If you are not monitoring and controlling your meeting costs, it is likely you are spending too much. For large companies, the cost of poorly purchased and tracked meetings can run into the millions of dollars! In fact, the larger the company, the greater are the changes of waste and liability exposure.

Here are some of the issues:

• Different divisions in a company don’t know what each is doing -- there is no company-wide calendar of events. Meetings are planned in isolation with one department often not having a clue of what others are doing.

• Administrative assistants, rather than meeting professionals, commonly organize many of the smaller meetings in a large company and often do not know how to negotiate for maximum financial benefit and minimum liability exposure.

• There are no standard ways of distributing company meeting policy to all employees who may be involved in planning meetings.

• As total meeting spend is unknown, the company’s total buying clout with hotels and other suppliers cannot be leveraged.

• Corporate meeting attendees often come from different divisions with expenses being charged to general travel, rather than to a consolidated meetings expense item.

The challenge is figuring out how do get your hands around this very complex, multi-headed issue of meetings consolidation. Initiatives have been tried in the past with limited success due to the highly data intensive nature of the task and from the lack of easy communication among different divisions of a large company.

At last, there are a number of web-based tools that give a variety of options for tracking, monitoring, and consolidating meeting spend promising to dramatically reduce meetings cost and liability. By offering the ability to track meeting spend companies are in a stronger position to negotiate with preferred suppliers.

b-there www.b-there.com

b-there is the newest player to the meetings consolidation scene having just launched a new application called OneForm, expressly for enterprise-wide meeting consolidation and collaboration.

Earlier versions are already in use by Nortel Networks, American Express, and Procter & Gamble. B-there has worked with the best practices from Fortune 100 companies to build customized prototypes of this toolset.

Some of the features include:

• An event calendar providing a consolidated view of all of the organizations meetings. Site defined filters provide the ability to view events by specific product category, region, cost center, event type, etc.

• Collaboration tools between departments and divisions in setting meeting objectives, evaluating and grading event ROI to the organization (Multi-departmental workflow tools)

• Contact & vendor management system that can be shared enterprise-wide.

• Preferred vendor sourcing.

• Expense tracking and budget reconciliation tools.

• Air/destination analysis and forecasting tools for selecting best meeting site.

• Intranet integration options.

• Data consolidation of all event components with comprehensive cross-event reporting on demand.

Substantial savings in the millions of dollars have been claimed in prototypes of this product.

GetThere Direct www.getthere.com (formerly Allmeetings)

GetThere is a subsidiary of Sabre, the world's largest computerized travel reservation system who also owns Travelocity. Their target clients are Fortune 500 companies that already use Sabre for their general corporate travel needs. Not surprisingly, there is strong support for tracking and regulating meetings travel, a major component of meeting spend. An interesting budgeting and meeting procurement module is also provided for pre-selected clients using participating hotels. 

Although this product tracks travel well, it is now being marketed only to large corporations already using Sabre for travel procurement. It does not focus on tracking the many onsite expenses and suppliers AV, production companies, etc.

PlanSoft www.plansoft.com

PlanSoft’s Meeting Management Solution (MMS) offers a very comprehensive suite of consolidation modules allowing corporations and associations to set up a standardized planning process to improve efficiency, communication and cut costs.

PlanSoft claims that, “with an average cost of less than 1% of all meeting related spend, MMS allows companies to realize an immediate ROI. Most organizations can anticipate a 5-7% reduction in meeting expenditures in year one, as well as a 10-15% gain in productivity.”

Features include:

• Distribution of established procedures and tools to guide both internal meeting managers and external meetings/travel suppliers throughout the meetings process including: online search and site selection, online meetings calendars, online RFPs, and customized reports.
• By guiding planners through each step of the planning process, MMS gives even occasional planners the tools necessary to make budget-conscious decisions.
• A centralized sourcing process drives business to preferred facilities and suppliers with tools to monitor compliance.
• Corporate-wide policy enforcement of these procedures is made possible through meeting approval capabilities for all meetings.
• Meeting approval and assignment capabilities allow managers to better manage workload.
• Focusing this consolidated buying power strengthens negotiations with suppliers resulting in cost savings and reductions in liability.

ProcurePoint (www.procurepoint.com) (formerly EventSource)

ProcurePoint’s main focus is the online procurement of hotel lodging used with meetings.  They claim to “compress planning and negotiation cycles from weeks to days while experiencing average savings of 10-35% in the costs of lodging associated with offsite meetings and transient travel.”

