<B>Capturing The Data</B>
<I>Portals, Carlson Tool Up Consolidation</I>
By Chris Davis
Three new Web-enabled products allowing corporations to track, compile and classify meeting information companywide, all announced earlier this month, illustrate the increased interest in full meetings consolidation by corporate meeting managers.
The products, from meeting portals PlanSoft and Event-source.com, and the Carlson Marketing Group, the meetings management sister company to Carlson Wagonlit Travel, are unrelated to one another but offer much of the same functionality. They all allow corporations to track meetings data, including budgeted and actual expenses and negotiated savings, over private Web sites regardless of who plans the meeting.
Meeting, travel and procurement executives will have access to companywide meeting expenditure data, sorted by hotel chain, airline or several other parameters. Many meetings consolidation experts, and buyers who have gone through the process, point to data capture as one of the most important, and most difficult, steps of the process.
Products like these are not new to the industry. A handful of travel management companies and online meeting companies have the capability. But the three new entrants into the field seem to offer evidence that more corporations are exploring the consolidation process.
A key difference between PlanSoft's tool, called Meeting Management Solutions, and CMG's, dubbed MeetingsLogic, is their respective availability: PlanSoft will not restrict to whom it sells the product, but CMG, at least initially, will offer the product only to its clients--not, notably, CWT transient clients.
CMG also announced a partnership with GetThere DirectMeetings--formerly AllMeetings--to provide site-selection capabilities for MeetingsLogic.
"The concept of MeetingsLogic is more than the technology," said MeetingsLogic director Laura Wells. "It's the consulting behind meetings, it's helping with procurement, hotels and contracts. The tool itself is geared to two audiences--the meeting arranger and the administrator, who is often in procurement, to track overall meeting spend. It can track individual meetings and the administrator can pull various reports on overall spend, budget versus actual spend and track negotiated savings. As an arranger, I keep track of what I do for the organization through negotiations, but administrators can pull negotiated savings reports for the entire company."
Wells stressed that the key to the product is CMG's consulting and negotiating ability. "We don't just want to put out the technology without the expertise behind it," she said. "We can leverage our relationships with our vendors as well. Taking on our clients' information with our own can only make for stronger negotiations on our clients' behalf."
MeetingsLogic is an added service to CMG clients at additional cost. "Initially, we will focus on helping the CMG client base. Right now, this is not going to be a public site," said director of travel marketing Karen Hessian, though Wells added that may change at some point.
EventSource's offering--dubbed Compass and announced just before press time--also allows corporations to customize reporting and highlight travel policy and preferred vendors.
PlanSoft's Meeting Management Solutions will operate in much the same fashion, but will be open to anyone. Pricing hasn't been finalized, said marketing communications manager John Opdycke, but likely will be a per-meeting charge, regardless of group size.
"This is the next step, as the product is designed to meet the need at an organizational level," Opdycke said. "Companies need a tool that consolidates data. This is the kind of product in which a corporate meeting or finance executive can roll up reports based on different parts of the company or suppliers, regardless of if they're spread out geographically or centrally located."
Meeting buyers, particularly those contemplating establishing a consolidated program, expressed interest at the offerings. "We do get reports from our agency, but we have to wait for the full cycle to be complete," said Barbara Hornback, corporate travel department administrator for The Kroger Co. of Cincinnati. "It would be nice to get accurate figures right away."
Kroger currently is forming a meeting department and trying to consolidate meetings data companywide, and while her agency has availed an automated rooming list to her, a comprehensive automated tool would draw her interest.
"It would be good to have a one-stop shop where you could do everything and be able to call up any type of report you wanted," Hornback added.
Officials at companies that already offer similar tools supported the moves, noting that supplier development of tools often mirrors buyer interest.
"This continues to prove that corporate meeting buyers need and want to get their arms around their companywide spending, which reinforces the message we've been spreading for seven years," said Christine Duffy, president and COO of Philadelphia-based meetings management firm McGettigan Partners. "But to do that, you need a technology enabler."
Corporations are awakening to the fact that meetings purchasing is quite different than transient travel purchasing, Duffy said, as fewer mandates can be placed on meeting site selection, for example, and it's more difficult to receive booking information from credit card vendors for meeting expenses.
"This is the key to the whole consolidation concept," said Kaye Mulkeen, COO of WorldTravel Meetings & Incentives of Atlanta. "You must have data to leverage spending with your vendors and benchmark your spending against industry standards. Without data, the whole consolidation concept is invalidated."
But Duffy warned that simply possessing a tool to consolidate corporate meetings spending does not a fully consolidated meetings program make. "It is only a small piece," she said. "Unless you have internal process management, you will not get results. But you can't take the first step to consolidation without a tool."
As for PlanSoft's migration into the data consolidation space, Duffy said it's a significant and representative shift for the online meetings industry. "PlanSoft is shifting its technology tools from those that operate a meeting to those to wrap your arms around spending," Duffy said.