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Tracey Wilt, Manager, Global Travel & Meeting Management

PAST Wilt’s first stint with Xerox was as an intern while she was a student at Rochester Institute of Technology. Upon graduating in 1992, she joined the company as a contract employee. After some time as the Xerox account executive for Carlson Wagonlit and two years in the corporate travel department at Lucent Technologies, Wilt was recruited back to Xerox in 1999. In 2007, she assumed her current title.

CRED Wilt has helped to take Xerox’s mature SMMP in two new directions. First, she implemented a centralized registration process for virtual meetings. More recently, Wilt’s SMMP is going global. “It is now deployed in Canada, the U.K., Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland,” she says. Phase 2 of the expansion continues this year in Belgium, France, and Ireland. “Our estimated meeting cost savings is 15 to 20 percent, while savings from consolidating our third-party meeting management company business is targeted at 10 to 15 percent.” Wilt was tapped to share her globalization experience as a featured speaker at the Crossroads Paris Paragon Business Travel Conference & Expo in Paris in May.

FORWARD THINKING She and her department have created metrics to measure supplier performance in the area of environmental responsibility. “We are working with our two U.S. meeting management companies, for example. If they get a meeting sponsor to use flash drives instead of printing handouts, if they offset any portion of the meeting from live to virtual, if they use pitchers instead of bottled water—all of those things are all tracked.”

GIVING BACK Wilt is a founding co-chair of the NBTA Groups & Meetings Committee and is part of the Strategic Meetings Management Certification task force.

ADVICE “Use a phased approach for your SMMP—you will never be successful trying to accomplish all your goals at once. Take one step at a time and continually look for process and productivity improvements.”

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