H-P Will Launch Intranet To Consolidate Meetings Data

<H1>H-P Will Launch Intranet To Consolidate Meetings Data</H1>By Cheryl Rosen

<B>I</B>f the stick doesn't work, try a carrot. Hewlett-Packard Co. next month will launch an internal World Wide Web site that offers its meeting planners information, insiders' tips and standardized contracts in return for their entering data on meeting spending into a central database.

Thanks to a unique cooperative relationship with the Convention Liaison Council, the educational offerings on the site will include 25 chapters of the "CLC Manual," the industry-standard textbook on meeting planning that serves as the basis for the Certified Meeting Professional examination.

With a worldwide travel and entertainment budget of $670 million in 1995, H-P estimates it spends about $150 million on meetings each year. But like many large companies, it has little real information on who is planning those meetings, where they are going and which suppliers they are using.

As H-P's first meeting manager, Richard Del Colle's mission is to build a database of meeting information by having planners register their meetings online. But in a corporate culture that eschews mandates, he cannot order planners to do so-he has to win their allegiance.

"My goal is to get a better grip on what we are doing, and to allow planners to network with each other," Del Colle said. "If a planner needs to do a meeting in Colorado, he will pull up the screen, hit 'Colorado' and up will pop a list of all the meetings H-P planners are doing there, all the information on previous meetings, contact names at the hotels, and the names and feedback of the H-P people who planned those meetings."

The site also will offer standard contract formats-not prices, but specific language and terms-and "help" buttons planners can hit for explanations of why the contract clauses are used as they are, and why it is important to include them. Also on the page will be icons for registering as an H-P planner, for registering new meetings, for accessing short lists of preferred vendors and for the CLC manual. Planners can read the manual's chapters in sequence or pull up a chapter if they have specific questions on a given area. The intranet also will publish a membership application for Meeting Professionals International, one of the 26 industry groups that fall under the CLC umbrella.

Del Colle's game plan includes three phases: first getting the site loaded immediately, then adding the preferred suppliers and finally asking them to register. "The list of preferred vendors will include partners we have used successfully in the past-for a no-brainer, planners can just go there and use one of those suppliers again," Del Colle said.

Planners will be free to use the vendors on the list or choose one of their own, and Del Colle will not be negotiating volume discounts with those included. "Nothing at Hewlett-Packard is mandatory," he said-and with a company as large and as varied as H-P, obtaining standard companywide volume discounts is "difficult" at best, he noted.

"It's more important to let the planners be educated, and then they will go after the best discounts themselves," he said. "If that saves us 5 percent of our $150 million meeting spend, that's $7.5 million. That's not a bad return on investment.