Using The Power Of Persuasion

<B>Using The Power Of Persuasion</B>
<I>Thompson Corp.</I>

By Chris Davis

Thomson Corp. is set to embark on a nonmandated meetings consolidation program, using an internal meeting calendar and a panel of meeting planners from its subsidiaries to determine best practices and capture expenditure data.

Stamford, Conn.-based Thomson, which will hire a consultant to manage the consolidation efforts, hopes to capture about $40 million of meetings expenditures and leverage that spending with suppliers, said director of corporate travel Christopher Staal.

Staal will not mandate that internal meeting sponsors register their meetings with planners or restrict site selection, he said, but hopes to convince employees of the value of registering the basics of their event--dates, property and number of attendees--on a calendar on Thomson's intranet.

"Thomson is very mandate-sensitive," Staal said. "I used to be a proponent of mandates as the way to gain compliance and get savings and control, but I've entirely changed my thinking, as we have about 95 percent compliance with transient travel policy without mandates. That happened because they provide solutions that make sense for travelers and the company."

The calendar initially was created with Microsoft's Access database software to detail the whereabouts of Thomson's senior executives. The calendar was not accessible to Thomson employees for security reasons. But the new calendar will be open to internal meeting sponsors and Staal thinks some savings opportunities will be readily apparent once they enter their meetings information.

Thomson is a holding corporation of several publishing companies in many fields, and there is little interaction between subsidiaries. As such, Staal said, it is likely that subsidiaries are staging meetings at the same hotel chains and not leveraging the combined spending for better negotiations. "If all meeting planners submit their information, the calendar becomes a great, consolidated piece of information," Staal said. "That alone would be a catalyst for interaction between companies."

Staal said the calendar should be fully accessible by the first quarter of 2001.

The current, senior-executive calendar was created by a six-month-old council of meeting planners from Thomson's subsidiaries. That council, which is cochaired by Staal, will expand its focus to share best practices and ideas among themselves.

"We want to make sure we capture benchmarking data, as well as talk about ways to diminish attrition damages and reduce breakouts or food and beverage expenditures," Staal said. "We want the council to be the guiding body to bring the right solutions to employees sponsoring meetings."

Staal believes Thomson will have consolidated data ready to be acted upon by July 1, at the latest.

That information will be handled by an as-yet-hired consultant, who will work with the planners' council and report to Staal to determine what the next step will be. Staal considered meeting management firms and expanding the roles of current planners to handle data consolidation, but opted against both possibilities.

"Consolidation is a full-time job in itself, and all of our planners already have full-time responsibilities," Staal said. "We want to have one person as a funnel to capture all the savings opportunities and potential strategic relationships, and we wanted a Thomson-specific culture. We didn't want to outsource this because we don't want the force-fed solutions that some of these companies have to offer. But we didn't want to add significantly to Thomson's headcount either, because, in the end, we don't know that savings will materialize."

Staal has the support of senior management for the consolidation project, for which he credited executive vice president of strategic vendor alliances Barbara Scarcelli.

"She was the sponsor among senior management," Staal said. "She recognized the opportunities for cost savings and the ability to build strategic relationships with our suppliers as soon as we proposed this to her."

Typically, companywide meetings consolidation includes some sort of requirement of planners and internal sponsors to ensure data is captured. Thomson's proposed program has none of that, and though Staal expects employees to participate because they see the value of the program and not because they have to, it doesn't mean that the company is soft selling consolidation.

"It's a different approach but it's not a soft approach," Staal said. "It will be appealing because people will see the value in participating. We'd all like to do something that makes sense. We want to save money. But we also want to develop and determine who we have strategic relationships with, who we want to give our business to while we save money."

That, Staal said, is the essence of the Thomson consolidation proposal: increasing the level of interaction and strategy between planners and employees, planners from different subsidiaries and planners and suppliers.

"It is ambitious," Staal said. "We want to bridge new relationships, including those across international and business lines, where no rapport exists right now.