Best Meeting Practitioners 2007: KPMG's Muldoon Consolidates Internal Meetings Management Process

Last year, audit, tax and advisory services firm KPMG merged six event marketing departments, a sponsorship and multimedia division and the firm's meeting services department into a single meetings department with one meetings policy and one meetings technology tool.

The move was sparked by a companywide initiative that studied the potential realignment of different departments.

"The main objective firm leadership had was to bring various departments that were providing similar services together, so there would be a cohesiveness—one infrastructure department that addressed events and meetings," said Carol Muldoon, director of events and meeting services.

Not only did the organization of the department change, but also every job description was rewritten and a companywide policy was put into place.

Muldoon and her team worked with KPMG leadership to define the specific responsibilities of the division. The department distributed 106 team members among 15 different locations, based on the number and the size of meetings each office holds.

When the department was reconfigured, a companywide communication was sent through the company's intranet, describing the resources the new department could provide, with a glossary of industry terms and grids of possible room setups, which Muldoon said also has been a "great resource" for training junior meeting planners.

The department worked with meetings technology firm StarCite to configure a tool that would align with the company's new processes.

"As we were bringing all of KPMG's events and meetings under one umbrella, if we were going to achieve the efficiencies and a consistent process, we had to have one technology tool that would satisfy all those needs," KPMG's Muldoon said.

Previously, meetings technology had been used mainly for attendee-management issues, but Muldoon and her team looked to expand the scope of their tools.

"As our new department came out last year, we escalated plans to really roll out the full end-to-end system, starting from having an automated request," Muldoon said. The meetings request requires filling out several fields, the answers to which "triggers that request to the right team to handle it."

The department also built a budget module to allow KPMG's finance and accounting department, which audits and processes all of the invoices for the firm's meetings and events, a better picture of spend.

"We've given them access to the MeetingView tool, so once the budget is closed by the planners, the finance and accounting folks can go in and, as they're auditing the related invoices, can populate the budget module with actual spend, which allows us to track our budget's actual variants," she said.

The finance and accounting department, although separate from Muldoon's department, created a subteam within their department specifically to deal with events and meetings.

"Giving them access to our meeting tool really helps us bring a completion to the end-to-end process," she said.

Including actual spend in the meetings tool also has helped the department better analyze and leverage spend with suppliers.

"The next step is being able to take that spend and leverage it in our negotiations with vendors," Muldoon said. "Our goals are to identify where we can streamline the number of vendors to really fully leverage our spend for a more favorable rate."

Simplifying the process already is underway for KPMG's smaller meetings.

For meetings with less than $5,000 in total spend, Muldoon and her team looked at hotels in 30 cities with the highest amount of company travel volume. They sent out requests for proposals in March 2007 to hotels in those cities, and selected between one and three in each to receive contracts with prenegotiated room rates and three different meeting packages.

"While we're not dedicating sources, we're still having risk managed," she said.

Suppliers have had a hand in making sure that meetings go through Muldoon's department. If hotels get a request that has not gone through the department, they are asked to call events and meeting services.

"We really do have a great rapport with the hotels in that way," Muldoon said, adding that she is looking into combining transient and group hotel spend to further increase leverage with suppliers.

Events and meeting services took a "train the trainer" approach to teaching team members about the new processes and technology. One person in the department wrote the training content, and 12 people were trained on the material. The 12 then went out and trained the rest of the department in small groups of eight to 10. "That was very effective because it ensured the same messaging," Muldoon said.

The initial 12 also act as resident experts, Muldoon said, so that if employees need assistance, they can talk to a local person.