New Corp. Planner Makes Quick Mark on Purchasing

<FONT SIZE="+3"><B>New Corp. Planner Makes Quick Mark On Purchasing </B>

By Lauren Bielski

If the early show of initiative and skill demonstrated by Carolyn Bajarin Pund is any indicator of future performance, then the new corporate meetings and events planner will ace her position, having already saved Bay Networks $175,000 after three months on the job.

Hired by travel manager Bob Lichtman to gain fiscal control of meetings for the Santa Clara, Calif.-based technology company, she rolled up her sleeves and started trimming costs from the first assignment. By taking a firm stance with vendors, she reduced their fees by 5 percent and made other cost-shaving program adjustments for two global meetings for sales and customer service divisions held in San Francisco.

In her previous position as a corporate events planner with "the fiscally accountable" UB Networks (a division of Tandy Worldwide Sales), Bajarin Pund cultivated many relationships with hotels and destination management firms and knew from her dealings with them that the fees on the Bay Networks contracts as originally penned were higher than the norm.

That was when she determined that she would offer guidance and support in the development of budgets and that it would be a critical aspect of her new role. Many administrators weren't tabulating all the meetings-associated costs properly, nor were they necessarily performing a close reconciliation of the invoices to catch errors in hotel billing or inquiring about lower-cost options-two lapses that she intended to rectify.

Bajarin Pund also decided that it would be critical to convey the value-for- dollar concept, something that seems rote to those with an extensive planning background and familiarity with ROI assessments, but wasn't necessarily understood by those who booked meetings intermittently and relied on suppliers to develop their agendas. "A lot of vendors, if asked, will offer very attractive but elaborate programs that don't necessarily have anything to do with achieving the objectives of the meeting," she said.

All factors considered, she is in a good environment to develop a sophisticated approach to purchasing meetings. Bay Networks-which is a leading producer of networking components that include LAN and ATM switches, intelligent hubs, multiprotocol routers and remote Internet access solutions-is a progressive company with a highly disciplined travel program with a high compliance rate within the company.

With demand for LAN switching products on the upswing, the company has performed amazingly well in 1996, generating revenues of over $2 billion, up 47 percent from the previous year.

Despite its strong financial position, the company is retooling itself rather than resting on its laurels: It has realigned both its product development and marketing functions to create two new, customer focused business units directed at enterprise networking solutions and Internet/telecommunications marketing opportunities. Acquisition of several technology and networking companies in the last two years have driven a top down re-examination of costs, including meetings and travel-related expenditures.

Bajarin Pund sees true consolidation as unattainable for the sprawling organization-with its 2,300 field offices located in 145 offices world wide-but she is implementing new accounting procedures to document where dollars are spent and envisions having a firm grasp on costs.

By evaluating budgets and providing benchmarks for appropriate fee schedules and event spending, the meeting and event planner and "department of one" hopes to get administrators in the mindset of cost-justifying all of their planning decisions. She intends to aid administrators by establishing contract guidelines and designing programs that support their objectives with realistic budgets for management approval prior to contracting and vendor referral.

"It's very easy to become unwittingly extravagant when you don't have a lot of planning experience," Barjarin Pund said. "For example, we were flying 2,000 executives into San Francisco, and originally, the company wanted to pay for individual cabs for a total estimated cost of $84,000. We recommended meet-and-greet busing for about $30,000."

Barjarin Pund wants to make certain that value for dollar is achieved through some scheme of systematic purchasing-although, with such a large and diverse organization, the best way to orchestrate this won't be clear until research is completed. "At first, we weren't sure what approach we wanted to take with meetings management," Bajarin Pund said. "We're still not certain, for example, whether or not to mandate the registration of meetings through the travel department-those plans are still being worked out."

The company does know that its meetings contracts are substantial, with an estimated $14 million spent on meetings last year.

The travel management team was concerned about purchasing, which has been ad hoc since the 1994 merger of WellFleet and Synoptics that formed Bay Networks, when the event planning team was disbanded and their responsibilities were reverted to administrators. "I hired Carolyn because we were in desperate need of having meeting purchases organized and identified," said manager of travel services Robert Lichtman. "We had individual departments creating meetings; everyone was shooting from the hip. It became critical to get some guidelines on who was generating the business, and what their objectives were."

There are "a mammoth amount" of meetings conducted throughout the organization. Twenty videoconferencing rooms enable many of the internal sessions between the company's West and East Coast offices to be held without travel-and food and beverage for West Coast meetings are handled by an on-site catering company, helping to keep costs in line. Still, Bajarin Pund estimates that thousands of vendors are involved in the off-site meetings held throughout the year.

In her role as a resource for department administrators, Bajarin Pund has begun assessing which vendors are used for the hundreds of smaller meetings the decentralized organization holds annually so that she can begin to create their list of preferred meeting hotels. Getting wise to the corporate meeting profile has required a some sleuthing and diplomacy.

"I checked with all the local vendors and requested receipts and documentation. I also looked at our air report to see what cities we held meetings in and did a mailing introducing myself when I first started to start getting feedback from the administrators that plan department meetings," said Bajarin Pund.

To begin the process of strategic purchasing, Bajarin Pund has begun monitoring attrition dates in order to release space without penalties, a critical step for an organization with many meetings planned in less than three months.

"I will be closely monitoring hotel contracts with national chains throughout this year to watch for trends, preferences and how meeting expenses are charged," Bajarin Pund said. With the companywide implementation of a new accounting system, the company has been able to project code meetings to complete the picture.

"We are able to pre-format expense reports for each meeting with disallowed expenses blacked out," she said. "If a major evening event runs from 5:30 to midnight, the expense report cell for dinner and entertainment that night is blacked out to disallow double expense reporting."

Bajarin Pund also will spend the next year establishing working relationships with the administrators and providing basic Meeting 101 education via seminars and on the company's intranet web site called BayWeb. The site also will include a directory of events.

Since travel policy isn't mandated-and won't ever be-use of the meetings program guidelines and services will have to be "sold to" the company.