Managing Meetings At: Keane

<B> Managing Meetings At: Keane</B>
<I>Co. Leverages Mtgs. And Travel</I>

By Chris Davis

A former meeting planner who has taken on travel management at Keane Inc. has centralized the meetings programs of its divisions and is soliciting bids for all travel contracts to include both transient and group travel.

"Keane has grown substantially in the last three years, but some of our deals have been in place longer than that. So we have to test the waters and make sure we have the best vendors in place," said Marianne Goodman, who in October became travel manager for the Boston-based information technology provider, and assumed responsibility for meetings as well. "We're bidding our corporate credit card, our corporate car rental, our agency, our airlines. Everything is up for grabs--that's what they brought me in for."

Keane felt that as a travel manager who used to be a meeting planner, Goodman "understood everything that has to do with meeting planning and trade shows, so we might as well put its management on to me as well," Goodman said.

Keane Inc. spent $20 million on travel and entertainment in 1998, $12 million of it on air tickets, though no one is sure of the exact amount that went to corporate meetings. "I just don't have a good enough handle on how much it was in 1998," she acknowledged. "What we're trying to do now is keep track of what we're spending and what we're saving over the cost of doing all the meetings individually."

Goodman estimates Keane's total meetings budget will run about $1.2 million in each of the first two quarters of 1999.

Before the move to centralize, Keane--which has 50 branch offices nationwide--employed one full-time meeting planner, a trade show manager in the marketing department and two temporary planners. Soon after her arrival, Goodman assembled the four into a central meeting planning department, hiring the temporary planners full time and assigning a supervisory role to the other planner.

When the changes were announced on the new corporate travel page of Keane's intranet site, Keane Federal Systems and Keane Healthcare Services asked Goodman's department to handle their group travel as well. "It's great, because now we can really utilize our staff," Goodman said. "We'll do a better job for Keane and help all our branches."

Goodman began the movement toward centralizing meetings herself, though she quickly sought--and received--senior management support. First she crafted a spreadsheet of all the meetings, from all divisions, that Keane was planning. The total topped 300. Then she presented her findings to senior management.

"I sent the report to the CFO, who asked if we could put some dollars to this, so I did," she said. "The next thing I know I hear from John Keane Jr., in the Office of the President, who said the report was great and that he never knew there were so many meetings. People are excited that they finally have this information centralized and the company can see what we're spending on meetings."

A good portion of Keane's meetings--one or two a week--are employee training and education sessions held at its corporate learning center at the Boston Navy Yard. Goodman has dedicated one planner to staging and capturing data from those meetings, "so we can set up policies and procedures and streamline that whole process."

One change to that program already has been made: Employees registering for the education meetings will do so over the Keane intranet.

Said Goodman, "We were doing voice mail announcements of meetings and asking people to fax their registrations back to us. But we are in the IT business, after all, so we decided to make the announcements electronically, on the corporate travel Web page. Anyone who wants to register for a class can now do so electronically, which streamlines the process and saves time."

While Goodman's planners won't necessarily handle every meeting in the company, all meetings of 10 or more have to be registered with the central travel department. The department will use the Gold System meeting planning software from Oakland, N.J.-based Isis Corp. "to get rooming lists done, tie the registration in with the rooming lists and help with e-mail."

After 20 years in the travel industry, much of that on the travel agency side, Goodman feels her meeting planning experience has helped her become a better travel manager. "It definitely gave me a better understanding of what the needs are," she said. "I know what it's like to misspell a name badge or have the rooming lists not match the arrival and departure lists; I know how critical that is to success. And it helps me understand the issues our planners are going through."

It also has taught her the value of turning meetings over to professionals. "Meetings are necessary for customers and employees, but you need to plan them in the most cost-effective way. You need a qualified meeting planner just the way you need a qualified travel manager. You can't have someone who just thinks it's fun to plan a meeting once a year. It's a lot of hard work and stress, and there's a lot of money involved. You want to put the company's best face forward so you can get new customers or retain the old ones.