By consolidating the request-for-proposals process for both
its transient and group hotel programs to a single provider, medical technology
supplier Edwards Lifesciences hopes to improve visibility into its hotel
spending, improve its negotiating power and ease the workload of an
already-stretched travel team.
Edwards three years ago turned to hospitality sourcing
technology supplier Lanyon to automate its transient hotel RFP process, said
Jessica McLin, Edwards project leader for travel and events. Now, the firm is
integrating Lanyon's meetings procurement tool into its program. Edwards
expects to introduce in 2012 a policy that would require all offsite meetings
to be registered in the tool.
"My goal is to be pretty fully functional in the system
by 2012, and we're rolling out the training," McLin said. "We're not
a mandated culture, so we're stressing the benefits and value-adds that will
come from that policy."
Edwards' travel program is growing, she said, and the
company needed visibility into meetings spending. Rather than centralize
meetings within the travel department—currently a team of three—using the tool
instead will put the onus back on the meeting registrant.
"We were trying to have all sourcing go through me,"
McLin said, but "that's not realistic for one person. If we have
visibility in how people are sourcing, let them do it through the tool and ask
us for help when they need it. That's a better long-term model for us than
piling workload on one person and setting that person up for failure."
Edwards through the tool will be able to view its annual,
quarterly and regional meetings spending, none of which it can see now, she
said. The company also will be able to compare data from meeting cards and
expense reports.
McLin said the data also would be useful as the company
seeks to forge new relationships with some major hotel brands. "We want
our meetings spend to count just as much as our business travel spend,"
she said.
Edwards is training meeting planners in one- to two-hour
sessions to use the tool, she said. Eventually, Edwards hopes to have within
each department or division "super users" who can act as resources as
new employees join the company.
When selecting a tool, McLin said Edwards considered developing
a system internally and choosing a more established supplier of automated
meeting procurement tools with more functionality than Lanyon, which introduced
its meetings tool in 2010. Because Lanyon still is developing some of the
functionality around its tool, McLin said it was a better fit as a middle
ground.
"Lanyon is still developing some capabilities that other
tools already have, but we decided to grow together because we didn't want to
pay for a lot of functionality we weren't going to be using for a long time,"
she said. "As for developing in-house, our IT team is great but stretched
very thin. It would require too much of their bandwidth and would never be
quite as good as something on the market from someone with specialty knowledge
like a Lanyon, StarCite or Cvent."