From the names of the com-panies represented on the stage, you could tell that this topic -- discussed before a standing-room-only crowd at Meeting Professionals International's World Education Congress, held in August -- warranted serious consideration.
From the planning ranks, you had folks from Anheuser-Busch, Abbott Labs, and Cisco. On the supplier side, you had reps from PlanSoft, seeUthere, and StarCite. And what all of them were saying in the 75-minute breakout session made perfect sense: Creating a program of meetings consolidation -- more precisely, centralizing common processes and capturing logistical and financial data related to meetings -- can help save a company quite a lot of money.
But then came the exchange that produced a collective sticker-shock moment. One audience member asked how much an enterprise-wide, Web-interfaced software system for consolidation of all meeting elements would cost a company. The answer: north of $100,000.
From the attendees, stunned silence. Then came the next query: How long would it take to get such a system up and running across all departments? A few years, at least.
Though fully accurate, such information is likely to scare most planners away from attempting consolidation, rather than motivate them to tackle the job. And that's a shame. "Too often, people are introduced to consolidation through the technology companies that handle that market," says Christine Duffy, president/COO of Maritz McGettigan in Philadelphia and a longtime champion of meetings consolidation. "So they jump to the conclusion that consolidation equals technology, but that just isn't true."
Duffy states that consolidation revolves around a company developing a centralized process with consistent policies for capturing data and leveraging the firm's meetings spend with suppliers. Corbin Ball, a Bellingham, WA-based consultant with 20 years' experience in meetings technology, adds that "consolidation is a misnomer -- it's just one part of what is actually enterprise meeting management. The concept is really much more than saving money by consolidating data and spending, and it's certainly much more than simply adding a software product. It involves the ability to analyze meeting effectiveness versus cost. If done correctly, it takes meetings to the most strategic level; it helps firms determine if their goals are being met at the right cost. It also brings consistency of branding and quality to meetings."
And while technology will certainly play a role in this effort, companies such as Weyerhaeuser (see case study, page 40) have done well at consolidation armed only with generic software and motivated, forward-thinking employees.
What Matters Most
If the technology isn't the critical aspect of a consolidation program, then what is? The acceptance of your bosses and co-workers. "We tell clients that consolidation can't fly without a senior-level sponsor," says Duffy. The most logical place to find one is in the finance or procurement department, both of which have a vested interest in the success of your initiative and might even help fund it.
From there, you must determine which tasks are ripe for consolidation, and which departments would be amenable to participating in a pilot program. With volunteers on board, the first step could be as simple as creating an event calendar on your firm's intranet that lists meeting profiles and supplier information, so that participating departments can coordinate their negotiating efforts with frequently used suppliers. In this instance, having a finance person as your champion helps because "it makes sense for you to piggyback onto what your company does with its transient travel business," Duffy says. "You're in a much better position versus the hotels when you can leverage transient and group business together." And thanks to the cost-tracking features of corporate charge cards, which do much of the consolidating legwork for you, partnering with your travel department makes that much more sense.
The goal of your pilot program is to create a small victory and showcase the results to other departments, building enough credibility to reproduce the efforts on a larger scale. The end result could be a company-wide protocol on negotiating with suppliers, based on centralized information that's captured from every meeting held. Similar protocols can be created with the registration/housing process or other logistical tasks you choose to focus on.
The Right Moment
In fact, with economic indicators being what they are, right now may be the time to move forward with a consolidation effort. "We're starting to see the uptick in the number of meetings being held, but the number of inexperienced people who are being asked to plan meetings is higher, too," says Rick Borry, chief software architect for Certain Software, a San Francisco-based maker of registration/housing and cost-tracking products. "So, as time goes by, the coordination of information among departments won't be there, and much potential savings will be lost without a consolidation program."
On the other hand, it is this same group of inexperienced people who must be convinced that consolidation will not diminish their importance to the organization. "Successful meetings consolidations are more likely to occur when internal stakeholders -- administrative people, directors of marketing, VPs of sales -- see the people running the centralizing process as providing a service to them," says Duffy. "It's not about forcing a group to use a particular hotel or dictating how people must run their meetings. It's about getting consistency in logistical tasks. Once that's done, you turn the meeting back to the internal client and let them do the rest themselves. I have not seen a single successful example where the company dictates to an internal customer. You can make recommendations on which hotels would give them the best deal, but the internal stakeholder who controls the event's budget isn't going to cooperate if you dictate where they can or can't hold a meeting."
And while there's no doubt that generic software can get a company moving into consolidation, Corbin Ball notes that "an online solution is the holy grail in this niche, because then people are able to see things on a company-wide basis and make things even more integrated and efficient." The best news: With nearly 1,200 technology vendors competing for success in the meetings market, it's not only the Fortune 500 companies that will benefit from constantly improving software. "These programs will start making sense for smaller companies very soon," Ball adds.
