Fast-food giant Yum Brands Inc., which has countered industry trends by growing its meetings volume commensurate with the company's rapid growth, has managed to limit spending in a decentralized structure by maintaining a strategy of outsourcing logistical management and implementing online registration solutions.
Louisville, Ky.-based Yum Brands is the parent company of KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell restaurants. The company changed its name from Tricon Global Restaurants in May 2002, at about the same time the company acquired the Long John Silver's and A&W All-American Restaurant chains for approximately $320 million.
Yum Brands stands apart from many companies in terms of its meetings program. While others have cut meeting spending, implemented new policies to tightly control meeting activities and/or centralized operations or consolidated spending, Yum Brands has not taken such courses of action other than a general effort to keep down costs.
The decision emanated from company philosophy regarding the purpose of meetings, said director of meetings and events RoseAnn Howard. "We have very specific reasons for meetings and messages we want to convey," Howard said. "Though we want to keep costs down, our goal is to fulfill the objectives of the meeting and to do whatever it takes to make that happen. We want our employees to be motivated and take action. We want them to buy into our message, to share and create success."
Howard's three-person meetings department handles roughly 50 meetings and events annually, encompassing the corporation's most strategic or largest meetings, as well as anything that involves the highest levels of company management or high levels of production. The individual department sponsoring the event usually handles the remainder, though Howard and her team are available if help is requested. The meetings and events department does not charge back for its services.
Since meeting spending is attributable to the individual department sponsoring a given event, it behooves that department to find cost-effective meeting management solutions. To that end, Howard has posted information about Yum Brands' longtime outsourcing partner, Scottsdale, Ariz.-based independent planning firm HelmsBriscoe
(Meetings Today, Jan. 21, 2002).Yum encourages, but does not mandate, the use of HelmsBriscoe's site selection services and has used the firm's services for about seven years, Howard said. "We've set up HelmsBriscoe on our intranet so they can be accessed by departments handling their own meetings," she said. "This ensures they'll get the same negotiated rates that we would. There's no mandate or policy, but meeting sponsors get better rates than they would on their own, so they go back after they've tried it."
Most often, internal meeting sponsors request a destination or city, and accept recommendations about specific properties that would fit the proposed meeting. Howard's group, however, does not have the power to compel the use of a particular site. "It is rare that someone overrides us about the site," she said. "Unless there's a specific business reason why it must be at a certain site, or there's a flavor offered they can't get anywhere else, they leave it up to us."
Howard maintains an internal calendar of proposed events, which is used to direct multiple events to single properties. "We try to synergize and we negotiate multi-meeting contracts," Howard said. "We are also active in finding canceled hotel space."
Yum has used Philadelphia-based online meetings management firm StarCite's RegWeb attendee registration piece for about two years, Howard said. The tool is a boon for a sprawling company with thousands of restaurants and employees overseas, and allows her access to attendee information. "It gives us fantastic reporting capability," Howard said. "We get everything from jacket size to flight arrival information. We can manage information faster and better."
After events, Howard's department issues surveys to attendees—requesting opinions on content improvement and plans to implement information imparted during the meeting—and adds expenditure data to a running total of meeting expenses.
One innovation Yum has explored is the use of television as an ingredient of its larger events. In October, the company broadcast an anniversary event that was designed to communicate information to thousands of employees through leased-access cable television. The broadcast reached 11 million homes in cities containing high concentrations of company employees and Yum Brands restaurants, including New York, Los Angeles and Dallas.