Managing Meetings At: Glaxo Wellcome - Co. Moves To One Agency

Pharmaceutical company Glaxo Wellcome is consolidating its $45 million meetings business in an attempt to rein in all meetings-related spending from headquarters and six regional offices.

Although the approach will be a soft sell without mandates, Glaxo Wellcome expects it to ease the planning of many of the firm's complex, off-site meetings. The firm held 570 sales meetings and 390 corporate events last year.

"For these complex meetings, there was too much wear and tear on our staff working with multiple travel management and DMC vendors for ad hoc program and on-site management assistance," said Janet Banks, who runs one of the firm's two meetings departments. "It made sense to work with one agency that can provide full service for all our meetings."

Included in the consolidation is implementation of technology supplied by its new agency, WorldTravel Partners. Glaxo's travel team will be able to remotely access information stored and managed at WTP's Atlanta headquarters, further streamlining the meetings process.

Glaxo Wellcome, a $5.23 billion company with more than 54,000 employees in 83 countries (including 9,000 in the United States), uses BTI Americas for its transient travel here and in the United Kingdom, but had been relying on multiple meetings vendors before a quest for cost savings and better technological tools drove meetings-consolidation RFPs last year.

The consolidation, which began in December, uses the agency's registration software, Meeting Partner; its budget tool, Planning Partner; and internally housed databases and links to its CRSs for collection and reporting.

The agency also has dedicated a staff of 38--five of whom are located at Glaxo's Durham, N.C., headquarters--to the meetings program.

OCR--character recognition-based fax scanning--is another critical piece of the technology solution, enabling the instant capture of program data and streamlining the registration process, said Bill Ridge, who works in Glaxo's Information Technology Group.

In addition to the software, the other WTP tool that impressed Glaxo Wellcome was its commitment to ongoing development of Web-based solutions in line with its MeetingsAssist product, which was rolled out earlier this year (Meetings Today, Sept. 16, 1996).

"We definitely see the future of this company in Web-based solutions," Ridge said. The company has received 30,000 hits on its intranet's two-year-old transient travel site, he said. About 25 percent of air bookings go through that site. "This is a pretty high percentage and indicates to us that tools dedicated to meeting management in the same location would be equally popular with our administrative assistants, who handle some of the simpler meetings," Ridge said.

Ridge stressed the importance of using flexible components: Glaxo Wellcome required that WTP's Web tools be able to interface with transient travel tools for a possible merging of transient and meeting data in the future.

WTP won the business over five other contenders, in large part because of its technology. "We saw a lot of positive attributes in the other candidates, but we liked the OCR piece of WTP's solution and liked the idea that we wouldn't have to dedicate our manpower to managing the database and software here," said Banks, who is in charge of sales meetings and product launches, two areas that generate much of the company's volume.

The one group that won't have to be sold on the value of meetings management is perhaps the only group that counts--senior management, who gave the green light on using one agency for all meetings.

"We like the idea that we got senior management support throughout the RFP process," said Andrea Hartsell, who is in charge of Glaxo's other meetings department, which plans non-sales-related corporate events such as board meetings, department gatherings, training and retreats. "They are really behind us on this."

During the selection process, a team in purchasing and finance reported to senior executives to outline the proposed cost-management approach, and sat on the steering committee to help chose the vendor and develop the process.

"We wanted cost-effective meetings management and strong service," Hartsell said. "Our turnaround times are very fast."

Although the company has no preferred agreements with hotels, destination management companies or car rental, it knows its spending practices, said Kaye Mulkeen, executive vice president of WT Meetings and Incentives.

"Their meeting staff knows about 80 percent of their spend and are pretty clear about who plans meetings," she said. "But Glaxo still needed to update its purchasing strategy and fine tune its reporting capabilities, which our solutions will help them do."

Banks said that although the meetings departments already handle most of the complex meetings, "we intend to do some regional presentations and run focus groups to pick up ancillary business. We also will discuss best practices so that the entire organization is working coherently.