Companies that comply with
federal and regulatory expenditure-reporting practices, whether they need to or
not, realize more strategic meetings management cost savings than companies
that don't, according to a study conducted by research firm The Aberdeen Group
for meetings technology firm The Active Network.
The study included data self-reported
in mid-2013 by "global supply management and procurement business leaders"
from 100 companies, some of which comply with federal Sarbanes-Oxley reporting
requirements and/or the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, the provisions of the
U.S. Affordable Care Act that this month began to require pharmaceutical
corporations to track marketing expenses to physicians, and will require them
to report such expenses to be displayed in a publicly accessible national
database.
According to the study, those
companies are more likely than other firms to report on meetings spending,
involve executives in SMM planning, deploy "best-in-class" analytical
and reporting capabilities and develop "end-to-end" SMM programs,
resulting in "significantly higher cost savings on strategic meetings and
events" than companies that do not comply generate.
In fact, Aberdeen determined
that "federally or regulatory compliant companies report 167 percent
higher realized and implemented cost savings resulting from strategic meetings
and events spend than noncompliant companies. Clearly, while federal
regulations may add layers of bureaucracy and paperwork to operations,
organizations that adhere to such regulations are much more likely to reap
handsome benefits than those that do not."
JR Sherman, Active senior
vice president and general manager of its business solutions division, told BTN the study "validates the theory
of strategic meetings management."
"Companies
are seeing huge returns from a return-on-investment standpoint on cost savings,
better efficiencies in their meetings and events, better experiences, less risk
and better compliance," he said. "For us it validates a lot of the
things we could only sell, years back, in theory."
Twenty-two percent of respondents
indicated their companies currently align with regulatory reporting practices, and
another 42 percent reported an intention to do so in 2013. The remaining 36
percent, however, indicated their companies do not intend to do so, a statistic
Aberdeen in the study described as "troubling."
"If you don't begin
thinking about putting a standardized process in place, tracking and managing
that process, creating benchmarks and then measuring it, you can't go backwards
in time," Sherman said. "This is about building a standard set of
processes for tracking and managing the spend associated with events."