. "I can't even calculate the money it has saved in that area."
All company meetings have been under budget since adopting the tool, she said, and the risk of attrition and cancellation penalties has been lessened.
"We were able to fine-tune everything and know exactly what the cost is," Garner said. "The year before we started this, we'd lost a lot of concessions because we didn't have a handle on who was coming and who wasn't. It cost us quite a bit of money."
Employee profiles on the transient system—Extreme Networks uses Sabre's Travelocity Business for its transient travel management—are integrated with the DirectMeetings tool to allow air booking at the point of online meeting registration. DirectMeetings' support staff automatically is notified if a vendor does not answer a request for proposal issued through the tool within 24 hours, and will call the vendor to check if the request was received.
Recent enhancements to DirectMeetings (see story, p. 28) also have helped, Garner said. GetThere stopped offering DirectMeetings as a separate product in 2004
(Meetings Today, Aug. 2, 2004) and merged its functionality into a standard feature of the DirectCorporate online booking tool. Since then, the company has been working to integrate the transient and meetings databases. Garner said the integration has worked to her benefit by saving time and by tracking meetings and transient bookings in one system for better leveraging opportunities.
The tool's new change reports provide a visible record of updates and additions to attendee lists, she said.
"That's a very important piece, because when you're working with meeting planners, you don't always want to keep sending over the same list and highlighting the changes. Now, you can send over just the changes," she said.
The enhancement to DirectMeetings also allow an administrator to register on behalf of an attendee, something Garner said she needs when an attendee replies to an invitation through phone or e-mail.
Technology has helped to uncover a lot of hidden meeting expense, Garner said.
"Meeting planning is one of those things that has always been in the closet. Nobody understood it or where the costs were coming from. Nobody wanted to let you know what they were doing, either," she said. "Now, you can pull the whole thing in together and it's more visual and easy to show your upper management what you've done."
Employees have expressed strong satisfaction with the tool, she added. Meeting expenditures are tracked through corporate cards.
"We see everything," she said, "and there's a check-and-balance system."