Welcome back to another installment of Whitepaper Wednesday here on the Purchasing Certification Blog. This week, I\u2019ll be reviewing a whitepaper entitled \u201cIntegrating Corporate Travel, Procurement and Meetings Management: A Best Practices Roadmap to Strategic Meetings Management Success\u201d from Starcite and Bitpipe.com.<\/p>\n
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As the trend is for more and more non-traditional categories to fall under the scope of the procurement department, a category that has been mentioned in more conversation than ever is meetings. While meetings management has been the responsibility of the corporate travel department in many companies, it appears that there is a lot of decentralized, one-off spending going on, making the situation ripe for funneling that spend into the procurement department.<\/p>\n
While even knowing what meetings spending is going on can be a challenge, this whitepaper offers some good suggestions for knowing where to start. It suggests seeking out expenditures on things like \u201cmeals with 10 or more diners, audio-visual charges, large hotel room blocks or banquet charges, etc.\u201d<\/p>\n
Where should you look for these expenditures? The whitepaper suggests corporate card reports, individual meeting planners, the finance department, and even suppliers.<\/p>\n
The whitepaper says that the next step is to create policies around meetings. Unfortunately, I felt that this section could have used a few more examples. The one example it did provide stated that any contract that an internal meeting planner negotiates or modifies must be reviewed by Procurement.<\/p>\n
The whitepaper talks about re-evaluating the supply base to consolidate business with suppliers who can accommodate both meeting-related transactions as well as what the whitepaper refers to as \u201ctransient travel.\u201d<\/p>\n
The whitepaper identified four aspects of initial meetings integration (the placing of meetings spend under the Procurement umbrella) that can result in return on investment of an aggregate total of 11 \u2013 25% of meetings spend:<\/p>\n
Then, the whitepaper goes on to claim that additional savings beyond these \u201cfirst returns\u201d are possible as a result of using data gathered to reduce preferred rates, get bigger discounts, and increase corporate card rebates.<\/p>\n
With these types of savings available, it is no wonder why larger companies are taking a harder look at meetings spend. My concern is that many companies will let this meeting spend slide under the radar for a couple of possible reasons: (1) they assume that their meetings spend is too small to matter or (2) they have always treated meetings as synonymous with travel, failing to take into account the market dynamics that may make integrating meetings spend into procurement a profitable endeavor.<\/p>\n
If you are interested in delving more into the topic of meetings procurement, you can get your own copy of this whitepaper from Bitpipe.com (registration required).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Welcome back to another installment of Whitepaper Wednesday here on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":4112,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-procurement"],"yoast_head":"\n