<B>2001 Best practitioners</B>
<I>In its 2001 Best Practitioners issue, Meetings Today for the first time recognizes the achievements of the meeting industry's top corporate buyers.
Candidates, who were nominated by buyers, suppliers and consultants, were judged on the innovation, effectiveness and cost-saving potential of their practices during the previous 12 months. Top honors this year were given to buyers with proficiencies in developing a globally consolidated meeting program, merging meeting and travel departments and developing an innovative meeting payment system. Meetings Today thanks those who assisted in the nomination process.
~Chris Davis </I>
<B><A NAME="2">PwC</B>
After fully merging meeting and travel operations at one of the largest firms in the country a year ago, which resulted in millions of dollars of savings from cost avoidance and better leverage in negotiations, PricewaterhouseCoopers' Gilda Caputo and Mark Williams will implement new mandates ensuring even higher compliance with the new program.
Caputo and Williams, who both bear the title of director of travel and meeting management, have directed more than 80 percent of all meetings, including 100 percent of training meetings, through the combined department, which was formed one year ago.
Florham Park, N.J.-based PwC, ranked second in BTN's 2000 Corporate Travel 100 issue (BTN, Aug. 28, 2000), this year spent roughly between $100 million and $110 million on meetings alone, with a little less than half of that dedicated to group air travel. Given the level of compliance, the combined department allows for better direction of controllable meeting and transient volumes to meet commitments with preferred vendors and increased clout at the negotiating table, as well as the avoidance of hotel cancellation and attrition fees. The company also has negotiated zone fare packages with major airlines that include lower fares than the carriers' public zone programs, with both meetings and transient volumes included in some air contracts. This is the result of the complete merger of meetings and travel--a significant maneuver for such a large and disparate firm, particularly given the speed and effectiveness with which it occurred.
PwC now will not approve any proposed meeting that does not include a proposed budget approved by the meeting sponsors' superiors. The new mandate should increase the level of non-training meetings directly handled by the meetings and travel department higher than the current 50 percent to 60 percent.
"We've seen that most proposed meetings have approved budgets, but we want our line of service leaders to look closely," said Caputo, who reports to Williams. "It's a smarter procedure that will lead them to discuss the strategy of the agenda and curriculum and be able to show a solid business case for approval. That lets us give quicker responses."
Given the current economic climate, Williams expects little negative feedback. "There's a higher awareness of short-term finances and some other budgets have been locked, and there's not been a peep about it," he said.
The seeds of PwC's new meetings and travel program were planted shortly after the July 1998 merger of Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand. Both companies had modified, downscaled consolidated meetings programs, though the two corporations structured the programs differently. Coopers & Lybrand only consolidated meetings in its training department, while Price Waterhouse's initiative included consolidating events from several, but not all, departments.
After the merger, consultants were hired to explore meetings program potential and efficiencies, resulting in a two-year effort to develop separate groups that respectively plan events, source sites and negotiate contracts and benchmark contract and spending data.
Once the consolidation program was up and running last year, Caputo and Williams met to consider the possibilities of closely aligned meetings and travel departments. Better negotiations was a major point, but so was the cost avoidance incurred by shifting hotel volume to meet transient commitments or evade meeting cancellation fees.
PwC's meeting sponsors are mandated to contact the meetings management department with, at minimum, basic meeting information, which the department's sourcers use to analyze destinations and properties. Beginning this month, this initial contact needs to include approved budgetary information.
Caputo and Williams pointed to the support of senior management, including American infrastructure leader Kathy Murray, to whom Williams reports and whose department oversees many internal services, including HR, technology and procurement, as key to both the successful consolidation and the implementation of the new mandate.
"We're getting greater policy enforcement from senior management, which is a prerequisite to winning," Williams said. "This helps us to better control what's happening and understand how many meetings are still untouched by the department--and now that number is getting smaller."
Often, Caputo said, noncompliance issues are simply the result of new employees or inexperienced meeting sponsors unaware of the proper procedures, which is incumbent on the department to correct. The firm does so by alerting meetings sponsors booking events on their own of the cost-saving services the department can provide. The company is aided by its preferred hotel chains, whose reps alert PwC of stray meetings.
While PwC has a database of benchmarked projected costs for many destinations and properties, which are updated by hand after each meeting, Caputo and Williams hope to expand its scope.
"We're working on creating internal metrics, building information about the travel and meeting side in one spot so we can automatically determine where we stand with all contracts," Caputo said.
