Pharmaceutical Co. Taps Meeting Planner For Travel

<FONT SIZE="+3"><B>Pharmaceutical Co. Taps Meeting Planner For Travel

</B>By Cheryl Rosen

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Florham Park., N.J. </I>- When Schein Pharmacueutical went looking for its first-ever travel manager, the search was a quick one. It began and ended with meeting and trade-show coordinator Debbie Ricciardelli.

Over the past few months, in addition to her meeting planning duties, Ricciardelli has engineered a consolidation of Schein's $1.4 million air volume account under American Express and taken on the day-to-day supervision of two new on-site agents. She has perused travel management reports and renegotiated contracts based on the volume they show. One day soon-when the dust settles-she may just assume the formal title of travel manager.

"I was already handling meeting planning, and I got travel through the process of elimination. But it was a great match," Ricciardelli said. "Most of Schein's travel is to pharmaceutical trade shows, and often to trade shows where we are exhibiting. What used to happen was that we'd let each person book their own travel-some to shows where we would have only one or two people going, but some where we had 15 or 20 going, and staying as long as a week. Now when I book a meeting, I also book the air and hotel, and the company gets the commissions. I give a list of attendees to our travel counselors, and then coordinate everything with them."

Ricciardelli said Schein has the best of three worlds when it comes to negotiations: It can use American Express rates or those of parent company Bayer, or it can negotiate on its own. And the partnership with Amex also allows the company to access those rates at hotels, and use their negotiated fee for Federal Express mailing of tickets.

Salespeople are mandated to use the agency, but as word is getting around, senior managers are using the on-site agency as well. And that trend should pick up even more as the company begins to offer American Express' technology-including T&E Mail, its e-mail-based automated reservation system, and Expense Manager, its expense reporting system.

Ricciardelli hopes to install both those packages-which she will get at no charge from American Express-by the end of the year. While she is not positive that the technology products will sell her travelers on the American Express service, "they sold it to me," she said.

Passing that enthusiasm on to her boss, sales operations director Steve Rennas, was a relatively simple matter. Rennas is a believer in technology as a productivity tool, and is in the process of automating Schein's sales force by giving everyone a laptop.

Ricciardelli hopes to expand the mandated following of travel policy companywide, and to include additional Schein offices in Cherry Hill, N.J., Phoenix, Puerto Rico and upstate New York. "We're leaning toward consolidating all the booking here and putting in ticket printers at the other offices," she said.