Case Study: A Large Pharmaceutical Company

Maritz Travel helps client lower costs and demonstrate corporate governance through strategic meetings management.

Maritz Travel helps client lower costs and demonstrate corporate governance through strategic meetings management.

Situation

The Global Company’s meetings and events landscape involved a fragmented set of activities, most of which were managed independently. Individual stakeholders drove the destination selection, resulting in a wide array of venue selections, room rates and contracting terms. In addition, the state-of-the-travel industry was a sellers’ market. The Client was experiencing rates that were above market norms. In many cases contract terms and conditions were not optimal. The lack of standardized processes made it difficult to assure that meetings and events delivered a consistent level of quality, and put the client at risk from a compliance perspective, based upon a limited governance over spend.

Solution

A Strategic Meetings Management (SMM) initiative involves a progressive roadmap of activities. After reviewing the Client’s data, Maritz’ Strategic Meetings Management division worked with this Global Company to implement a process that would assist in gaining cost efficiencies, improve the quality of their meetings and further assist in managing legal and financial risk.

By working with the management of the stakeholder groups, unifying guidelines, and a process to execute were developed to take into account and address:

• Profiling of appropriate venues based upon meeting type
• Venue room rate and food & beverage spend guides
• Contract agreements, terms & conditions

The policy includes an exception process that accommodates unique circumstances.

An effective communications plan was developed to socialize the objectives of this plan and share the benefits it extended to the individual roles.

The team was able to negotiate aggressively by leveraging the Client’s spend volume and Maritz’ buying power.

Results

• The Client is now able to strategically manage their meeting spend.
• Quality of events has improved through a standardized operating model to drive consistent service delivery.
• Financial and legal risk are now managed to comply with organizational goals and government regulations.
• Despite a 10% increase due to the sellers’ market the client achieved a 10% year over year savings for a total cost reduction of 20%.
• The new process generated $425 K savings in year over year spend.