In the meantime, Duffy urges companies to look inward -- determining which course of action would work best in a particular corporate culture -- before looking outward for a software savior. "The mistake is believing that the first or second decision about consolidation is a technology decision," she concludes. "Technology is an enabler to the process, but you had better know what your process is first."
Case Study: Weyerhaeuser Company
A Promising Work in Progress
If you think that the consolidation of meetings in your organization would be too large an undertaking, consider this: A Fortune 200 company with 57,000 employees scattered worldwide has saved more than $2 million on meetings held over the past 18 months through its consolidation program.
The number of employees needed for the project: Four. The tools they had to do the job: Excel spreadsheets.
Doesn't sound so overwhelming anymore, does it?
Weyerhaeuser Company, a 104-year-old forest products firm based in Federal Way, WA, first eased into its consolidation program in December 2000, when management publicized to all divisions what Julie Merken, a Weyerhaeuser senior meeting planner, calls a "soft mandate." In short, employees responsible for any meeting of 25 or more attendees requiring sleeping rooms were instructed to contact the travel and meeting services department for assistance in site selection, contract negotiations, rooming list management, and other aspects of their events.
"Compliance wasn't too closely watched at the outset, but the announcement definitely drove many people to us, and it helped us get more organized in capturing the amount of spending we did with the hotels we were using," says Merken, who came to the firm a few months after this initial rollout. "We found departments across the company booking meetings at the same hotels, but each department didn't know about the others, so the leverage of our volume just wasn't being used. The opportunities were there for us."
One year into the program, with 250 meetings already aboard, Weyerhaeuser's soft mandate became firm, and the criteria changed: Now, any meeting with 15 or more attendees at an off-site venue, even single-day customer events and luncheons, would require coordination with the meetings department. An electronic form was created for employees' meeting requests, from which Merken's department moves the process along. "We contact the internal client to flesh out the specifics of the meeting, and then we ask if they are flexible on which city they'll meet in. This way, we can look at our preferred hotels in the cities our transients and groups go to the most. If a property fits the bill for a particular meeting, we suggest that our client use it, but it's not mandated. We can also run a multiple-city site search if that's what the client wants."
Once the host property is determined, the meetings department gathers its rooming lists from the internal travel department, which fields calls and e-mails from attendees setting up their flight, rail, or auto arrangements. Each meeting is assigned a number that attendees use when they make their travel plans, and from that, Merken's group re-creates the rooming lists in Excel; at the moment, the lists are not electronically transferable between the two departments.
Despite the straightforward approach of the process, resistance by some employees was palpable. "Administrative people who have done their events for a few years were reluctant to give up what they considered the fun part of their work: picking the venue for and the style of meal functions, choosing meeting space and formats, and handling other logistics," says Merken. "We had to tell them that we weren't there to take the meeting from them, but rather to save them time in looking for the right hotels and suppliers, and in combing through contracts. And over time, we've heard from many of our clients that our work puts them so much further ahead in planning each meeting, especially with lead times being so short."
While management was amenable to the consolidation process from the time of its inception, bringing the accounting department into the fold early on was a strategic success for Merken's group. "We worked with them to get all the meeting charges that our department pays for to accrue to a single corporate charge card. First we used American Express, and now we use MasterCard. Both companies give you detailed expense tracking and reports, so we can see where our dollars are being spent and prove the cost savings that our department creates through use of preferred suppliers." This, combined with the savings the group generates from alleviating attrition penalties by negotiation and by offering future bookings to affected properties, has raised the department's profile with management.
But as the number of meetings the department handles approaches 1,000, Merken finds that managing rooming lists in Excel is simply too time-consuming. As a result, the department has gotten permission to purchase an online product that streamlines the registration process. "We're starting with registration because that's our most cumbersome task," she says. "It can give us more precise information and free us up to do other meeting tasks better. We won't have to re-enter data, and we can focus on helping a sales manager or a mill manager run the best meeting he can. Down the line, I'd like to see us have a tool to track budgets more precisely, but we'll take it a step at a time."
To tout the victories that have already come from this ongoing process, and to encourage other employees to buy into the idea of bringing their meetings into the consolidation loop, Merken's group distributes a newsletter each quarter. It documents the savings the department created for different clients, in specific areas such as meeting room rental, food and beverage, transportation, waived attrition penalties, and more. "Using real examples from different types of meetings definitely catches people's attention," she says.
In the end, Merken says that the single most important behavior planners must exhibit when implementing a consolidation program is perseverance. "Keep trying to make it happen, because it makes sense," she concludes. "Communicate and build a relationship with your internal clients in the same way your sales reps would with external clients. Get them to understand that you are in this together with them, and you will always work in their best interest."