Managing Meetings At: Warner Lambert

<B> Managing Meetings At: Warner Lambert</B>
<I>Warner Lambert Outsources</I>

By Alan Salomon

Five years after its first attempt to consolidate its corporate meetings with an outside vendor, Warner Lambert Co. is trying the outsourcing route again. It has turned over the facilitation and planning of all of its meetings to WorldTravel Partners Inc. of Atlanta.

Under the terms of the agreement--which one Warner Lambert executive said is expected to cut the company's $40 million domestic meeting spend by at least 20 percent--WorldTravel will handle all travel reservations, meeting registrations and data collection. It will be a turnkey operation, with Warner Lambert reimbursing WorldTravel for all expenses and bills incurred for meetings.

Warner Lambert hopes the arrangement will allow it to consolidate its meetings purchasing information, which in turn will allow it to pay invoices in a more expedited manner and to deliver spending data the company then can use to negotiate volume discounts. "We will receive more value, and more bang for our buck," said global sourcing director Katherine King.

It was King, along with the six internal meeting planners at Warner Lambert, who put together the road map for what she called a "dramatic shift in strategy for Warner Lambert's meetings." In the past, secretaries and sales representatives planned most meetings, but stopped short of the negotiation process.

Even with 400 domestic meetings annually, the company had virtually "no controls, no measurements and no tracking," she acknowledged. As a result, she said, "We weren't getting good deals on hotels and travel."

Equally worrisome, the company wasn't making the most of the expertise its staff possessed. "Our meeting planners were just handling the tip of the iceberg. Basically everyone had their own little areas they supported and didn't go beyond that, which left the majority of the company without meeting support," King said.

King viewed this situation as an opportunity not only to improve the way Warner Lambert does business, but also to improve the quality of the meetings themselves. "We are putting additional professional resources toward meetings so that we are getting more for the money we are spending," she said. "This is not about a matter of saving money, even though we will do that. Now, we will have some control to help us understand what we are doing and where we are doing it. We can leverage sales organizations and also negotiate better with hotels."

Part of the value of centralizing the meeting planning process is that it will allow the company to consolidate its meetings in fewer sites and to piggyback meetings at the same site. "We will steer meetings where we get good rates or maybe have another meeting going on at the same time," King said.

While Warner Lambert does use videoconferencing, WorldTravel Partners will not push planners to use the technology to replace face-to-face meetings. King said that she sees videoconferencing as an effective tool for small groups where everyone on both sides of the screen knows each other, but "otherwise, I don't think video is effective."

Before signing up with WorldTravel Partners, Warner Lambert had tried outsourcing pieces of the program, but became discouraged by the training necessary for every new vendor, and almost every new meeting.

"We have rules and preferences and types of ways we want to run our meetings, and our meetings are diverse," King said. Company meetings range from informal ones to ones that need to be button-down and top notch. "It's difficult for independent, outside meeting planners to deal with all that."

The role of Warner Lambert meeting planners will now change in that they will not be bogged down with details. "Now we can devote more time to the meeting strategy and investment standpoints," said King.

Already, she has thoughts in that direction. At the top of her agenda is the sharing of best practices among planners from different groups, and the drawing up of a standard contract for all Warner Lambert meetings.

Also to be standardized is the Meetings Express concept developed and successfully rolled out at Parke Davis, a Warner Lambert division.

Meeting Express offers prepackaged meeting options for planners to choose from when they are planning meetings of 50 or fewer attendees. Rather than build a meeting from scratch every time a group needs to get together, Meetings Express offers choices much like a Chinese restaurant offers meals. One meeting model might be a morning meeting with one coffee break and basic audiovisual equipment; another would be a full day with two breaks, A/V and a buffet lunch; a third would be first class all the way. The options are presented in several different packages, and planners simply order package A, B, C or D for each meeting.

King said the biggest challenge in all this is managing the change itself, and convincing the part-time planners that turning over meeting planning to the experts is in the best interest of everyone.

"People who are not full-time planners think planning meetings is fun," she said, "and convincing them to pass it all over to World- Travel Partners might take some doing. We are working on that potential problem."

Since Warner Lambert "doesn't mandate, but rather educates," King is rolling out an educational program to let everyone know what meeting planning is and how WorldTravel can guide them. "We will try to convince them they are not losing control but rather will now have more time to put into content," she said.

In the beginning, WorldTravel will handle only domestic meetings, but the plan is to take the model global once the system is running smoothly. Indeed, the need for a uniform and consistent approach is greater abroad, where Warner Lambert doesn't employ professional meetings planners at all, King noted.

And despite a previous unsuccessful attempt at consolidating meetings in 1993, King is convinced that the time is right now for a new companywide initiative. "Global sourcing was new at that time, but now our people have come to know us and know we aren't there to take their jobs away and threaten them. We are here to improve the process and increase the value. We don't see so much resistance any more," she said.

And what does all this mean for King? Certainly, she'll be busier as her role stretches to include responsibility for travel and meetings on a global basis, as well as for automobile fleet and some procurement. "My job is to go to different areas of the world and find different ways to do things," she said. She hopes this new and different way of doing things, which she found practically in her own back yard, will pay off in better and more productive meetings for Warner Lambert. So far, she joked, "It's been kind of a train wreck.