Accessing this information, which PwC currently handles in a Lotus Notes database through reports from corporate card supplier American Express, can be hampered by hoteliers delaying post-event reports. "It's nothing we're going to have ready tomorrow," Williams said. "But new technology could affect the entire program."
<B><A NAME="3">Accenture</B>
One year after its implementation, Accenture's innovative program, designed with Diners Club North America to automatically assign specific meeting transaction costs to different cost centers within the company, has been so successful that Accenture hopes to expand it to nearly all the events planned companywide.
Accenture global director of meeting and event support Tom Keville, who rolled out the Electronic Event Account System last July, said the company also has been extremely successful in persuading hotels and other venues that do not normally accept Diners Club to do so.
"This has been exactly what we asked for and exactly what Diners indicated it would be," Keville said. "Compliance has been very high. Our major concern was that Diners is not as widely accepted as other cards, but it's accepted in more places than you think. Plus, even if someplace doesn't accept Diners, more than 95 percent of the time they've been persuaded to for us."
Keville last year approached Diners Club, the preferred corporate payment system for domestic travel bookings for Chicago-based Accenture, then named Andersen Consulting, to help develop a solution for a sprawling meeting reimbursement system. Under that program, Andersen's 70 U.S.-based planners would forward meeting bills--whether it was direct-billed or charged with a Diners Club or American Express card--to a central service center in Chicago, which would pay each individual invoice separately and seek reimbursement from the meeting host for each event. The process led to scores of invoices issued and collected throughout the company, sometimes for one meeting.
The complex process of developing the system that eventually would allow individual meeting transaction costs to be assigned to specific budgets was complex, involving Diners Club and Andersen's meeting, travel, technology and accounts payable departments.
In addition to immediate savings through processing efficiencies, EEAS leads to a higher level of data consolidation and the ability to further break down charges, allowing the company stronger leverage when it enters its negotiating season in the late summer and autumn. Few companies spend more on meetings and travel than Accenture, which ranked fourth in BTN's 2000 Corporate Travel 100 issue (BTN, Aug. 28, 2000).
EEAS was implemented for more than 2,000 meetings nationwide, but that does not comprise the entire scope of Accenture's meetings program. Two areas--training and large, client-based sales events--were excluded from the initial launch because "both our large, client-facing meetings under the marketing and communications banner and our professional enablement sessions are such different businesses that I didn't want to assume this would work simply because I thought it would," said Keville, who is based in Wellesley, Mass.
But Keville's department soon will propose that departments handling training and large, client meetings implement EEAS procedures, which would increase the level of compliance already realized by Accenture's planners, despite the lack of a hard mandate to book via Diners Club or to use planners' services. "We capture the vast majority of meetings this way, but there is some leakage," Keville said. "We go after that very diplomatically, and we capture that the next time. We also have a very good relationship with national hotel chains, and they will tell us if there is a large piece of spending without a planner as primary contact. There's no pushback."
Very rarely, though, is lack of compliance due to properties declining to accept credit cards in general or Diners Club in particular. Given its heft and the potential for repeat business, most hotels are eager to host Accenture meetings and can be convinced to accept Diners Club, often on a permanent basis, Keville said.
"It's actually not been much of an issue at all," Keville said. "If a property does not take Diners, our planners will contact our card administrator, who will contact a member of the Diners salesforce, who tries to convince the property to take the card. They do so more than 95 percent of the time, often in just a few days. I was skeptical of this in the beginning, but there's been almost no establishment where we've hit a wall."
The level of compliance particularly has been impressive given that Keville's department introduced two other in-house technological tools at about the same time as EEAS. The first, an offsite event management piece that is not yet Web-enabled, offers Accenture planners another tool with which to consolidate and compartmentalize data by planner, office, property or hotel chain. The second is a Lotus Notes-hosted discussion board, allowing planners the ability to not only ask questions of their colleagues, but post cancellation dates and share resources and best practices.
"We will be able to take data from the EEAS and overlap it with the homegrown tools to fully access all meetings data online," Keville said. "We're not quite there yet, but it's only a few months away."
Keville's department feels no need to develop a similar solution for group and meeting air bookings. "We have an online tool for transient bookings, and our discounts for transient travel are almost always better than the carriers' zone fares," he said.
