Harley Revs Up For Mtgs. Services

<H1> Harley Revs Up For Mtgs. Services</H1>By Cheryl Rosen

<B>W</B>ith automated booking systems promising to reduce the amount of time agents spend on the phone, some travel managers are grappling with the issue of precisely what their staffers will do with this free time.

At the same time, many companies that have recently centralized their small meetings are being swamped by calls for help from hundreds of internal meeting planners asking for professional help.

In Harley-Davidson's centralized travel and meetings department, manager Trish Haudricourt has put the two together for a process that seems to promise cost savings and better service. Her plan for 1996 is that as travelers move to an e-mail-based booking system, her staffers will use the time to offer more meeting services.

Haudricourt has managed a staff of seven on-site Carlson Wagonlit agents plus two internal Harley-Davidson meeting planners in a centralized meeting and travel department since 1987. Under the current arrangement, the Carlson staffers handle all meetings that last three days or less and do not involve customers. Bigger-ticket meetings are passed on to the Harley planners, who "make a sales call on the internal customer and evaluate the needs, then decide whether they can handle it themselves or if they need to get me involved," Haudricourt pointed out.

But with all the company's transient travel issues coming through the office, Haudricourt and her department have had little time to focus their efforts on companywide meetings contracts.

That's all about to change in 1996, she said. Her priority is to move travelers to e-mail for travel planning and reservations, and to use her staffers to focus on the consolidation of all local Milwaukee meetings under one or two preferred hotels-possibly including a permanent new Harley-Davidson conference center.

"We are consolidating our meeting data now to see if it is feasible for us to run our own conference center, or whether we'd be better off using local hotels," she said. "But in any case, we will be negotiating sleeping rooms, meetings rooms and food and beverage contracts with one or two vendors for all our local meeting needs in Milwaukee."

Overall, about 60 percent of Harley's meetings comes from its marketing department, 30 percent are sales incentive meetings and 10 percent involve human resources and training.

Haudricourt, who reports to the company CFO, has found that superimposing a financial model over internal meetings often adds a much-needed perspective, and a focus on real return for the company's investment in meetings, she said.

Just the other day, for example, she met with the training department to review its plans for a series of two-hour training sessions to be offered to 70 employees at each of six sites around the country. The budget included $100,000 for a facilitator and $30,000 per destination. "My question was whether we really needed to spend $300,000 to give people two hours of training-and in truth, they just hadn't really looked at the bottom line that way before," she said.

If the promise of automated booking holds, Haudricourt hopes to do a lot more of that kind of internal consulting.