Target Corp: Policy, Tech Increases Compliance, Savings

Minneapolis-based retailer Target Corp. has centralized its meetings program, developed a meetings policy and used technology to push policy compliance and increase savings.

Target travel sourcing lead Laurie Kazimer said the company last year avoided an additional 178 percent, year over year, in meetings hotel expenditures during negotiations and generated further savings by integrating GetThere's online booking and meetings management tools to direct meetings to preferred transient hotels. Policy language that directs small meetings to her department has allowed more events to be centrally sourced, but technology deployment has allowed Target to avoid adding headcount to manage the additional workload.

Target in 2003 created a policy to govern small meetings, as part of a larger travel policy. "Small meetings presented the biggest opportunity," said Kazimer, pointing to the cost savings that would be generated by policy compliance as the driving factor. Larger, highly produced meetings are managed outside of her department by Target's corporate events team.

Meanwhile, Target created within the travel department a centralized sourcing and planning team of those "knowledgeable in sourcing and contracting, that would work with our internal employees to help them source and plan their meetings" to handle the meetings approval process, Kazimer said. Although the policy is not mandated, "any travel or meeting of 10 or more needs to be approved, sourced and planned by this team," she said.

"Our team, when they want to start planning a meeting, completes an approval form. Once it's approved by senior management, it goes through the travel team. We start working on finding and sourcing that location, setting up a registration site and booking flights. It's really driven a lot of process efficiencies."

Before the policy was enacted, many different employees handled meetings management. "As we developed the policy, we developed the centralized team. It was hand in hand," Target's Kazimer said. "Now we really have those pieces being done by people that are experts in what they do."

The policy is communicated to the company via the company's Intranet site. The number of meetings the team has handled has increased steadily, increasing the travel department's workload. "The policy was driving the small increase year over year, so we knew that we would need a tool to maintain headcount that we currently had and still have today," she said.

Target has used GetThere's online booking tool for transient travel since 2001, and chose GetThere's DirectMeetings to integrate the two. "It provided us with a solution that brought the end-to-end into play," she said.

GetThere's tools also highlight the company's preferred suppliers during the booking process. "We definitely use our preferred hotel suppliers whenever possible in planning these meetings and sourcing these locations," Kazimer said. "We find that it is beneficial to have our spend in these relationships. If you know you're going to work with your preferred suppliers, you definitely have a better idea of what to plan for budgeting and you leverage that in your annual negotiations."

Both the policy and the technology have allowed greater savings and spend leveraging. From 2005 to 2006, Kazimer said savings through negotiations increased by 178 percent. That percentage is measured by the amount proposed when sourcing the hotel versus the contracted rate.

The implementation of the DirectMeetings tool has allowed the number of staffers on Kazimer's team to remain steady, even though the number of meetings handled has increased. Last year, the team planned 300 meetings, double what it planned the year before.

Kazimer and her team worked with senior management to deploy the new approval process.

"Senior management continues to be very supportive, as we provide savings metrics on a monthly basis for them in our travel reporting," she said. "Policy compliance, knowing and understanding where our meeting spend was happening, really wanting to be able to leverage that spend with our preferred suppliers on the business travel side. Those things were very important to us as we developed the policy."