ProcurePoint has an extensive site selection database with allowances for clients to loading preferred vendors. A standardized request for proposal (RFP) and negotiation process is offered. Also, hotel spend data comparing budgeted vs. actual spend is captured. There is also an option for centralized meeting department oversight of “admin” planners if desired.

Their open bid process (a reverse auction), unique to the industry, allows hotels to bid online in real time for meetings requiring lodging.

This solution comes at a much lower price tag than the others and would be easier to adopt than some of the other systems but has the limitation of not tracking other meeting spend from other suppliers (travel, AV, decorators, catering, etc.) so it only captures a partial picture.

SeeUthere www.seeuthere.com

SeeUthere offers a very full-featured meeting consolidation system to:

• Enable centralized procurement controls, while allowing decentralized budget approval and logistics management.

• Standardize meeting processes including procurement, planning & attendee management.

• Establish preferred supplier policies and tracking compliance and consolidate meeting spend enterprise-wide.

Claimed cost savings of up to 30% can be accrued from:

• Consolidating meeting volume and re-directing to selected suppliers

• Improved negotiating power with corporate-wide meeting contracts

• Centralized control and visibility

• Greater accountability among budget owners due to higher visibility of true meeting costs, especially as compared to company-wide benchmarks

The four modules of the system include:

Procurement: (procurement process workflow automation; permission-based access by multiple roles: meeting sponsors, budget owners, meeting planners, policy administrators; policy enforcement & compliance tracking; best practices portal)

Planning: (company-wide meeting calendar, collaborative master planning center, RFP management, supplier database, budget management)

Attendee Management: (Online registration - including housing management, Integrated travel management, event marketing)

Data Consolidation & Analysis: (financial accountability, compliance tracking, supplier management)

This product is primarily designed for large corporations that wish to establish meeting spend controls on an enterprise basis. Central to SeeUthere’s strategy is defining the expense process. This system enables a company-wide enforcement, pre-meeting approval process and compliance tracking, in a manner not too dissimilar to travel or office supply procurement.   

StarCite www.starcite.com

StarCite originated as a spin-off of McGettigan Partners and was one of the first online providers to use meetings consolidation techniques. StarCite provides a very experienced senior management team that is intimately involved with nearly every meeting planning, travel and developing web-based applications. Their approach appears to be as much consultative as it does technology-based.

StarCite has racked up an impressive list of clients (Cisco, QuakerOats, KPMG, Lehman Brothers) and partners (Starwood, American Express, Maritz, BI). White papers posted at their web site detail millions of dollars of savings from companies using their product.

They claim a “truly integrated” meetings platform including procurement, attendee management and group air including a true two-way dataflow of air reservations. Their two-year partnership with Cardinal Communication and their recent purchase of the RegWeb product significantly rounds out their capabilities.

StarCite offers a database of 53,000 suppliers from which preferred vendors can be highlighted on only listed. StarCite’s combined buying power sources over 1.5 million rooms annually 

Planners can create a standardized, branded and complete online RFP to which the hoteliers can reply online automating and standardizing the procurement process. A range of supplier utilization and spend reports and budgeted and negotiated savings are tracked.  Also, the ability to enforce procurement by creating an approval process is provided as an option.

8-15% first year savings on first year spend in procurement have been reported using the StarCite system.

Third-party alternatives:

If you just want to have someone come in, set everything up and help with the ongoing process, there are meeting planning companies that would be happy to do just that, and have very strong technology tools to assist. Two that come immediately to mind are: McGettigan (www.mcgettigan.com) and Conferon www.conferon.com. Both are large, very experienced meeting planning companies that can consult with companies to help work their way through this very complex implementation task. McGettigan, mentioned earlier, really started the concept of meetings consolidation and offers Core Discovery EN, a client server application that is web enabled. Conferon, the world’s largest meeting planning company, with tremendous experience and buying clout, uses a Conferon-branded version of the PlanSoft’s Meeting Management Solution (MMS).  There are also a few smaller companies and individual consultants that can help in this area as well.

These meetings consolidation tools call for, at times, drastic changes in the business and procurement process. As people tend to resist change, the implementation process is crucial to the success of these initiatives. For those companies willing to go through this pain of change, the rewards in terms of substantially lower meetings costs and liability exposure.

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