Pamela J. Ferranti
Manager, meeting management solutions
Xerox Corp.
Webster, N.Y.

PAST Before managing meeting consolidation for Xerox, a role that began in July 2004, Ferranti's 24-year career with the company included posts as travel services manager, marketing manager, and warehouse manager.

CRED After serving as the focal point for rolling out Xerox's online booking process for business travelers, the travel services veteran was tapped to create a similarly consolidated environment for managing the company's global meetings. Working with StarCite's meeting technology, Ferranti established the processes to track meetings activity across the 57,500-employee company. The meeting-consolidation program is in the midst of a global rollout, with Canada already on board and the European arena aligning their processes.

SUCCESS STORY At Xerox, “We don't like mandates,” Ferranti says. Nevertheless, her department has created measures to make it more difficult for people to go off on their own and avoid the department's policies. Gradually, people have come around. Ferranti is proud to point to her department's satisfaction rating, which has climbed from 75 percent three years ago to 96 percent this spring.

FORWARD-THINKING Ferranti's department rolled out a green initiative in early 2008, significant not so much for its mission — energy and waste reduction for meeting and events — but for its metrics. The initiative sets specific quantifiable goals for each aspect of the environmental program and measures the outcome. For example, Ferranti has set specific 2008 targets for such things as badge recycling (50 percent), use of hotels with green policies (40 percent), transitioning face-to-face meetings to videoconferences (5 percent), and more.

GIVING BACK Ferranti volunteers as president of the board of directors of the Wayne County Fair, an annual six-day agricultural fair in Palmyra, N.Y. She is the first woman to hold the job in the fair's 152-year history. Last year, the event drew 16,000 visitors and more than 100 commercial exhibitors, in addition to hundreds of fair exhibitors.

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