Meeting News - April 12, 2010 - (Page 28)

News Planner Roundtable: Tackling The Recession With Strategy, Tactics Kristine Morgan: APICS has not historically had a lot of processes in place. I’m kind of jealous of you who do.To not have a pathway for everything is like starting from scratch every time. We’ve always used ConferenceDirect for sourcing. I’m going to have contract help for the annual this year, which before was all on the in-house meetings team.We actually have insourced a couple of things. We used to outsource registration, and we’ve brought that in-house with a collaborative effort. That’s not just me. It’s largely our IT team. Traci Oziemblowsky: It is easier now, though, because everything is becoming software as a service,like registration.We used to pay $30,000 a year for that. There are so many companies now where you can do it yourself,and it’s not that hard. We use RegOnline and save $30,000 a year doing that, and we are all trained on it. Morgan: It’s part of our association management software. It’s already there, we just weren’t using it. MN: Matthew,you said your team has been cut in half. How has that affected your strategy? Matthew Schermerhorn: It’s very similar to what Jessica was saying.In a sense,we continue to fight a battle between what we see on our team as being the most relevant things we bring to the table—the sourcing process, risk management, contracting and looking out for the company—and what our clients see as being relevant, which has more to do with the kinds of logistical post-sourcing planning that we are trying to train especially administrative assistants to do. It is actually working pretty well. For the first time,and thank God we started this early on, we now have some standard contracts with a few hotels around us.We do social events for the administrative assistants so they can feel comfortable going to the hotel to set up the contracts, which were rather difficult. That has been really helpful. We still do all the tracking and all the strategic meetings stuff that we possibly can, such as tracking spend and savings.Though no one really wants these reports right now, at least we’ve got the numbers so that when people do,we can throw them out there. The other strategic piece that our www.meetingnews.com MEXICAN STANDOFF: From left, Liberty Mutual’s Nemerever, Ariba’s Oziemblowsky, FedEx’s Schanbaum, AAA’s Schermerhorn and APICS’ Morgan TO DISCUSS CHANGES IN MEETINGS MANAGEMENT PRACTICES, negotiating tactics and building performance metrics during the economic downturn, MeetingNews associate editor Seth Harris met with AAA Northern California, Nevada & Utah director of corporate events Matthew Schermerhorn, spend management solution provider Ariba’s senior manager of corporate events Traci Oziemblowsky, The Association for Operations Management (APICS) meetings manager Kristine Morgan, FedEx Office senior corporate event planner Jessica Schanbaum and Liberty Mutual Agency Markets senior meeting planner Lark Nemerever in February at Meeting Professionals International’s MeetDifferent event in Cancun, Mexico. MeetingNews: How have your meetings management practices changed in the past 18 months? Lark Nemerever: They’ve changed a lot because Liberty has specific programs they want us to follow for strategic management. We went onto StarCite, which we never used before. We are tracking expenses through that so we can use it for negotiating with hotels in the future.We have 28 MeetingNews April 12, 2010 greater buying power because of Liberty and different partners. It’s been quite a bit of change. It’s all been very positive, but it is changing the way we’ve been thinking. Jessica Schanbaum: We had four people. Now, there is just one, but the ratio is still the same.We were doing about 150 meetings per person before, so there are less, but it’s more for me. The size of the meetings has changed. We are doing more regional meetings and less largescale ones.We were really on a great path toward doing a strategic meetings management program and monitoring, doing everything online, getting to the point where we could manage our volume to see where we could leverage our negotiation. Now, we have to decentralize and keep the things that are most important like contracting.We were doing vendor management down to our caterers. Now it’s more, do what you want, but the legal stuff has to come through us. At least in hotel and transportation, we are managing more strategically, but decentralizing so that a lot more non-event people are managing events. We are doing a lot of training and are more of an advisory role than logistics and onsite. http://www.meetingnews.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Meeting News - April 12, 2010

Meeting News - April 12, 2010
Contents
Meeting Post
Newsmaker
Meetings Spotlight
Viewpoint
MeetingNews Research
Event Profile
Association Watch
Meeting People
Construction Cites
Theme Parks
MeetingNews Roundtable
Conv. Center Showcase

Meeting News - April 12, 2010