MetLife Advances Tech Tools

<B>MetLife Advances Tech Tools</B>

By Chris Davis

MetLife Inc. is completely revamping and upgrading its meetings technology capabilities, with the eventual hope that hotels will be able to securely access the company's rooming lists as well as other attendee registration information over the Internet.

The technology upgrade is taking place in a four-phase process, said Bill Wulff, MetLife's former director of event services. It will include the installation of Isis Corp.'s Gold System meeting management software on the company's network, which will allow MetLife to better capture meeting expenditure data, and an intranet page designed to disseminate information about upcoming events and motivate potential incentive qualifiers.

But the most intriguing piece of MetLife's plans is the final phase of the project, which could be completed by the end of 2001. In it, the company would give hotels secure access to attendee information in order to save planners time and ensure that the most accurate and up-to-date information is available. "It will help us particularly for short-term meetings," said Wulff, who resigned from MetLife in April to accept a position as president and CEO of meeting management firm Above the Rim Events of Fort Lee, N.J., but has been retained by the New York-based insurance giant to see the meetings technology project through to completion.

"It will give our suppliers consistent communication about where our meetings stand, especially when our planners are busy with other programs," Wulff said. "From that respect, it will save planners a great deal of time."

Currently, MetLife is in the second phase of the seven-month-old project, which entails training the company's 13 in-house planners to use and customize the Gold System. Earlier, MetLife's hardware and infrastructure were upgraded to support Wulff's plans.

Wulff hopes to begin the project's final phase by the end of next year, but there are security issues that must be addressed in order for that timeline to be kept. Since the plan is for hotels to access MetLife's information over the Web, access would need to be password-protected and event-specific, which raises internal firewall issues.

"It is a concern, and it may end up that we won't be able to do the project as we planned," Wulff said. "But we'll try to build it. It won't be automatic and it won't be easy; new technology tends not to pay dividends until year two, but it will absolutely speed up the process."

Eventually, the increased technological expenditures, which Wulff didn't enumerate, will pay off, he said: "In the long term, this is something that could very possibly save MetLife an enormous amount of money."

<B>More Data, More Savings</B>

Wulff sees savings potential through improved negotiations with better data--MetLife has a fully centralized meetings program, but Wulff said the new system will afford more comprehensive expenditure tracking--and through avoidance of costs associated with current group incentives, which include items such as production and shipment of CD-ROMs that detail programs and promote destinations.

The communication aspect of the project is one that Wulff said many corporations overlook, especially considering the importance and cost of group incentive travel programs in large insurance companies and the money they spend motivating their employees to attain that goal. "Even centralized companies use their meeting pages to register attendees and track data, but not to communicate and motivate," Wulff said. "We will list qualifications for attendance, photos of past events. It will be more interactive and personalized."

Wulff is quick to credit his partner on the project, MetLife legal information technology manager John Sciarra, and vice president and chief of staff Dave Parsons for his approval for the project, which began in January. Wulff said a simple PowerPoint presentation was all it took for Parsons to authorize the project. "Without them, nothing happens," Wulff said. "He immediately saw the value of it. This doesn't get off the ground without his vision and his willingness to embrace new technology.