Sourcing/Procurement

UnitedHealth sGroup's 15 annual “high-touch” events are bid on by the company's preferred incentive house suppliers. With those suppliers, Tamara Gordon says, “we have developed terms and conditions, and we have negotiated their fees and how they charge those fees.” Before each meeting, “we send them the specs — number and demographics of attendees; length, budget, and timing of the program; as much as we can give them. We direct the site selection to some degree, giving our destination history and whether we prefer a particular region. When bids come back we perform standard analyses using both quantitative and qualitative data.”

Planning/Execution

The question of the actual planning of meetings — will they be internally planned or outsourced? — is one that lies outside the framework of an SMMP. Whichever solution works for your company, however, a corporate overseer is a must, says Kate Lastinger. “To efficiently run an SMMP, a company should assign at least one project manager. This manager should be pulled out of the meeting planning process to focus on the business of strategic meetings management.”

And if you are not using any third parties, the economic crisis might prompt you to consider them for at least some parts of the process. “You can't be afraid you'll lose your job to a third party,” says Todd Zint at NFP Insurance Services. “Outsourcing meetings services can be a strategic decision if you continue to manage elements that impact the culture and integrity of your event. Always position yourself between your internal client and the third party.”

Payment/Expense Allocation

Zint began putting elements of his SMMP in place when he joined NFP Insurance Services more than four years ago. Two of the changes he has instituted were designed to make the expense allocation process more efficient.

One move was to shift the meetings department's budget, including employee allocation based on usage, onto the business units. “It used to be that the meeting sponsor would say, ‘I've invited 14 extra people, but you can't change the menu from lobster to chicken.’ I had no control, yet supposedly I was accountable,” Zint explains. “So then at the end of the year I'd get asked, ‘Why are you over budget?’ It put me and my team in a difficult position.”

Now, Zint has a predetermined schedule of pre- and post-meeting conferences with the business leader where they review the forecasted and actual budget in detail, so the meeting sponsor sees how last-minute decisions can affect the bottom line.

The other major change was to create purchase order numbers with accounting codes and meeting codes built in. That way, the money spent (on deposits and final payments) and the money earned (from sponsorships) goes in and out of a single bucket — “like a checking account specific to each meeting,” Zint explains — making the accountants' jobs easier and creating an audit record of vendor payments for Zint to compare against a detailed event breakdown and review with the business leader. “This helps us avoid surprises and educates meeting sponsors on the importance of managing within expense guidelines.”

Zint's goal for 2009 is to use a meetings credit card solution for all meetings expenses, which will make bill-paying easier and provide richer data for negotiating leverage.

Analysis/Reporting

Creating reports for senior management is what keeps an SMMP going. At Thrivent Financial, Dan Young sends an event-summary report to his supervisor and to the CFO that lays out cost-savings: the spend per attendee, the meeting's proposed budget and its actual spend, and return on investment based on subjective evaluations that measure how well the event met its objectives. A room-pickup report includes the negotiated room rate versus a standard online rate.

Technology

To get approval to buy StarCite's enterprise system for Lincoln Financial Group's SMMP, Paul Vandevere says, “I stressed the fact that the technology, as the core of the SMMP, will automate the entire process, allowing for greater staff efficiency and productivity. I stressed the increased visibility of the department as an innovative cost-savings and cost-avoidance advocate, the importance of leveraging our spend, and how the technology will enable us to capture that information. These are all part of our continuing strategic goals.”

As important, he points out, “the technology will help us show our value. Meeting sponsors don't think about how much we save them on a daily basis. We are not party planners, we are managing meetings. Especially in these economic times, we want to show that we are giving them 100 percent.”

SMMP: The Definition

The strategic management of enterprisewide meetings-related processes, spend, volume, standards, and suppliers to achieve quantitative cost savings, risk mitigation, and superior service.

Source: Groups & Meetings Committee, National Business Travel Association www.nbta.org

SMMP: The Sum of Strategic Parts

The elements of an SMMP include registration and approval of meetings, sourcing/procurement, planning/execution, payment/expense allocation, and analysis/reports. At the core of these elements is technology, and linking them together is a clearly defined corporate meetings policy.

Here’s Some Good News: An SMMP Can Even Help You Drive Corporate Strategy

Dan Young's meetings department at Thrivent Financial has managed the companywide meetings calendar since 2003. Now, says Young, CMP, director, event planning and field recognition, “we are trying to drive the entire field and corporate planning process through strategic event planning.”

Translation: Taking into consideration Thrivent's incentive conference schedule and major training events, along with industry events such as Million Dollar Round Table, Young recently proposed to senior management a schedule of dates in late 2009 for key strategy sessions, so that corporate goals and messages would be set in time for the following year's field conferences. “Then, when January 2010 hits, everything is a go,” he explains, “and everyone in the organization has time to plan and implement corporate goals.”

Improving your company's entire strategic planning process? That's serious added value from the meetings department.