Sanofi Pasteur deputy director of travel services Will
Anderson compares the process of incubating a strategic meetings management
program with the Petri dishes so integral to his company's business, with
pre-negotiated hotel contracts, online meetings booking and a standard form of
payment taking the place of the microbes that are cultured into Sanofi Pasteur's
vaccines. Now, after generating about $500,000 in savings the first year, "the
Petri dish is on fire," Anderson said, and the new program is spreading to
other parts of his division's parent, pharmaceutical giant Sanofi.
"It was an idea whose time had come," said
Anderson of the project that would garner him a place on Business Travel News' 2011 Best Practitioners list. Sanofi Pasteur's
strategic meetings management program was born in 2007 during a downturn in
company travel. Implementation began in 2010 on a foundation of StarCite
meetings technology. The program is designed to standardize and consolidate
several front- and back-end meetings processes, removing for internal meeting
sponsors the need to find sites, negotiate contracts and manage attendee
registration and bookings.
Sanofi Pasteur's meeting-booking process begins with an
automated request by an employee to stage an event. The request is forwarded to
a particular level in the corporate hierarchy for approval depending on the
projected cost of the meeting: Requests for events costing $62,000 or less
would be routed to a director, and those that would cost more are sent to an
executive director or vice president. "The manager can approve, deny or
ask for more information," Anderson said. "The whole approval process
for meetings is vetted out, and it forces people to think about it and makes
sure funds are budgeted. And it qualifies the meeting."
The approval process is paperless, and Anderson said the
elimination of purchase orders by itself has generated significant savings. "The
company is saving $250 to $300 a shot for purchase orders."
Should the proposed meeting be approved by the appropriate
executives, the meeting sponsor then can turn to Sanofi Pasteur's
StarCite-powered platform. That platform began to take shape after Anderson and
his team completed a Six Sigma training session during the travel lull and
decided to assess the company's meeting planning processes.
"We went out and purchased StarCite modules—the
invitation tool, registration, request for proposals, the whole boat—and
decided we needed to get fully automated with meeting planning processes,"
said Anderson, a Six Sigma Yellow Belt. "We started to see the flexibility
of the tool and virtually designed our own process."
Pre-Negotiated Rates,
Terms
Anderson and his team pre-negotiated contracts for meetings
at three or four properties near each of four Sanofi Pasteur business
locations: its U.S. headquarters in the northeast Pennsylvania community of
Swiftwater; its parent's U.S. headquarters in Bridgewater, N.J.; Cambridge,
Mass., and Toronto. The contracts include pre-negotiated rates, terms and
conditions and prices for ancillary items like Wi-Fi access or audiovisual
equipment.
Meeting sponsors through the platform can choose a property
and book space under the pre-negotiated rates and terms. "It allows an
administrator to go in and use our tool like Expedia, with pictures of hotels
and everything, and since the contracts are pre-negotiated, the rates are
pre-negotiated, and the T&Cs are in place, they can just pick a property.
It walks them through the process, and it provides meeting planning logic for
them. It's an insurance policy and a good night's sleep built into it."
Once a site is sourced, sponsors can use the platform to
conduct traditional meeting-planning functions—invite attendees, build a
meeting-specific website and set up registration capabilities, with the
assistance of a meeting planner, if necessary. Attendees at the point of
meeting registration can book travel through Sanofi Pasteur's Cliqbook online
booking tool, furnished by Concur, "so we can virtually manage the
manifest of who is registered and who is booked," Anderson said.
Part of the negotiated property agreements is the use of a
master folio bill for each event, which Sanofi Pasteur pays through an American
Express meeting card. Attendees are not individually billed. The charges are
paid centrally by Anderson's department, and the department responsible for the
meeting is charged the expense via invoice routed through the company's SAP
system.
Sanofi Pasteur uses the Meetings360 payment and
reconciliation portal jointly developed by American Express and StarCite,
allowing for comprehensive and smooth spending data consolidation, Anderson
said.
Savings Add Up
Sanofi Pasteur receives commissions from the properties with
which it holds pre-negotiated contracts, and American Express provides a rebate
on meetings spending charged to the meeting card; Anderson said the rebate is
between 1 percent and 2 percent of spending. Combining that revenue with
negotiated savings from the hotel contracts and savings from eliminating
purchase orders generated about $500,000 in the second half of 2010, shortly
after the program's debut, a figure that Anderson expects to escalate quickly
this year and thereafter.
"We project capturing $40 million worth of spend and
offering savings of about 10 percent," Anderson said, adding that those
are "rough figures."
"Historically, our meeting planners save between 12
percent and 16 percent on what they get their hands on in hard negotiation.
There's probably about $500,000 alone in back-office efficiencies," he
explained. "There is the future leverage we'll have with hotels—we'll
actually be able to know what we're spending at Marriott in North America. That's
going to be huge in our negotiations because we've been a house divided, and it's
not leveraging properly. We will be able to pool all that knowledge, all that
leverage and all that spend and get better rates for sure."
Anderson said StarCite charges a fee for each transaction,
an expense Sanofi Pasteur also pays with the meeting card.
Before Anderson's project—aided by Sanofi Pasteur manager of
meeting operations Sara Gunderman—the company's meetings management efforts
weren't centralized. "We had to go to five sources for a guesstimate of
meetings spending," he said. "People were paying on individual credit
cards, some were doing purchase orders, some didn't even know they needed a
purchase order, they were just going out there and spending money. We've
eliminated maverick spending because people are not spending money before
purchase orders are in place—and now, there's not even a purchase order."
After obtaining "unanimous" approval from the
management committee at Pasteur for what it described as "a no-brainer,"
according to Anderson, he quickly gained program compliance without installing
a true mandate. "It's more of a velvet-glove mandate, whereby they need to
help. They are glad to know there is an SMM program. They appreciate the help
and need it, as they are overwhelmed with meeting planning and the current way
that they pay and approve. It's been welcomed with open arms. I predict it will
be an after-the-fact mandate, but it's been an easy sell."
The initiative has spread throughout Sanofi Pasteur and into
some areas of its parent's operations as well. The result, Anderson said, is a
more streamlined program with more visibility into the full picture of meeting
expenditures. "Some companies are running meetings through T&E, and
the [management] approval thresholds are very, very low, and the spend is very
high. We find that out with the affiliates, and we are going in there and
providing a lot of relief and help."
As a division of a large pharmaceutical company, Sanofi
Pasteur's meetings must comply with regulations governing certain expenditures,
including the federal Physician Payment Sunshine Act. "We also found that
StarCite is a wonderful archive for all information we need to provide to be
compliant with the Sunshine Act," Anderson said. "All spending for
doctors we capture in StarCite, and we are kind of tweaking technology in
concert with information services people. We put it in place, and it's kind of
a tech life raft for all of these applications."
Anderson's department downsized one employee as a result of
the technological advancement of the meetings initiative, but now the company
is looking to add headcount to the program as it grows, he said.
"We're really pleased about what we've accomplished,
its an enormous undertaking, but we've connected the dots using the technology,"
Anderson said. "It's a race without a finish line, and the best part is
yet to come."
The report originally
appeared in the November 2011 issue of Travel
Procurement.