Appointing Kesler to a senior position with strategic oversight of meetings (effectively just two people removed from the CFO) has freed her company's top financial officer to worry about other things. “Meeting management isn't something he thinks about every week,” she says of CFO Dave Anderson. “It's somewhere on his huge radar, but from a big-picture perspective, this is what we should be doing, and it's what he expects us to do.”

Kesler admits that getting time in front of a busy CFO can be a challenge. While her efforts have helped the company to achieve an annual savings of between 10 percent and 12 percent, she still has to sell the value of her department whenever there is a change in management. She recalls a transitional period when her team went from reporting to shared services to reporting to finance, and she found herself once again explaining the program's value to Honeywell's CFO. “During a review meeting, the agenda called for our team's initiatives to be discussed along with a number of other high-level initiatives that day. The CFO took one look at the agenda and said, ‘Let's kill this. We don't need to focus on this,’ referring to the program I had been working on for the past two years.”

Luckily, she was able to convince him otherwise, but notes that knowing how to communicate is key. “When talking to finance, it's about the numbers — being able to show that the program will self-fund and that it will reap savings.”

Financial Pressures

CFOs' increasing involvement in meetings isn't just the result of planners such as Kesler bringing it to their attention. The current financial landscape also has a lot to do with it.

“We continually look for the opportunity to spend less, and meetings seems like an area that is somewhat ripe for management,” says Steve Shebik, vice president and CFO at Allstate Insurance Co., Northbrook, Ill. “Over the last couple of years, my oversight has intensified because travel costs are higher today than they have been in the past. We are not telling [meeting sponsors] where to go, but we are holding budgets at levels below where they were in the past and forcing people to decide how many people they are going to bring [to a meeting] and how much they are spending on each attendee.”

For larger meetings, such as sales training and incentive trips, Shebik says his involvement is focused mainly on setting budgets. He relies on Allstate's vice president of procurement, Lori Yelvington, for everything else. “No contract can be signed by anyone but procurement,” says Yelvington. “We sign off on contracts to make sure that we are protecting the company from risk. We also look for things that might stand out, like excessive fees.”

The Outsourcing Option

At Fort Worth, Texas-based Elbit Systems of America, the U.S. subsidiary of the Israeli defense electronics manufacturer, CFO Bill Augat recently decided to outsource all the company's travel to a third-party provider and mandated that all employees use it. He meets with CFOs from each of the company's four business units monthly to discuss the new travel policy.

His motive? “To find ways to wring more cost out of the business so we can reinvest it and grow other activities such as R&D,” says Augat.

This is the model through which most CFOs get involved in meetings, says Randall Kane, managing partner, Acquis Consulting Group, a New York-based management consulting firm. “They are first looking at meetings through a business-travel lens,” he says. “They are saying ‘We have a strong mandated travel policy in place, why don't we use that as a baseline to construct a model for meetings?’”

Honeywell's Kesler believes that at least minimal components of an SMMP are a good idea for even the smallest meeting spend. “It's a gap in data that CFOs should want to see filled in.”

Advances in technology have made that data more readily available. “Years ago we simply didn't have robust meeting-management tools available to companies to allow them to really administer and manage this process,” says Concur's Adair. “These tools have really just come about in the last few years.”

He'll be keeping a keen eye on the category, that's for sure. “As we continue to grow, we will reevaluate the need to centralize meetings management, no differently from the way that we evaluate the need to centralize other services across the business,” he says.

“It wouldn't surprise me if we made the decision to have a centralized meetings-management program within the next year or two.”