Parexel director of global
procurement and travel Benjamin Park's end-to-end small meetings program
has realized savings not only by leveraging transient rates for meetings but also
by producing soft-dollar productivity increases. Parexel has launched the program
in Europe, supported by Meetago meetings technology, and soon will roll it out in the U.S.
BTN: What's a small
meeting for Parexel International?
Park: We have a lot
of meetings [that are] for about 20 people. Those are the ones we are targeting
with this small meetings tool. We faced the challenge, like many companies, that
the admins are in charge of these small meetings and they want to stay in charge
but they don't necessarily like the bureaucratic work of contract review and sending
things off to legal, covering privacy assurances, getting the invoice … you know.
BTN: But it's also
limited, in a way, to make the planning process simpler, yes?
Park: Yes. In other
meeting tools, you can select like 20 or 30 hotels, and the hotels know that. Through
our tool, we limit the small meetings to four bids. The hotels know the meeting
has only four bids, so they are getting a 25 percent hit rate. They like this.
BTN: Are you prioritizing
any hotels for your meeting organizers?
Park: We push our
transient preferred properties to the top of the list as long as they meet the meeting
requirements. [The organizer] selects what properties they like. If one hotel rejects,
they can select another so they always have four competitive bids. The terms and
conditions are sent; internal signatures are collected electronically. There's no
paper sent around.
BTN: How does the
payment work?
Park: We're using
a virtual credit card to guarantee and pay for the hotel. It's big in Europe and
it's coming to the U.S. more and more. So once the invoice comes in, we use a third
party to check if the invoice is matching the contract. If there's a full match,
then it gets automatically paid and done. If there is a mismatch larger than a certain
threshold, the third party sends it back to the admin [for clarification]. They
[also] enrich the date on the virtual credit card to the Level 3 data which is necessary
for VAT reclaim. So we basically get the invoice from the credit card and we don't
even need the hotel invoice anymore.
BTN: From an adoption
standpoint, have you had challenges?
Park: The process
is easy. The admins love to use it, and they are telling others about it. I don't
find that I have to get out the policy stick and tell people they have to use it.
We introduced a meeting registration feature that we've had challenges with adoption
because our people prefer email, but we are working on that.
BTN: How does this
fit into Parexel's overall travel management strategy at this point?
Park: We're moving away from focusing on sourcing and
savings because that is generally all done. Every new sourcing effort, every new
negotiation—the outcome is only marginal. So we're focusing a lot on where we are
adding value, where we have expensive labor doing repetitive work. I want to be
sure I'm setting up the company with tools and processes that can be used globally
and that are scalable. [As] Parexel acquires and grows, we need processes that don't
rely on humans to do repetitive task-based work.