Estée Lauder this month will begin to flow all meetings bookings through its new strategic meetings management program, which includes a single technology platform, policy, meetings procurement card and a core group of part-time meeting planners throughout the organization.
The initiative is the culmination of a two-year project to develop a formal meetings program with standard contracts and sourcing methods and includes plans to leverage meetings with transient spending.
Eventually, the company will extend meetings management to its international travel program, which recently has added two travel managers to oversee Asia/Pacific and the Europe, Middle East and Africa regions.
Leading the initiative is executive director of global travel and meeting services Cynthia Shumate, who embarked on the process in early 2007. While the company didn't have a formal meetings management program, it had hundreds of employees planning meetings and signing contracts despite limited formal training in proper recording of meetings expenditures, at times paying for meetings with corporate cards rather than company approved American Express meeting cards.
Shumate said that due to the categorization of some meetings charges as travel expenses, "for years our travel entertainment has been overstated and meetings understated because people have been covering these budgets out of T&E, not realizing that some of it is attached to the meetings budget."
Early in the project, Estée Lauder deployed the StarCite meetings management technology platform and mandated that all meetings be registered on a master calendar.
"We put out a message to retool the entire company as to how we look at meetings, source them, where we have them, the amount of visibility we have to our data and how we reconcile and measure our budgets," said Shumate.
Shumate and her team recently identified a group of "power users," meeting planners across the company trained on the StarCite technology who have been given a standard meetings contract, a consistent meetings sourcing process and a single payment platform with the American Express meeting card, of which there are about 150 cardholders.
"It's not reasonable to have 500 people all calling themselves meeting planners," she said. With a core group of employees to help Estée Lauder's brands plan and manage meetings with proper data recording, the company can now "start running reports to understand what our total exposure is," according to Shumate.
Beginning next year, Shumate will hold regular meetings with those power users in order to obtain feedback on suppliers, which will be used to help develop a preferred meeting supplier program that would integrate with the transient travel program.
Estée Lauder holds about one dozen large meetings annually, which often are national sales meetings with no more than 350 attendees. The company also has thousands of smaller meetings for employee training and product launches. Shumate said some brands require salespeople to be educated twice annually and others four times per year.
For some of the company's bigger brands, such as Clinique or MAC Cosmetics, that could add up to about 1,600 small meetings annually. Previously, those meetings were not preferred by hotels because they are short in length and use substantial meeting space for product demonstrations, but only require a few sleeping rooms, Shumate said.
"That's a hard meeting to count on," she said, "but when you say to a chain that you are sitting on the potential of 1,600 of these around the United States, is that of interest? That is a different recognition."
In addition to the U.S. rollout of the strategic meetings management program, Shumate and her team are working to gain further oversight of international travel and meetings. In the past few months, the company has added a travel manager in its Paris regional office to coordinate travel for eight countries in the region and one in Hong Kong to oversee 10 markets.
While the travel managers in those areas are new, the overseas program already has been consolidated with American Express Business Travel. The U.S. program uses Carlson Wagonlit Travel for travel management services.
The company additionally is launching a global travel risk management program with International SOS, conducting a global expense reporting request-for-proposals process, developing a global hotel RFP and applying its strategic meetings management discipline internationally.
"There is a clear understanding that the overall hotel relationship isn't just transient," Shumate said. "If we, as the client, can be more proactive in managing and bringing our group dollars to our preferred relationships, then hopefully we become a more valuable client because we can manage who that group dollar goes to rather than just letting it go anywhere."
Originally published Dec. 21, 2009