E-Tool Quantifies Mtg. Benefits

<B>E-Tool Quantifies Mtg. Benefits</B>

By Chris Davis

Not every corporation that consolidates meetings does so to save money. Leveraging meetings volume for better negotiations, in fact, was not even a primary reason for Brampton, Ont.-based Nortel Networks to centralize all meetings companywide and develop an online tool that automatically weighs the potential benefits of a proposed meeting. The goal actually was to ensure that the company's messages and communications remained consistent with its marketing plans.

"So many times meetings consolidation is pushed strictly from a financial standpoint, and while that is an important by-product of consolidation, it was not the driving force to effect all of the changes here," said Carolyn Pund, Nortel's Santa Clara, Calif.-based senior manager of meetings and marketing events.

The company about 18 months ago decided to bring together all meetings and customer event programs throughout all of the company's lines of business, after the discovery of two unrelated company programs at the same hotel, with different menus and amenities.

To avoid such a recurrence, Pund said, the marketing department developed and put into place a series of procedures and processes governing the methods of vendor selection and the invitation process. Those policies led to the creation of the online business case tool, which weighs the necessity and potential of each event.

The tool resides on the corporate intranet, said David Cegelski, Richardson, Texas-based senior manager of integrated marketing operations, and its use is a required first step for any employee wishing to hold a meeting. The tool prompts users to answer a series of questions related to the proposed meeting.

"The employees must tell us up-front what their ideas are," Cegelski said. "We ask about meeting cost, what the business case is for holding it and what the alignment is with our strategy, who would attend, its location, dates and a proposed budget. If there's a history of cost and return on investment, we ask that as well."

As the tool solicits answers, it assigns a numerical score based on each reply. Upon completion, the scores are totaled, offering the marketing group a general idea of the potential meeting's worth relative to cost. The group will not accept or reject the meeting based on its score alone--although recommended scores for acceptance or rejection exist--as any new meeting automatically would be downgraded because of lack of history.

"It's quite robust," Cegelski said. "There are eight separate screens the user must fill out, but it drills deeply to what we want to accomplish."

The proposed meeting sponsor's replies are reviewed every two weeks by a committee representing several aspects of Nortel marketing, Pund said, including events, finance, branding and communications. If the event is approved, it automatically is posted to the internal corporate events calendar, which also resides on the intranet.

The calendar consolidates meeting data to allow the event management team to view the status of invitations and bookings, and evaluate patterns with regard to future events. Though Nortel developed the concepts and content for both the business case tool and corporate events calendar, the technological aspects were installed online by Durham, N.C.-based Propellor Interactive.

Nortel also continues to move other aspects of the meeting process to the Web. For instance, the company retained B-there.com to handle all online attendee meeting registrations through the intranet. The next step, Pund said, is for all the separate Web-enabled meeting processes--from pre-evaluation to post-event surveys--to interconnect through an integrated system, which she said is purely a technological issue.

"We have all the elements, but they're not organized in the same place," Pund said. "We'd like for all the information in the calendar to be able to flow automatically to all the forms that need to be filled out and to the micro-site set up for each meeting. We will link that to a database for the customer invitation process, which executives at the meeting can pull out before meeting with customers at the event."

Though Nortel's domestic travel is handled by Carlson Wagonlit Travel, as are its many meetings, some ticketed and specialized programs are managed by TQ3 Maritz Travel Solutions. Nortel is developing methods to prepopulate automatically B-there and Maritz online meeting forms when Nortel registration forms are completed.

Nortel soon also will introduce an online evaluation program in which attendees will give their impressions of the effectiveness of the meeting. The subsequent ROI data will be rolled into a database.

Still, at this point CWT and Nortel have not worked to break out group and meeting travel patterns, data or expenditures from total travel and entertainment spending, which amounted to about $296 million worldwide in 1999, according to BTN's Corporate Travel 100 issue (BTN, Aug. 28, 2000). That may change, as CWT has developed a meetings procurement initiative, including a Web-based consolidation tool that Nortel plans to deploy (Meetings Today, May 21).

"It was an unusual consolidation development," Pund said, "but it still looks the same, with the added strategic planning value of consistent messaging, operations control and visibility into spending.