Siemens, a multinational conglomerate, in June began deploying in the United States an end-to-end meetings management platform that integrates its meetings payment system with automated planning and booking processes.
The new platform enables the company to consolidate its meetings spending data, gain full visibility into its actual meeting costs and tie the data into its budgeting and financial modules. It also enables meetings space deposit payments and can combine meetings data with transient travel data through the company's reporting tools.
While Siemens is not the first corporation to use the American Express and StarCite Meetings360 platform, it is one of the largest, with $550 million in 2008 U.S. travel and entertainment spending and 430,000 employees, 97,600 of whom are in the Americas.
By Sept. 30, the end of Siemens' fiscal year, director of Siemens event management services Bobby Badalamenti expects to have most corporate divisions on the tool, including Siemens' central planning group, which began training in June and now is processing meetings through the system. Siemens is using different training modules for the tool to meet the needs of its different types of users.
The implementation will allow Siemens to develop a more concrete idea of its combined travel and meetings volumes—a feat relatively unattainable before the implementation of the end-to-end platform.
The company plans to take its technology integration even further on Nov. 1, when its version of Meetings360 is set to integrate with its new Rearden Commerce online booking tool.
The implementation of Meetings360 is part of an initiative that began in March 2008 and involved garnering buy-in from the highest levels of senior leadership, tweaking the expense systems, customizing the tools to fit Siemens' business processes and policies and developing training modules to prepare various Siemens employees to procure and plan a meeting.
What developed is a hybrid full-service and do-it-yourself meetings management system called Siemens Event Management Services On Demand, designed for use by Siemens meeting planners, administrators and third-party agencies.
Such a hybrid model offers an easy-to-use process that can deliver greater policy compliance with more complete data and cost savings, according to Badalamenti.
"If you are outsourcing to a third party who is using this platform and we're doing all of the hard work on the front end, that minimizes the work you would give to a third party, and you could do it yourself," she said.
The project team also had to bring the expense systems on board with Meetings360. To do that, they had to work with the finance and accounting business lines within Siemens' shared services operations to correctly code the meetings card payment processes so such charges could be identified on the back end as separate from individual corporate and purchasing cards.
When travel and meetings operated separately, such travel expenses as airfare and lodging went to an individual's corporate card and would not be recognized as part of a meeting expenditure. Combining that was a key tenet the mobility services team used to gain buy-in for the project.
"That has been our mantra," said director of travel and event management services Steven Schoen. "We're able to point out to our associates and internal customers that to a great degree they don't really track the full cost of a meeting. They only track what is centrally billed and comes out of their budget. A director could plan a meeting and think he is able to lock it up for $10,000, but he doesn't know that when all is said and done with the travel costs, he actually spent $20,000."
The internal lobbying efforts proved successful, as the project was approved by Siemens' strategic governance board as part of a larger supply chain management initiative in North America. Then, the project team undertook a consistent communications and branding effort to bring the rest of the employees on board.
"We learned from a compliance and a branding perspective that we can preload the tool with a Siemens-branded template," according to Badalamenti.
The company built its own portal with access to the booking tool, industry information, policies, internal and virtual meeting options and libraries of forms and templates. Meetings360 also will live as a portal on the Rearden Commerce online procurement platform, where profiles from the meetings tool will be linked into both systems.
Siemens, which is made up of five operating units with their own management, business processes and cultures, had StarCite further customize the tool to fit with each unit's ways of doing business.
The customization included building in various control functions so reports and data could be designated to the appropriate people across the company.
"It is built is for compliance and to mitigate risk," Badalamenti said. "You do that by giving control to the operating company or division as it conforms to their policies."
Originally published Aug. 10, 2009