When it comes to meeting management, Pricewaterhouse- Coopers is a trailblazer. Do you use meeting cards? PwC helped to invent them. Have you launched a strategic meetings management program? PwC consolidated meeting management back in 1998. Thinking of becoming the resource for webcasts at your company? PwC's meeting department has included a full-time virtual meetings staff for four years.

So take a look at what PwC is up to now, and you might get a peek at what is next in strategic meeting management: Six Sigma. In an effort that started in April 2005 and continues today, PwC has reduced what it calls “rogue spend” by 70 percent, improved consistency and service, and found new ways to get the most from technology. The result? Millions of dollars saved in just the first year.

Six Sigma Defined

There's an unwieldy mathematical description of Six Sigma, and then there's a simpler conceptual idea. You can find the former at Wikipedia. You can find the latter in the PalmPilot of Debi Scholar, CMP, CMM, CTE, director, meeting and event services (known as MES) at PwC: “Six Sigma is a methodology, or strategy, to improve processes.”

Scholar has kept all things Six Sigma close at hand for nearly two years. When PwC announced plans to launch a handful of Six Sigma projects firmwide, Scholar lobbied to be among them. Nine projects, including the meeting and event improvement process, were selected from some 100 applicants.

Initially used by manufacturing companies, namely Motorola, Six Sigma was created to measure and improve quality — to reduce the number of “defects” per million “opportunities.”

But measuring quality gets fuzzy with things such as meetings. “It's not something that goes in a machine and comes out the other end,” Scholar says.

Nevertheless, Kathy Murray, managing director of infrastructure at PwC, saw MES as a prime candidate for the Six Sigma project “because it's very process-oriented.” Meeting management had been centralized for years; however, Murray says, “individual meeting planners were doing their own thing. It was crying out for consistency.”

Not to mention that the firm's business is meetings-intensive: There were 1,647 events on the MES calendar in fiscal 2007.

A Shot of Red Bull?

Maybe it's just coincidence that she works for a company that does such things, but Scholar claims to welcome an audit. “It's a great thing anytime you can have somebody review what you're doing,” she says. “Yes, we had a strategic meetings management program in place, but Six Sigma was like an energy drink. This gave our program the boost that it needed to become visible in the eyes of the firm. Sure, it was difficult and it took us a lot of hours. But we were all for improving the SMMP.”

A quick primer on how Scholar's department works: A meeting or event request comes in, a member of the contract management team checks for all the relevant data (city, line of service requesting the meeting, number of attendees, dates, space), and then projects a cost. This information goes to finance leaders for approval. “Before we spend too much time on the meeting, the finance leaders take a look and say ‘yea’ or ‘nay,’” Scholar explains. “Meanwhile, we are initiating the sourcing process; however, we have a rule of thumb that we do not spend more than 10 hours on a meeting or event until it's approved.”

After approval, a member of the contract management team finds and analyzes potential locations and then negotiates and signs the contract. At that point, a planner takes over the meeting implementation.

The contract management team has a “reporting relationship” to the procurement department, Scholar notes. “We work with them closely to ensure that we follow procurement policies such as contract signature authority, selecting suppliers fairly, and retaining records.”

And while MES is “a centralized, virtual team,” she adds, there are local planners who do not report to MES. “However, they follow the firm's policy and come through us for meeting registration, contract negotiation and signing, and bill payment.”

You'll Need Wall Space

The Six Sigma project for MES got rolling in April 2005. First up was the creation of the Meeting and Event Process Improvement Team, whose seven full-time members included Scholar, two other MES staffers, and representatives from the learning and education area and the travel area. Four part-time members came from travel, procurement, and MES. All started off with two weeks of “Green Belt” training led by “Black Belts” — Six Sigma experts hired by PwC to guide the projects firmwide. (Ten subject-matter experts who participated periodically were from human resources, finance, marketing, procurement, travel, security, and the executive offices.) After the training, a Black Belt continued to guide the MES team. “The Black Belts keep you on target,” Scholar explains. “They help to make the whole thing less daunting.”

And a Six Sigma project feels pretty daunting from the get-go, when a team gets the assignment to map its process. Scholar recalls that it took an entire wall to contain the steps involved in planning a meeting. “It took us days and multiple flip charts to create,” she says, “but that's when you see all the things that might not be value-added.”

For example, she says, “we determined that having a person take meeting requirements over the phone and then populate our database was not a value-added step for simple, nonseries types of meetings. It made more sense to have the meeting requester fill out the data and then submit it to us for review. This doesn't work for extremely complex meetings or a series of meetings, but it has reduced our time at the beginning of the process.” Scholar notes that meeting requesters can still get questions answered on a “meeting hotline.”

Eye Opener

The second step is measurement. For MES, the critical statistic was compliance with PwC's meeting and event policy. “I thought we had 80 percent of the firm's meeting spend” being registered and managed through MES, Scholar says. “Unfortunately, I learned that I had only 49 percent. So there was 51 percent of meeting spend that we still needed to gain control of.”

To measure the quality of its service, the team interviewed stakeholders; in Six Sigma parlance, they listened to the Voice of the Business (senior management), the Voice of the Provider (peer departments such as security and IT), and the Voice of the Customer (meeting sponsors). Recalls Scholar: “I thought, ‘We provide great service; we're certainly working hard,’ but we found folks who were not happy with our services. It was a painful moment.

“People said we were not consultative enough, that we were not acting as true professional managers, and that our turnaround wasn't as good as it could be. It was one of those somber moments where we realized we really did need to improve.” Room for Improvement

They heard the message; it was time for team members to get up, dust themselves off, and make some changes. The tough work was ahead: figuring out how to improve. “We looked at three areas,” Scholar reports. “Process, technology, and organization.”