In spurring his company's preferred meetings management
technology provider and online booking tool to integrate, Siemens' Steven
Schoen helped make the often-slippery process of calculating meetings spending
all but transparent. That gave department heads and other meetings
budget-holders a clear view of all the costs—including air travel—involved in
hosting an event. Whether they were happy to receive that information is a
different story.
"We now can say to a stakeholder, 'By the way, that
meeting that you thought cost you only $15,000? It actually cost you $35,000,
because of all the airfares,' " said Schoen, Siemens director of mobility
services. "We provided a level of transparency [that] shocked them and
that they weren't sure they wanted. It's actually been quite the eye-opener for
them, and the higher up you go [in the organization], the wider the eyes open."
Siemens for a few years has operated a centralized meetings
management program, and lately in North America has sought synergies between it
and the conglomerate's travel management program and its marketing and
communications purchasing, areas that—along with fleet management—also fall
under Schoen's purview. Technology and strategic sourcing were two promising
avenues for such synergy, a process that "really came together this year,"
he said.
Although meetings management platforms—like StarCite,
Siemens' provider, owned by The Active Network—for many years have offered
integration with some online booking tools to enable travel booking at the
point of meeting registration, such synergies are not ubiquitous. StarCite in
fact previously had not integrated with Siemens' booking tool, provided by
Rearden Commerce. All parties were willing to do so at Siemens' request.
"We were the launch customer," Schoen said. "We
designed the build and the integration. There was none before we started."
Tying travel booking to the meetings process enabled Siemens
to create identifiers based on specific meetings so that all associated travel
could appropriately be allocated, instead of as a less specific transient air
expenditure. Combined with individual hotel guest room expenses and a master
hotel folio that shows meeting-specific charges like food and beverage and
audiovisual fees, a far more expansive breakdown of a meeting's true cost now
is available to Siemens' stakeholders.
What they do with that information isn't for Schoen's team
to decide. The process "is not necessarily in place for them to spend less
or spend more, but to know what they're spending and to manage more effectively
to budget," he said, though noting that internal meetings have been a
major target of corporate demand-management efforts.
Such meetings spending visibility has other benefits too.
Under Siemens' sourcing structure, Schoen's team conducts joint meeting and
transient negotiations with hotels. "I have a hotel person who does
meetings and transient," he said, "which makes sense because we're negotiating
with the same chains and the same properties."
This report
originally appeared in the Sept. 2, 2013, edition of Business Travel News.