MPI Attendees Get Free Software, New Prez

<B> MPI Attendees Get Free Software, New Prez</B>

By Chris Davis

Even as Plansoft stole much of the technology thunder at the annual Meeting Professionals International's World Education Congress (see story above), another meetings-oriented technology firm announced its own plan to create an industry standard. SCLM Software of Bethel, Conn., will provide its MeetingMatrix Silver meeting-room design software free of charge to all 8,100 MPI planner members.

MeetingMatrix Silver affords planners the ability to electronically design the interior layout of a real meeting space floor plan. Planners can use it to arrange seats, audiovisual equipment or even food and beverage, staging and tables using a scaled version of the meeting space's dimensions.

SCLM president EJ Siwek said his software systems analysts have measured each meeting space included in the software and each is accurate to within a quarter of an inch.

Since the system allows planners to save and reuse floor plans they have created, MeetingMatrix Silver will ease demands on their time. "Once they use our product, they don't have to recreate meeting setups day in and day out," Siwek said. "They can just copy, file and update. If they like the setup of one meeting or the head table setup from one banquet, they can just clip that portion out of the one setup and copy it to a future meeting."

On the back end, too, "a picture's worth a thousand words, so when the facility receives the floor plans, they know exactly what the planner's intentions are."

Currently, about 150 meeting locales are included in MeetingMatrix Silver, and 10 to 15 additional spaces are added monthly and can be downloaded from the SCLM Website (www.meetingmatrix.com). The software already is used by more than 1,600 organizations worldwide, Siwek said.

Meeting buyers can obtain a free copy of the software on a CD from participating facilities or download it from the SCLM Website. They also shortly will be able to access it at the PlanSoft (www.plansoft.com) or MPI (www.mpiweb.org) sites.

"We're trying to drive the standard," Siwek said. "Over the next several weeks, (MPI's COO) David DuBois and I will be laying out our battle plan--and our goal is to get it out to as many people around the world as we can. We have no upward limit."

SCLM also markets MeetingMatrix Silver Plus and MeetingMatrix Platinum, which are enhanced versions offered for a fee. For $295, MeetingMatrix Silver Plus adds the ability to create a rectangular room layout when SCLM-certified dimensions aren't available. For $995, MeetingMatrix Platinum allows planners to enter dimensions, including circular ones.

SCLM charges hotels and other conference facilities anywhere from a few thousand dollars to upwards of $15,000 for "the software, the installation training and the measurements," Siwek said. But that's a small price to pay with a high return, he added. "This will save the hotel industry literally thousands, if not millions, of dollars over time. As hotels don't have to do last-minute setups, they're saving tons of time and manual labor. It also makes their sales a lot easier, because they can graphically show the client their interpretation of what the client asked for."

At the MPI conference, many noted that the dual technology announcements of PlanSoft and MeetingMatrix illustrate the direction in which the industry seems inevitably headed: a world where a single, electronic RFP is the norm and Internet access is as vital as a site tour.

What some think could make the difference for PlanSoft and SCLM is the meetings industry background of the participants--Siwek, for example, was the meeting planner for the Juran Institute before convincing his employer to back this venture. The question now is, can they translate their meetings background into technology industry success?

"This is a situation where meetings people are in the software business, and not the other way around," said Jeffrey Rasco, president of HMR Associates of Wimberley, Texas. "They need to follow the example of the successful technology companies for it to be done right."

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Not surprisingly, Ed Simeone talks like a meeting planner--and sees "a direct correlation between where I have had to move events at my company and where things have to move with MPI."

Indeed, the corporate experience of MPI's new president-elect has placed him in position to lead MPI further down the course that current president Bob Moore has set: emphasizing planner education at the chapter level and stressing content over logistics.

Simeone, who will begin his one-year term on July 1, 1999, spoke of the organization's current member-education push, his belief that planners should focus even more on the content of meetings they organize and his own experiences in the industry in a wide-ranging interview with <I>Meetings Today</I> at the World Education Congress.

Simeone is manager of worldwide events for EMC Corp. of Hopkinton, Mass., a manufacturer of intelligent mass-volume technological storage units. He has been in the meetings industry for 20 years, the first 17 years with Digital Equipment Corp.

And the lessons he learned there carry over readily, he said. MPI, like planners themselves, has to learn "to talk about the increased viability of the meetings professional. We have to talk about growth beyond the tactical. We have to start looking at where this industry is dragging us and we have to make certain the organization keeps pace with that."

The meetings industry is still "relatively embryonic" in terms of technology and strategic thinking, Simeone said. "I just want to make certain that the high proportion of people who are in the meeting planning industry right now understand where they need to move to continue to have that viability and not run the risk of being outsourced."

Simeone cited a June gap analysis study by MPI that stressed that while both management and meeting attendees were generally pleased with meeting logistics, both sought improvement in meetings content, pace and post-meeting retention (<i>Meetings Today,</i> July 20). To that end, planners need to consider content more than ever--and to do that, they need to become very familiar with the products or services their corporation or association offers."Our profession has always been transplantable," he said. "I can go into any kind of a company and do meeting planning. But if all of a sudden you're chartered with branding and messaging responsibilities, you need to have some idea of what the company is doing and where its position is in the marketplace. Some people are going to have to search within themselves to see if that's what they really want to do."

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At the conference's opening general session, president Bob Moore offered details of MPI's Platinum Series chapter education program (<I>Meetings Today,</I> June 22). "About 25 percent of people who leave MPI do so because their educational expectations were not met," he said. "That's an area we can control."

The three-year program will begin in February, when each of the 59 chapters will receive a module in a three-hour interactive format. Six months later, each chapter will receive a new module.Topics for the program likely will include technology, marketing on the Internet, legal contracts, negotiating skills and global issues.

The program is funded by private grants, including $250,000 from the MPI Foundation and $210,000 from Hilton Sales Worldwide. United Airlines will serve as the official carrier and provide air transportation. "This is our biggest project, maybe ever," Moore said.

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For the second year in a row, the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Co. took first place in a study of meeting planners' satisfaction with the hotel industry. Ritz won every category of the J.D. Power and Associates survey of 2,095 meeting planners--topping the field in the sales process, pre-event planning, the event phase and post-event follow-up--and also improved its score in every phase over last year's industry-leading performance.

Ritz didn't dominate all the good news, though. The planners' overall satisfaction with the industry improved in every phase from the 1997 survey. Marriott, Hyatt and Sheraton hotels also fared above the industry average for planner satisfaction. "The industry as a whole has improved greatly," said Darlene Cassio, J.D. Power's senior director of travel practices. "But Ritz-Carlton has outpaced that improvement and raised the bar of satisfaction."

Another interesting change revealed by the study was an increase in the number of planners calling the pre-event planning stage the most important part of the meeting process. About 26 percent of respondents felt that way, compared with 18 percent last year. The percentage of planners who felt the event phase was the most important fell accordingly, from 46 percent to 39 percent.