<B> Lilly Outsources</B>
<I>Prepares Pacts With Multiple Meeting PLanning Partners</I>
By Lauren Bielski
Eli Lilly & Co. is preparing to sign contracts soon outsourcing the logistical management of its meetings to five partners. All five will have access to a common registration system when McGettigan Partners implements its Internet-based CORE Discovery 5.0 system next spring.
As Eli Lilly heads into the second major phase of a group travel and meetings consolidation begun in 1994, manager, corporate travel and meeting services, George Odom said that McGettigan Partners, which already has installed an earlier version of CORE at the pharmaceutical company, will serve as a sourcing and operations manager with a ten-man team on site. Because he is in the midst of final contract negotiations, Odom said he was unable at this time to name all of the technology and travel management company partners that will be involved or define the scope of their contribution.
"McGettigan will replace our internal meeting management group, and oversee the day-to-day operations of meetings. That team will be supervised by three Eli Lilly executives from finance and customer service, and me. McGettigan will handle the pre-meeting arrangements, including contract negotiations and site inspections," Odom said. "After completing the pre-trip work, logistical assignments will be handed off, as it makes sense, to the rest of the outsource partners for implementation and on-site management."
McGettigan officials confirmed that the new management approach will be bolstered by the Internet version of CORE, which will enable a team of vendors to realize the promise of a registration system by finally enabling true data sharing. The plan is to have each meetings company input the information on the programs it implements, with administrators at Eli Lilly able to access "big picture" summaries of total program activity whenever necessary. Each of the four team partners, however, will only be able to access information on its own program. Meanwhile, transient and group travel will continue to be negotiated jointly by BTI Americas.
The eventual goal of the new outsourcing scheme is to free up Eli Lilly administrative assistants to become more actively involved in meeting program design.
"We want our more senior people to let go of logistics and, ultimately, focus on content issues and creating a sound adult learning environment," Odom said, noting that improving meeting content was the single most important long-term objective for this phase of consolidation.
Eli Lilly's daring experiment of migrating from the single, internal department it began in 1994 to multiple outsource partners is in fact a necessity, given the scope of the pharmaceutical company's operations, Odom said.
"When we analyzed the demand on the department and started to consider our alternatives, we quickly realized that no single supplier had the manpower to devote," Odom said. "If we were going to keep all the work in-house, we'd need to have a fully equipped staff of at least 150. Management didn't deem that cost-effective."
He said the checks and balances resulting from using a number of different partners would provide a needed reality check, and that somewhere between having too many suppliers to keep track of and just one company, a middle ground of a well-defined crew probably will offer the best results.
Odom said that Eli Lilly lost brain power and manpower in an overall corporate downsizing effort in 1993, just before the initiative to consolidate meetings got started. By the beginning of 1996, a more streamlined crew of internal planners had at least minimal involvement in meetings hosted by all the major divisions of the company through internal selling.
When the decision came to outsource the entire effort, rather than simply trying what had worked for other companies, Odom's team put together a series of focus groups to determine what Eli Lilly execs wanted to see and what they wanted to avoid. "It makes more sense to fulfill those requests and consider the corporate culture rather than setting an agenda first," he said.
Odom, who spearheaded the initial phase of consolidation and participated in the work guiding this latest transition, said his company hoped to find the balance between service and cost-avoidance. The new approach also intends to provide information for novice planners to improve their productivity and reduce contract risk. While he emphasized that the consolidation had the support of senior management, the corporate culture at Eli Lilly wouldn't likely support a mandate.
"Cost avoidance plus service is a major goal," he said. "We had an exhaustive RFP process to determine who would handle our meetings and offer the creativity and who placed a premium on service. I think that we prompted many of these service companies to look at meetings and at their own operations a little differently."
He said the pharmaceutical company was planning to make use of its intranet site to offer administrative assistance to its ad hoc planners, as AT
T has done with its Center of Excellence, a group of full-time conference and meeting planners who periodically discuss best practices and use an intranet, as well as a newsletter to educate part-time planners. Odom also said that the Eli Lilly team will explore AT&T's efforts to develop pre-packaged deals.
"We're definitely benchmarking against our efforts and the previous successes of other firms out there," Odom said. "This is a gradual process and I have to say, we're still learning.