Temporary staffing and employment agency Adecco has saved more than $200,000 in the first half of this year on its meeting expenditures by hiring help of its own to drive 95 percent compliance with a policy rolled out in 2005, said the company's director of travel and meeting services.
Three months of data collection and internal surveys helped to build senior management support, which has now mandated use of the meetings department.
Adecco, with an estimated 2006 meetings spend of $2.2 million, last year implemented a policy that required any events with 10 or more room nights to be sourced through a central meetings and travel department. The company's U.S. operations are launched from Melville, N.Y., and its global headquarters are in Glattbrugg, Switzerland.
Under the new policy, Adecco's multiple third-party vendors in meetings management have been reduced to one partnership with Frederick, Md.-based Conferon Global Services—which on Aug. 29 rebranded as Experient
(Meetings Today, Sept. 11)."We saw meetings as a huge opportunity, not only for leveraging, but also for savings," said Barbara Finn, Adecco's director of travel and meeting services. "While we didn't really know the true spend of meetings overall, we knew it was substantial—and why would we manage our corporate travel spend and not manage our meetings spend? That's why we made the decision."
The bulk of the savings have come from negotiating room rates and food and beverage, Finn said, adding that "tons" of savings were gained by negotiating out meeting room charges. She also helped to eliminate cancellation penalties by reusing the cancelled space.
At the same time Adecco chose Experient as a meetings management partner, it also implemented meeting cards from American Express. The card has helped the department compile data on meetings expenditures separately from transient expenditures, Finn said.
"Any meeting-type activity was driven toward the meeting cards," she said.
Experient and Adecco's legal department jointly have developed a contract template sent to vendors along with the request for proposals that acts as a standard addendum with company-approved terms.
"It's something that our legal department said were our requirements. Then, we built on top of that our wish list in terms of meeting requirements," Finn said. "We had one big property for a large event that really pushed back. They finally folded because we told them a year out that we wouldn't consider them, and they came back and said they would do it."
The company this year sent RFPs to meetings technology vendors. Finn said she hopes to have a new technology system in place by the start of 2007.
"We obviously want to integrate the meetings software we're looking at now with our online booking tool. We want to streamline those processes, rather than have multiple systems," Finn said.
The company's accounts payable department acts as an auditor for the meetings program, alerting Finn if they receive invoices for meeting services outside of the approved policy.
Noncompliance is not punished, but employees who book outside of policy are reminded of the approved process.
"It's still fairly new. It's been a year but you always have new hires that come in and say they didn't know," according to Finn. "It's an ongoing audit process, but our noncompliance is very minimal because our senior management is supporting the initiative."
Finn estimated that the policy, which requires any meeting with 10 or more room nights to be registered on a meetings portal on the company intranet, has a 95 percent compliance rate. Stakeholders submit their needs and meeting specifications, Finn gains the necessary approvals and the request is sent to Experient for planning and sourcing services. All contracts are routed through the procurement department and expenditures of more than $25,000 must be preapproved by the company CFO.
"We wanted to make sure that meetings followed the same guidelines as any other expenditure within the company," Finn said.
Experient also will work with the meeting stakeholder directly when sourcing the event, she said.
Meetings were on the radar after a transient travel policy was adopted in 2000. Finn's department initiated the program and set about gathering data. Prior to the new policy, meetings were "totally decentralized" at Adecco, Finn said. Finn joined Adecco in 1999 to manage travel, corporate card and meetings and events.
"We had our marketing or event planners using different companies and not utilizing the corporate travel function at all. It was very decentralized," she said.
Finn then used surveys during a period of three months to discover who was planning meetings, what kind of meetings they were planning and what they needed to better source meeting services. Those surveys helped drive compliance by giving Finn a better idea of what type of solution was needed for corporate meetings.
"Once we were able to compile all that data and have a real understanding of what was out there, we were more surprised than we thought we would be as to the number of meetings going on. It was much higher than we anticipated," she said. "It's good news because it obviously needed to be controlled."
Finn approached senior management, which approved the initiative. The company president communicated his support of the program in an e-mail to employees, and the policy was mandated.
"Our CFO and CEO were very supportive when we were doing our data collection and showing what we anticipated the savings could be—and not only the savings, the efficiency gains and increased controls. It wasn't something they could ignore," she said.
In 2007, in addition to implementing new meetings technology, Finn said she hopes to compile a list of preferred transient properties that can be used for meetings as well.