Managing Meetings At PricewaterhouseCoopers: Adding Staff To Save Millions

After 18 months of tracking rogue meetings and rewriting company policy, New York-based PricewaterhouseCoopers on July 1 began the second phase of an initiative to save 10 percent to 15 percent of its meetings expenditures during the next three years. Senior management supported the effort by trimming meeting budgets across the company to increase compliance and doubling the size of the meetings department, according to the company's director of meeting and event services.

Though PwC has had a centralized meetings department and policy for seven years, some expenditures still were not being captured, said Debi Scholar, director of meeting and event services, and some processes were inefficient.

"We knew we could improve the process to make sure we were following procurement policies, so we went through a process-improvement project," Scholar said.

Using internally developed metrics and charts, monthly reports and cross-departmental cooperation, Scholar said senior management has approved the expansion of the meetings staff to 52 employees. During the past two years, the department has ranged in size from 23 employees to its current size of 42.

A new meetings policy states any event that requires a contract must be registered. If it costs $5,000 or more, it must be sourced through the meetings department. "If they want to plan it, that's OK, but we have to mitigate the risk," Scholar said.

The legal department also helped to develop standard contract addenda that PwC uses with preferred hotel vendors. The company also is working on a master agreement with a hotel partner and small meeting packages.

"The new policy was implemented July 1, and we are now beginning to communicate it," Scholar said, adding that the next six months would focus on educating stakeholders on the new corporate meetings requirements.

In May, while budgets were being approved across the company for the start of the fiscal year, the meetings department presented its research on savings opportunities to senior management.

"They took action. They actually cut some meeting budgets," she said.

At the same time, senior management approved additional resources for the meetings department. Scholar said she estimated the amount of resource hours required for different types of events and projects, broken down by tasks, then quantified the average cost of labor and overtime per staff member to convince senior management that additional resources were required.

Pressure has increased on the department to produce immediate results, and the meetings department has tried to assure stakeholders that content and quality of events will remain the same under the new policy. "We are on the line for these millions of dollars of savings for the next three years," she said.

The department also evaluated the potential risks of maintaining the status quo of the meetings management process. Scholar said she drafted an acrostic to teach her department staff how to communicate the value of the program. The acrostic—Accountability Instills Smart Equitable, Responsible Business—covers topics from auditable contracts, security and data retention to banning conflicts of interest.

Other metrics developed by the meetings department include average cost per attendee, the number of meetings that come in below budget, penalty recovery, cost of the department's services per attendee, supplier diversity, use of minority-owned vendors, lead times, sponsor and attendee satisfaction and resource needs.

The department drafted change management plans with charts to show senior management. For example, plans to increase compliance with the program were charted by individual procedure, the nature of control of that task, what to check to ensure the task was being carried out, the action and reaction of the task, exceptions to the procedure and the staff responsible for the procedure.

The meetings policy, registration and other resources are available to employees through the meetings department's Web portal, Scholar said. The department has begun a phased rollout of the new policy, beginning with the marketing department, to increase compliance.

For the first 18 months of the program, Scholar said her department attempted to discover how much the company truly was spending on meetings and on what that money was being spent, working with accounts payable, preferred suppliers and its corporate and meetings card vendor. They discovered that food & beverage, sleeping rooms and air travel were the three biggest expenditures, making up 70 percent of overall spend.

"When we captured all of the rogue spend from accounts payable and from the card data, we learned that we only had about a 50 percent compliance rate," she said. "That was a huge shock, because I would have thought we had 70 percent to 80 percent compliance."

In just the few months since, the department has targeted increased compliance in the marketing and human resources departments—two areas with significant untracked spend—the volume of meetings passing through the approved process has increased, she said, with overall volume for 2006 up about 20 percent over fiscal year 2005.

The department also promoted the use of Webconferencing to replace the first or last day of a scheduled event. PwC discovered it could save "millions" in F&B alone, she said.

"Our hotel suppliers were very anxious to work with us on food and beverage, they had a lot of ideas on how we could save money and we're really taking that to heart. Little things add up," she said.

Each savings opportunity was quantified in an Excel chart showing the hard-dollar savings potential for the next three years, cost avoidance projections and "soft savings," which the department defined as intangibles that may save money but are hard to quantify.

Soft savings, such as protecting PwC's reputation, were briefly described to senior management in reports rather than quantified.