<B><A NAME="4">BMS</B>
Global meetings consolidation widely is recognized as one of the most complex and difficult concepts in meetings management. Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. director of meetings Lynne Ridzon has taken the leap by centralizing all European meeting operations, eventually encompassing offices in almost two dozen countries, into a single operations center. The move should slash meeting expenses by no less than 13 percent, Ridzon said.
Like many pharmaceutical companies, New York-based Bristol-Myers Squibb has long since consolidated domestic meetings, in this case for a full decade, which has led to a decrease in expenditures by 20 percent. The domestic successes led Ridzon to introduce BMS' best practices overseas.
After two years of analysis of European meeting operations, some of which were centralized through a meetings department, some of which were more haphazard, Ridzon's team created a European global meetings management group based in Paris and mandated that all meetings be registered through that central operation. France, the United Kingdom and Germany will begin mandated registration as soon as BMS completes internal construction of appropriate Web-based technology, expected early in the fourth quarter. "We will track spending, issue budgets and capture actual spending," Ridzon said. "We've taken our time. This is a formal embrace of the consolidation effort and mandate."
The Paris operation center is staffed with multilingual European meeting professionals who will negotiate contracts and monitor all spending. The 13 percent increase in savings, Ridzon said, primarily will be realized through cost avoidance and better-negotiated contracts, as well as maximizing and leveraging hotel space for multiple meetings. BMS, though, will sign no volume-based meeting contracts with hotels or designate preferred venues. "We negotiate every meeting individually. I don't believe there's a good way to homogenize the process by just using 10 hotels or one chain. Each meeting has too many needs. It doesn't work," Ridzon said.
The company, however, does employ preferred third-party meeting management firms and agencies to handle all logistical planning. Prior to this move, many employees relied on these firms to negotiate contracts as well, a practice Ridzon has ended. But even with a decade of meetings consolidation experience, Ridzon said bringing all European meeting operations under the same roof was a challenging and intricate process.
"It's easier being an American company, with English as the primary language, where people are familiar with corporate edicts and rules and regulations," Ridzon said. "It's easier to manage the process, though it's not easy under any circumstances. There are issues of compliance. There are issues about communicating why you want to do this. There are different cultures, languages, mindsets--it takes tremendous effort to put it into a context so that someone in Spain or France or Italy can see and understand. Ultimately, they embrace it, but there's tremendous effort to get everybody on the same page. You can speak in English about meeting processes, and though it's very similar to their experience, you don't know if everybody is processing the information differently in the transaction."
To combat this, Ridzon's team spent years analyzing the differences and similarities in Europe's meeting management processes. The company first determined exactly how meetings were staged, from proposal to event, and were pleasantly surprised that some offices employed dedicated meeting planners. Others relied on administrative assistants and other employees to handle negotiations and logistics.
Ridzon pulled the existing European meeting professionals into a group that, while still maintaining responsibility for the meetings in their respective offices, was tied into BMS' domestic meeting management department. "We formalized our relationship and started having regular meetings," Ridzon said. "We looked at the whole process, and it's important to be sensitive to what's happening culturally in the respective countries to determine which practices will work and which we can all agree on. That's how we determined that a best practice would be the sourcing of venues through a centralized location in Europe with people who were European and spoke several languages. We had them initiate the registration process through the operations centers in each of the countries. We needed to get buy-in from everybody and that hasn't happened overnight."
For years, Ridzon has supplied BMS senior management with an annual business plan for meeting operations, and had the responsibility for developing and implementing cost saving initiatives each year. European meetings consolidation was born through this process, as senior management's approval was required to dedicate financial and technological resources to the project. Since Ridzon can demonstrate 20 percent savings domestically and about 95 percent compliance, selling the planned 13 percent savings in Europe--"a very conservative number, with no real downside"--was not a difficult task.
The same held true for convincing European managers, employees and planners alike to sacrifice local control of contracts and logistics, as the promise of savings "absolutely carried the day," Ridzon said. "Another part of consolidation that's very important is the communication," she added. "It's very important for the company to know on a global basis what it's doing with meetings, so as to not compete with each other for audiences, venues or times."
The Web-based tool, which the Paris operations center will use to register meetings and consolidate spending data, is effectively an extension of BMS' proprietary consolidation software, developed in-house, with modifications to handle European-specific needs and requirements. When the piece is ready, the mandate will begin.
Bristol-Myers Squibb also will analyze Latin American meeting management programs to seek cost-saving initiatives, Ridzon said, but full consolidation there is unlikely any time in the near future, as meeting operations currently are less structured.