Like many large companies in the pharmaceutical sector,
arguably the most meetings-intensive industry of all and with perhaps the
greatest need due to regulation of detailed documentation of meetings and event
operations and expenditures, Johnson & Johnson is no stranger to the
strategic meetings management concept. With an effective program that spanned
its U.S. operations, according to global manager of meeting services
Christopher Wall, the company nevertheless was not where "we wanted to be
on a global basis," and in 2013 sought to rectify that.
Wall and his team crafted and submitted a global request for
proposals for meetings services to several large third parties, with the
winners tasked with helping to service the pharmaceutical company's annual load
of more than 10,000 meetings. In the end, J&J reached a decision that he
wasn't necessarily expecting at the process' outset.
"We were really looking to find a solution that would
really help us move our process forward at a more rapid pace," Wall said. "We
were really looking for acceleration. To get acceleration, we took a lot of
time and effort on this particular RFP to really define and design what it was
we were looking for. In the end, as we looked back at it and saw the results
and had the conversations with the suppliers who were involved, we ended up
implementing a dual global solution, which was a switch from what we previously
have thought we would do with a single global provider."
Hear Christopher Wall
in his own words:
2014 Best Practitioner Christopher Wall
Wall selected two mega travel management companies to
provide meetings services globally, with a single meetings technology tool to
support the process and collect relevant meetings data. The rollout in fact was
at a rapid pace: By the beginning of August 2014, SMM services had been
established in 47 J&J markets and another 12 are in various stages of
implementation, he said.
The use of multiple agencies but a single technology tool
enables J&J to not only provide service with global standards and local
modifications but also collect and manage data in a single global format.
"We didn't want to have each supplier operating with
their own tool, managing the data in their own set and then providing us
reports at the end. We really wanted to take a different approach," Wall
said. "We ask our suppliers to use the J&J instance of that tool so
that whether they're sending RFPs or tracking meeting spend or any of those
types of things, we're utilizing our tool in order to do that. We get better
transparency, better visibility, better control versus them doing their own
thing. We even have taken the step to begin developing and issuing on a global
basis customer service satisfaction surveys, so no longer done by the agency
themselves but being done, through our instance [of the tool] asking the same
questions in every market so that on a global basis, we're asking the same
thing."
In developing the RFP and modifying the meetings technology
tool, Wall sought input from several
internal stakeholders, including but not limited to its internal audit, legal
and health care compliance departments.
"All of those groups together, as well as our
customers, really define the right kind of solution to support our needs,"
Wall said. "On a global basis, there are some markets that are more
difficult to work in than others, that provide perhaps more risk than there are
in others. It's that risk that, in the end, we need to look to manage
successfully both for the local company and obviously for the overall
enterprise."
This report
originally appeared in the Aug. 25, 2014, edition of Business Travel News.