Despite the challenges strategic meetings management initiatives in many organizations pose, financial and efficiency savings gains prove the efforts worthwhile, buyers and a consultant told attendees at the Business Travel Media Group's Tech Talk 2011 conference here this month.
"I have never in my life been so exposed to something so convoluted and difficult to understand even the basic elements," said WellPoint strategic sourcing manager for travel Cindy Heston of meetings management. "Meetings is a whole different world."
Not on her agenda in 2008, when she was hired at WellPoint, Heston said meetings management a year later became her night and weekend job as she attempted to answer the most basic of questions from her chief procurement officer: " 'How many meetings do we have?' No one had the answer. I raised my hand and said we can change our travel policy" to require that employees "send me the contracts before they sign them, and I can just count" the number of meetings.
"When you saw the contracts and the terms and conditions, you were horrified to think about liability to the company. I could have just done my count, but it was much more involved than I even imagined," said Heston, who worked with suppliers to modify contracts before they were signed.
Former Grant Thornton strategic meetings manager Cindy Carlson said she also grew concerned about risks in contracts signed by outside offices and the scope of the unknown when she first tried to determine the number of meetings the company held nationwide. The five-person meeting planning staff at headquarters, including three full-time planners, executed about 125 meetings per year, "but that didn't include any of the local or regional meetings or meetings that slipped through the cracks, which is one of the reasons why we needed to implement a strategic meetings management program."
Carlson said her former CFO asked her, " 'Tell me what you don't know.' I realized that we didn't know quite a bit. When we went to the next level of sophistication for our meeting tool, that's when we got a bit smarter and started looking for ways to involve all our offices to at least register meetings or go through some type of approval so we had some idea" of nationwide meetings volume.
Technology also helped the accounting firm consistently track total spending per meeting and savings, Carlson said. A local office might report a meeting cost of $10,000, factoring only the hotel bill, Carlson said, "but in reality it's more like $40,000 or $50,000" when including travel, contractors, materials, shipping and production.
Data Drives Decisions
Armed with data on meetings, WellPoint's Heston said she quickly "got the support for additional headcount," policy changes and technology. Nearly two years after she first began to study how meetings at WellPoint were contracted, managed and tracked, Heston said the company now has more than 1,000 meetings a year and 15 professional planners who support different regions in the United States. Within the travel team, two planners contract board and executive meetings. The company's sales and marketing department continues to manage meetings independently, "with our protocols now," Heston said.
Today, the company requires "registration, not negotiation" of all meetings. Even WellPoint's professional planners are required to register all events. "They cannot go out to a hotel directly to start that dialogue. Don't push me a contract because that means you've already started negotiations," Heston said. The registration process "sends a message to our supplier base that we have a relatively managed process at WellPoint."
WellPoint tried to rationalize its supply base, "something that is very irrational as every event is a RFP. Well, that's a time-waster," Heston said. "We worked with our suppliers and said that we really want to have four paths of a negotiation.
The first path is for a "non-contracted event" held at a WellPoint facility with guest rooms in a "transient block with no liability" at one of the company's preferred hotels, Heston said. "We just block the hotels at our transient rate." Most such blocks are for 20 to 40 attendees, she added.
Secondly, WellPoint worked with hotel chains and eventually developed "54 template agreements," including all terms and conditions, to make the contracts as "plug-and-play" as possible.
A "more strategic way to handle events," Heston said, is meeting bundling. "You have a broad scope of all events going on in the business and you start to segment them. These are Midwest broker meetings, and we have 50 that run every Tuesday and Wednesday. Let's bundle these as a whole and not waste time doing them one at a time."
The fourth path is the standard RFP for a single event that doesn't fall into other categories.
WellPoint uses technology for attendee registration and RFPs. But Heston said there are key areas of meetings management that no technology tool today sufficiently captures. "Technology is great in round one" of hotel negotiations, "but then everything goes offline. It's really a key area that we want to automate." Heston said it's one of the "procurement validation" aspects she would like to see such tools offer, along with integration with expense technology and air analysis of destination options.
Hotel databases, Heston said, should include base prices for such standard charges as Wi-Fi, taxes or audiovisual basics, and it "would also be nice to run the transient hotel program" on the same technology as meetings. That would make it easier for a company to "almost have [airline marketshare analysis firm] Prism metrics for hotels" and determine what share to give specific properties in a market as part of their strategic partner programs.
Technology Options Abound
Meetings technology platforms can help companies better see who is booking and attending meetings, and help boost compliance with internal policies, regulatory reporting, vendor management and risk management procedures, said Meetings Analytics founder and principal Kimberly Meyer. Technology also can help document consolidation savings, which vendors claim can exceed 15 percent, she added, and said industry metrics peg "30 percent of all travel due to meetings, and the opportunities are significant."
Unlike travel management, meetings management is "far more manual, which means garbage in, garbage out," she said. Planners, whether internal or employed by travel or meetings management companies, "may enter 500 different fields of data during planning," she said.
"Meetings is at least 10 years behind transient" when it comes to data standardization, Meyer said. "Most of these tools have grown up talking different languages from each other, from global distribution systems and from hotels. If you think you have data issues in transient, just you wait."
Companies should carefully consider whether they need technology to more effectively manage meetings. Those with fewer than 100 simple, domestic meetings per year who manage effectively today with a database or spreadsheet might find it provides the necessary reporting and visibility. Those with more than 100 meetings, "complex meetings, complex hierarchies" or that use various combinations of internal planners and agencies "certainly need all the tools to manage meetings well," Meyer said.
What one metric shows the value of the meetings program?
The savings analysis, agreed Heston and Carlson. "The way we were able to get to where we are today is to say there's money in it," Heston said, pointing to double-digit percentage savings. At Grant Thornton, Carlson said she was able to prove more efficiency. "We were able to do more with less, which is a type of savings."
In addition to tracking budgets at three stages of planning--approved, working and final--Grant Thornton tracked savings for every cost avoided and perk negotiated, Carlson said. It also tracked meetings per planner to determine when it needed to bring on additional resources.
The article originally was published in Business Travel news.