Managing Meetings At: Champion

<B> Managing Meetings At: Champion</B>
<I>Corp. Scores Consolidation</I>

By Lauren Bielski

At a time when the Champion International paper company is in cost-cutting overdrive, manager of meetings and special events Michelle Rubin and director of facilities adminstration and corporate services Carolyn Davis are making a significant contribution to the bottom line.

Champion these days is grappling with the aftermath of a radical restructuring, new senior management and steep capital investments designed to enhance its wood production operations in Canada.

Rubin, in the meantime, is consolidating meetings in the wake of a successful transient travel policy implementation for the company's 4,000 frequent travelers. Meeting spend makes up a significant part of the company's $30 million annual hotel budget.

Initially, Rubin spent a great deal of time minimizing Champion's risk by customizing contract language (<i>Meetings Today</i>, Feb. 23). Now in phase two of her program, she hopes to top last year's cost avoidance total of $750,000 by an additional $250,000.

To support that goal, Rubin is offering guidelines to internal developers on the building of travel pages for the company's intranet site that will support meeting registrations. She characterized the project as building an electronic request for proposals that will allow her to shoot electronic specs off to bidders for Champion's preferred hotel program--and she is keeping her fingers crossed for a spring rollout.

Champion holds meetings in several locations throughout the United States, including Huntsville, Ala., Greenville, S.C., and Bangor, Me. Internationally, the company does frequent business in Brazil, and has site offices and mills in Sao Paulo as well as in Canada, where it has holdings in Vancouver, British Columbia. In all, Champion operates 11 mills and four technology facilities, in addition to numerous sales offices.

Although Rubin eschews chainwide hotel deals in favor of destination-specific negotiating for meetings, she feels that intranet registrations will help her gain virtual eyes in the back of her head.

"With online registration, we should get a better picture of our total group spend and better leverage in negotations," she said. "The idea is to get notice on where my help might be needed, particularly in contract development."

That's an approach that's been working at companies like Hewlett Packard (Meetings Today, July 29, 1997) and is driving much of the recent interest in online technology products like McGettigan's CORE Discovery.

Meanwhile, the $15 million air portion of Champion's travel bill will continue to be negotiated by BTI Americas, the in-house agency that handles the company's transient travel and group air bookings.

Rubin also will step up the department's internal sales pitch to pull in more of its international meetings. So far, the soft sell approach has worked domestically, and the meetings management team Rubin heads has been called in--at least to offer advice--on about 200 meetings in 1997. That's been no mean feat for a company that had a laissez faire attitude to meeting planning as recently as 1995, and still does not mandate the use of Rubin's expertise.

Davis and Rubin both stand behind the value of providing cost savings, service and sheer reliability in the selling of a meetings consolidation program. Still, they figure that fighting a common enemy--notably, a tough paper market in 1996--probably had a great deal to do with the new department's comparative success in pulling in so many meetings.

"Our management and employees are both really supportive of meetings consolidation, and we've covered a lot of ground quickly because of the company focus on reducing operating costs," Davis said.

When a sudden downturn in European demand weakened the domestic paper market, the changing times forced the company to rethink its operations and more closely scrutinize spending across the board, Davis said. In response, the company pulled together cross-functional management teams to redeploy manufacturing, marketing and sales operations, and started a purchasing initiative to establish preferred chemical suppliers. New chairman Richard Olson and new CEO Kenwood Nichols brought "a new strategy to improve operating efficiencies."

At a time when everything from wet chemistry to capital investments were subject to scrutiny and the mills tried to outdo each other in devising waste-reduction strategies, Davis quietly and methodically set the stage to also improve meetings-related procurement. The company's sponsorship of the 1996 Olympics, and a two-week event held there, further brought home the message that meetings needed to be managed differently than in the past.

Davis, who helped state the case for consolidation, was instrumental in hiring Rubin, who started a formal meetings management program in January 1997.

In an environment of extreme transition, Davis guided Rubin to issue cost-savings memos for all meetings that she handled or advised in any way. That was a simple idea with big reverberations, according to Rubin.

"The memo idea was Carolyn's brainchild, and what it did was put meetings on an equal footing with other business processes within the company," she said. Meetings represented a set of costs that hadn't been looked at that closely, but the memos--which pointed out cost-avoidance techniques for smarter contracting--combined with the new department's ability to take the strain off the administrative assistants, began to give them a profile.

Except for a few flashy corporate sponsorship events--like Champion's ongoing support of the U.S. Olympic rowing, canoing and kayak teams--most of the meetings Champion hosts are small, with as few as 12 participants, and last about two days. Still, the contractual risk that the company used to bear was tremendous.

"An administrative assistant might call and casually mention that she was planning a meeting, and I would begin to ask her how she was handling the contracts and logistics," Rubin recalled. "Inevitably, it would dawn on the person that there was tremendous detail involved--and often, they would just hand over the meeting for me to finish. I'm showing them a tangible benefit and we're capturing more business this way.