H-P Manages Meetings Via Internet, Forges Extranets

In one of the first large-scale applications for corporate meetings on the Internet, Hewlett-Packard has launched a meetings management homepage, collected data on 500 H-P gatherings and received permission to "borrow" two IS staffers to help move the project along-all within the past six months.

But while meetings program manager Rich Del Colle is gratified by what he has accomplished, his mission is far from complete. By May, he plans to add an icon to connect the H-P meetings page with Marriott's corporate Website, allowing H-P planners to access property information and pictures, pull down an RFP and send it directly to the national sales office.

By September, he anticipates adding more extranets-connections between H-P's page and those of suppliers-by expanding the Preferred Supplier section, linking to numerous hotels and other suppliers. By 1998, his goal is to build an extranet to American Express Group Travel Management Services, allowing planners to book their meetings direct-and attendees to book their travel online.

"What I really want is to tie into the H-P corporate travel vision of a seamless end-to-end system, covering every phase of the meetings process, from the meeting request to the time the master bill is paid," Del Colle said. "The goal is a site that goes to the e-commerce level, and I know I can take this current Website to that level. Within the next year or two, we should be able to pull up our homepage, enter the times and dates, send it to Amex and have them do everything in an interactive extranet arrangement."

While that vision will take some time, Del Colle already is reaping benefits from his "Meeting Planner's Assistance Program" homepage.

In perhaps the most widely recognized decentralized corporate culture in the country, Del Colle, the company's first-ever meetings manager, is charged with the unenviable task of managing a meetings program without a mandate. The key to doing that, he quickly realized, was to provide a site so valuable planners could not resist coming. So far, the site has attracted-and helped him identify-1,400 people involved in planning meetings at the Palo Alto, Calif.-based technology giant, and provided detailed information on 500 meetings. The fifth-largest domestic air-travel purchaser in the nation, Hewlett-Packard's domestic units spent $360 million in T&E last year, and another $310 million abroad.

Launched six months ago (MT, July 29, 1996), the meeting homepage includes an area for registering new meetings or looking up those in the planning stage, databases of other meetings and planners, an education page that includes the CLC Handbook in its entirety and a searchable archive of meeting planning information, an open discussion area and the preferred suppliers page. A part-time planner handling his or her first meeting could type in "Delta zone fares," for example, to access a definition of zone fares as well as proprietary information on Delta's program with H-P. The database also allows planners to search other meetings being planned by geographical location, meeting date, property type, room rate, affiliation (chain) or planner, so planners can piggyback on other meetings in the works, or check that no other meeting is being planned at the same time as theirs for the same audience they hope to attract.

In the preferred suppliers area, Del Colle is working with Marriott vice president of interactive sales and marketing Mike Pusateri to develop the link between the Marriott site and a private H-P homepage, where planners will be able to access H-P rates as well as view pictures and information on preferred Marriott properties. He foresees similar links with Hyatt, Sheraton and Crowne Plaza-or "any chain with whom we do business and whose national account manager can add value and save us time," he said.

Every preferred property will have an icon that allows planners to call up an RFP, fill in meeting information and e-mail the form to the supplier.

Despite these negotiations, managing the site does not require a huge investment in time, Del Colle said. He does monitor it for duplicate meeting listings, "and looks through all our meetings department zone fare contracts to be sure all the meetings are registered on the site." If they are not, he calls the planner and asks-not orders-them to register.

In the end, the program's success will come down to educating planners about the resource he is offering, and encouraging them to help each other. To help get the word out, he has put together a formal meeting-planning assistance training program with his major hotel partners, in which anyone involved in planning meetings for H-P is invited to a local property for an afternoon. They receive information on the meetings Website, the American Express GTMS program and other meeting planning basics. In a back-of-the-house tour at the hotel, they learn how the hotel office makes decisions on accepting group business, and they get tips from the banquet chef on developing cost-effective and healthy menus.

Del Colle's efforts will not truly show results until next year, when the database begins to yield the secrets of exactly how much H-P spends on meetings every year, how many meetings it holds and who plans them-questions that H-P, like many large corporations, cannot answer now.

Del Colle hopes to eventually build an international database by taking his model to Europe, Canada and Latin America, asking each unit to develop its own Meetings Assistance Home Page modeled on-and linked to-the site in the United States.