Advito Hires Lilly's Odom
George Odom, former Eli Lilly and Co. leader of travel and meetings services, has joined Advito, the separate consulting division of BCD Travel, as senior director of global business development, the company announced earlier this month. Meanwhile, the consulting division also announced enhancements to its air and hotel program management services and tools, as well as its benchmarking service.
Odom, who spent his entire 29-year career at Lilly, including 16 years as the head of its travel services department, will be responsible for expanding Advito's meetings consulting practice, among other duties.
He will assume his new position this week at the National Business Travel Association International Convention & Exposition. He will be based in Indiana and report directly to vice president of global business development Mark Williams.
In his new role, Odom said he would draw on "the expertise I have gained through the years at Lilly, getting that travel and meetings program going, and seeing if there is the ability to leverage through Advito to help people manage their business better both in the travel and meetings areas."
Odom said his most significant buyer accomplishments were consolidating Lilly's business units in Europe and meetings companywide. "That was so brand-new. No one had really done that before. We couldn't really steal anyone's ideas," he said.
Advito also has released RFP Decision Suite, a hotel procurement and management tool that converts offers from individual properties into "accept-reject-revise" recommendations based on a custom scoring system. The model gives an overall cost-of-stay calculation, factoring in the rate offered by a property relative to the target and the monetary value of amenities. The system also provides benchmarking summaries through dashboards, which provide analysis of savings, compliance and rates on geographic levels including global region, country or city, said Advito vice president of business intelligence Maria Chevalier.
The internally developed tools are used by consultants handling the RFP process for full-service clients, said Bob Brindley, Advito vice president for the Americas. "Pulling all that together will really allow the clients and the consultants the ability to more efficiently use the information, process the information and focus more on the strategic issues, instead of just kind of processing through all of the data," he said.
The company also recently released an Air Contract Scorecard component that includes year-over-year data metrics and graphical dashboards. The tool measures trends based on carrier, market, carrier savings, contract target versus actual and quality of service index information.
The benchmarking data is derived from more than 400 organizations responding to online surveys, which includes Advito's more than 200 clients, 15 percent of which are non-BCD Travel customers, according to Chevalier. Since its launch in mid-February, more than 50 corporations have used the benchmarking service, she said.