Reducing costs through MeetingsPro
MeetingsPro has delivered process efficiencies when booking smaller meetings and achieved an 8% reduction in overall spend.
Article Contributors
Our County Council customer is responsible for a wide range of services across the whole country. Their role is to act strategically and implement policy as determined by Cabinet, this means delivering services to people in an open and cost-effective way.
Our customer carries out a high volume of small meetings and have embarked on a journey with us to consolidate spend and bring onboard leakage, as well as incorporating not-for-profit venues within their preferred venue list. They’ve also adopted our web-based management tool, Meetingspro®, to further streamline their processes and reduce their costs on overall company spend.
Objectives
The County Council had a high volume of small meeting bookings managed offline. Their profile leant itself to the implementation of MeetingsPro, as they wanted to achieve the following objectives:
- Achieve 50% of all bookings placed through MeetingsPro within the first year of go live, rather than the traditional webform or email.
- 30% of bookings self-managed online directly with the venue within the first year.
- Reduce the average cost per daily delegate by 5% against the previous year tracking.
- Reduce the average cost per booking.
- Reduce the percentage of Tier 3 (commissionable, non-government/council venues) bookings.
Solution
Through a managed re-launch and communication plan, our proprietary online tool was implemented to more than 160 bookers across multiple sites and divisions. We worked closely with our customer throughout the process to provide invaluable project management to ensure the project was delivered timely and successfully, this included:
- Communications plan
- MeetingsPro booker training
- Approval process configuration
- Payment process reviewed and a lodge card implemented
- Technology integration
There were a number of key achievements since our customer launched MeetingsPro, including a reduction to their overall costs by 8% in the first year alone.
MeetingsPro has made a huge increase in time efficiency, and when used correctly makes significant cost savings.
Project Support Officer, CC
Results
Through demand management there was an evident reduction of Tier 3 venues by 15% through converting these into governmental and council run venues.
Overall, the results we have achieved for our customer are massive. Each of the objectives they set out to accomplish have been exceeded all within the initial months of go live.
We’ve since been reviewing their internal meeting space which has seen further savings and maximised usage of their internal space, which was as a priority over costly external venues.