The Knowledge > Corporate case study
How to... TACKLE MEETING SPEND HEAD ON
Often viewed as the last bastion of unmanaged travel, huge strides in technology and a climate conducive to change is allowing corporates to manage M&E exactly as they manage transient. Gillian Upton finds out how Tesco has done just that
Danielle Bartlett BUYER MANAGER, GROUP TRAVEL, TESCO Danielle joined Tesco in January 2006. Her Tesco career started in the buying team, initially within retail consumables and moving into travel just over two years later. As buyer for travel & MICE UK, Danielle progressed quickly before accepting her current role of buying manager, group travel, in 2010. She was responsible for Tesco’s first event production e-auction and, today, Danielle is at the forefront of developing Tesco’s travel and meetings strategies and industry leading travel technology and tools.
THE under-utilisation of internal meeting space and a lack of control was the main driver for supermarket giant Tesco to get a better handle on M&E spend and thereby create a great savings opportunity. Like many corporates, the company
had primarily been focusing on the effective procurement of its transient accommodation and travel. “We had under-utilised internal meeting space. We had space in our office locations and in Tesco stores locally which was not being used properly,” explains Danielle Bartlett, buyer manager, group travel at Tesco. “People in the business were simply
not aware of the opportunity to use internal space. It was a situation no-one was satisfied with,” she says. The company’s strategy was simple:
to introduce mandated policies and to launch an online tool for booking internal and external meetings with the initial objective being to reduce meetings and events spend by 20 per cent. Furthermore, Tesco also wanted to simplify the booking processes and drive policy compliance. “Leveraging our accommodation and
MICE spend was something which made sense but we also had to ensure we had the right supplier first and the time and resource to attack the project properly,” recalls Bartlett. From concept to roll out took seven
months during 2008 and the results have been amazing. In the first two years alone, partner BSI booked 74,000 internal meeting bookings. Occupancy hit 97 per cent in high, mid-week periods and 60 per cent in off-peak periods such as the month of August. The company saved £6.9million in
‘cost avoidance’ meetings – which represented a 40 per cent drop in external meetings – and saved 26 per cent on the average cost of 24-hour delegate rate, down from £37 ex-VAT to nearer £28 to £29. Read on for a step- by-step guide to how Tesco achieved its goal of reining in its M&E spend.
due to the lack of historical MI providing line item detailed information. It took a long time to pull together what we could from historical MI and historical invoices.” To bolster the information, Tesco worked closely with stakeholders in training and management teams to establish past and likely future demand. “This gave us the necessary baselines,” Bartlett explains. BSI's Sam Welch, head of account management, and working on the Tesco account since 2004, advises to get as much data as you can: ”Don’t panic if you haven’t got full data and
Step 1 Data collection was the bedrock of the project and did present challenges. “If we were to successfully develop a robust meetings programme then we had to arm BSI with as much information as possible to assist them in negotiating the venue programme,” explains Bartlett. Lack of data is often the reason many corporates put the brakes on such projects, but Tesco persisted. “This was a challenge,” admits Bartlett, “especially
“We had to ensure we had the right supplier first, plus the time and resource to attack the project properly”
make sure you use your data and measure it.”
Step 2 Getting the right suppliers in place was the next step. Tesco already worked with BSI for strategic accommodation management and appointed them as its preferred meetings management supplier (including venue finding,
event services and online booking technology) after a six-way tender process in late 2008. “BSI was already successful in the meeting management market and won our business on merit. The partnership has worked well for us because it has
6 I THE BUSINESS TRAVEL MAGAZINE
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