Planners Intranet Usage Growing

<B> Planners Intranet Usage Growing</B>

By Chris Davis

As the Internet's role in the meetings industry steadily progresses from intriguing novelty to important resource, more planners are turning to their corporations' intranets for everything from registering meetings to posting hotel rates.

According to a Meetings Monitor survey, more than 82 percent of 201 respondents work at companies that have an intranet, and slightly more than half of them have meeting information posted there. Two years ago, only 37 percent of respondents said their company's intranet included meetings information.

There's a wide gap across the corporate landscape, though, concerning exactly how intranets relate to the meetings department. Some companies don't utilize them at all, others mandate meetings registration through the intranet--plenty of companies fall in between. Eastman Chemical Co. of Kingsport, Tenn., soon will mandate that any offsite meeting, or any onsite gathering that involves catering or other additional expenses, be registered through a meetings page on its corporate intranet, said Jessica McGee, director of travel and meeting services.

McGee hopes the new mandate will provide not only hard data on Eastman Chemical's group spending and the subsequently better deals, but also improve communication between departments holding meetings. "Sometimes, we'll contact a hotel for a meeting and find we have another group booked there," she said. "It can be confusing for us and our suppliers, because we're not speaking with one voice." And, of course, the opportunity for a multi-meeting contract has been missed.

Eastman Chemical, which has a relatively laissez-faire meetings and travel program with few mandates and restrictions, will nonetheless reserve the right to not reimburse the meeting host if he or she does not register online. The new policy, McGee said, represents "a major culture change."

Those with experience in meetings consolidation always have stressed the importance of initiating a process to capture data on air and hotel spending, a tricky task for many planners, particularly at large or decentralized corporations. Intranet-based meetings registration can be a valuable tool for a planner in determining where their corporation's money is spent.

But the perpetual variable in an intranet-based meetings registration program is the level of compliance, said Carol Ann Salcito, president of Stamford, Conn.-based Management Alternatives. "As intranets become available in more companies, more meetings processes will move in that direction," she said. "But I don't see a move toward mandating. Companies might look more towards use-or-lose policies or charging for the manual process. But there's a question as to what happens to employees if they don't comply."

Sophisticated meetings management programs can use mandated intranet registration to increase usage of preferred suppliers, a step that will be taken by Joseph A. Seagram & Sons Inc. of New York. Other companies, though, are finding value without online registration. Some intranets include tools to help planners and other employees set up events, including contract how-tos and special hotel deals.

Towers Perrin in Philadelphia, for example, hopes to have a meetings page on its intranet by year-end. "We definitely want to create a template for employees planning small meetings to show them what to do if it's six-, three- or one-month out," said corporate meeting planner Martha Gorman. "We'll show them what a rooming list is and have a calendar posted so people can see when other departments are holding meetings."

The goal is to reduce the amount of information transmitted by word of mouth about company meetings and the services the Towers Perrin meetings department provides. "We want to educate the employees and make everything more accessible," Gorman said.

Richard Del Colle, Burlington, Mass.-based meetings program manager at Hewlett-Packard, developed one of the first large-scale applications for meetings management on the H-P intranet (Meetings Today, April 28, 1997). H-P mandates online meeting registration, which has saved millions of dollars over the past few years (Meetings Today, Nov. 16).

Today, H-P has pushed through more than $500,000 in meeting credits it negotiated on its hotel cancellation penalties by posting the availability of the credits on its intranet site, Del Colle said. "It's simply a matter of pushing the information out in the newsletter and Web site. You'll get your money back," he added.

The Monitor survey also revealed that more than half (52 percent) of planners use the Internet to aid with some aspects of the meeting process. The most popular usage continues to be site and destination selection, with about 84 percent of planners who use the Internet for work seeking hotel options over the Web. About 78 percent survey destination options.

While the percentage of Internet planners researching destinations online is just about unchanged from a 1996 Monitor survey, the percentage researching hotels has increased from 70 percent, making it the most popular online planning application. That's no doubt due in part to the rising amount of information available online, and the proliferation of hotel-search and online-RFP sites, and the publicity they've engendered (Meetings Today, Feb. 22).

"I'll look at available facilities for offsite events, like restaurants or other dinner sites, especially in cities I'm less familiar with," said Kerri Koenig, conference and event manager for Basking Ridge, N.J.-based AT&T. "I'll also look at various hotels on the chains' Web sites."

Still, despite the capability of several of these sites, only 13 percent of respondents who use the Internet for work actually book meetings online.

Koenig is one planner who has not. "I'd still rather use national salespeople," she said. "Not dealing with a person is still a scary proposition. Perhaps if I were at a smaller corporation, without relationships with national salespeople, I'd be more inclined.