Bechtel Designs Meeting Prog.
<B> Bechtel Designs Meeting Prog.</B>
By Lauren Bielski
As the planning team at Bechtel Corp. finishes up the last-minute details of a global team-building conference set for May 27, a unique partnership between one Bechtel company and a small meeting planning firm is keeping yet another special event on track--and moving the decentralized engineering giant one step closer to a more consolidated meeting management approach.
The team-building conference, to be held at the Landsdowne Conference Center in Virginia, is the product of a quality-savvy meeting manager and an entirely outsourced logistical department. "We find that using a single third-party planner consistently is a more efficient way of working," said Bob Palmer, senior manager of Bechtel Power and Industrial. "I know that when this conference is over, we'll have hosted the best event for the budget we established, not in small part because my meeting vendor understands the corporate culture and knows what I want to deliver. When we used destination management companies or event planners on a per-event basis, we had to make decisions in short time frames based on a limited sense of chemistry. And there was always a learning curve. This company is a negotiations specialist, and they know how to get value for dollar and get the job done right."
Palmer's partner, ASE Group of Overland Park, Kan., started out as just one of many event planners on Bechtel's temporary payroll, working on a client dinner in 1990. In the ensuing years, the partnership has yielded such stellar special events as a jeep rally that last year hurtled more than 40 Bechtel client CEOs through the desert in a tour that was part history lesson and part water-gun fight.
Today, Palmer, his internal staff of two and ASE Group's 19 employees are just about as similarly-minded as employees of any two companies can be. ASE Group is entrusted with implementing about 10 events a year for the 100 year-old company, with budgets totalling more than $1 million, not including travel expenses. ASE Group gets paid on a floating percentage of each meeting's food and beverage expenses, plus commissions on room block, to reach a 20 percent industry standard.
And its responsibilities at Bechtel are increasing. Though it has not yet achieved preferred vendor status for the entire collection of Bechtel companies--which includes Bechtel Offshore, Bechtel Technology Consulting and Bechtel Pipeline--ASE Group's efforts in Landsdowne next month will put its talents on display to senior management from all divisions.
Meanwhile, Bechtel's travel agency, American Express, has been in discussion with ASE Group to start up a travel and conference help desk, although the details have yet to be ironed out and no time frame for implementation has been announced.
For Bechtel, consolidating more of its meeting planning with ASE Group represents one more step in a gradual movement toward outsourcing to a more limited number of suppliers to create the most creative, cost-effective solutions. The engineers at Bechtel Power may be used to thinking without a box to design a hydroelectric dam or rapid transit system, but when it came to internal management of event planning, senior management in the past played by a book that said only local vendors understand local markets. Hence local vendors were used on a per-event basis.
"It wasn't in our corporate culture to use many outsiders, or if an event required outsourcing, to work with preferred vendors," Palmer said. "ASE Group was the smallest, least experienced company that applied for event work affiliated with the Edison Electric Institute Annual Convention in 1990. But they were the company that actually listened to us and answered the questions we asked, instead of telling us what they were good at doing--and that focus got them the contract that year," and in ensuing years as well.
But it is Palmer, who has been in the business for about 10 years, who ultimately retains responsibility for managing meetings "the Bechtel way," and in seeing that each delivers on his department's promise of the best return on the company's investment. To that end, he himself walks through every program in on-site inspections that other planners might simply confirm over the phone. He also has no compunction about asking for service extras.
As he interprets it, the Bechtel way typically involves the use of conference centers, because they are distraction-free and specialize in such amenities as 24-hour e-mail and fax-capable temporary business centers. The Bechtel way also requires hosting facilities to go the extra mile with service, particularly on the pre-conference side, addressing multiple queries and fine-tuning everything, he said.