Biotech Co. Consolidates Mtgs.

Amgen Inc. documented more than $3 million, or about 22 percent, in savings off its meeting and group travel program in 2001, after implementing a meetings consolidation program and developing an intranet-based meetings registry.

The Thousand Oaks, Calif.-based biotechnology firm plans to expand consolidation initiatives later this year, including the introduction of a mandate to further capture meetings activity and data.

Amgen also has signed a contract with StarCite to assist with data consolidation and hotel sourcing, said Betsy Bondurant, the company's assistant director of meeting planning and trade shows.

Amgen's consolidation program, launched in 1999 and refined several times since, is centered on encouraging planners and administrative assistants in the company's sales departments to register meetings through an internally constructed intranet page, allowing Bondurant's team to handle contract negotiations.

The program still allows nonprofessional planners logistical responsibility, Bondurant said, which has smoothed the evolution to a consolidated environment. "We'll work with them on the requests for proposals, but they get to decide at which hotel the meeting will be, though we may make a recommendation," Bondurant said. "Really, we want to assist with the contract process. Once their supervisors sign off on the budget, they get to have the meeting back. It actually takes the contractual onus off of them, minimizes our risk and is a huge time-saver. Some of our admins enjoy planning as a perk, and we let them do a lot of it on their own."

But not contract negotiations, and that has turned into significant savings. The 22 percent figure used by Bondurant is comprised entirely by savings on hotel sleeping rooms and is tabulated by calculating the difference between each host hotel's initial meeting quote—not the property's rack rate—and the actual post-negotiation cost.

Bondurant decided to embark upon a meetings consolidation program in 1999—following a Meeting Professionals International conference session that touted its benefits—and came to the conclusion that an intranet-based registry was the best method with which to determine the company's actual meeting and group activity.

"We developed a meeting registry on the intranet, using in-house resources," Bondurant said. "This was not a corporatewide initiative. We advertised this in our sales and marketing departments, and some meetings were registered. At first, we asked for a lot of information about the meeting, but then we realized that the less information we asked for, the higher compliance would be."

The registry was streamlined to request only proposed budget information, meeting dates and choice of property or hotel chain. Compliance grew throughout 2000, a year in which Bondurant was able to document 18 percent savings using the formula above.

As captured volume grew, Bondurant came to believe that an outside vendor likely would better handle Amgen's data-consolidation needs more so than would an internally developed product. She settled on Philadelphia-based StarCite, calling it a better fit for Amgen's needs than an offline agency or meetings management firm.

"We were looking for help with consolidating our data and spend," Bondurant said. "We just wanted the sourcing, not the full, consolidated meeting management other firms offer."

Bondurant beta tested StarCite between March and June of last year, successfully using the site's functionalities to track data, assist in the negotiating process and save time.

Amgen's commission-based contract with StarCite runs through 2002. Key to the contract was StarCite's agreement to use hotel national sales representatives whom Amgen had developed relationships with instead of the portal's own contacts. "We've spent a lot of time cultivating those relationships, so this is just the right thing to do," Bondurant said.

Before consolidation, Amgen employees planning meetings used a group of company-qualified meeting planning companies and independent planners, mostly in southern California. While this structure still exists in some parts of the company, notably in some research and development areas, a new mandate to register meetings soon will make it a thing of the past. Bondurant said Amgen would institute the companywide mandate in the next few months. "The consequences for noncompliance will be pretty stiff," she said, declining further detail. "We understand the value of consolidating and tracking spend."

Amgen also has seen success in influencing negotiated transient hotel rates with group volume, a strategy Bondurant will continue this year although creating combined group/transient contracts is unlikely.