Objective
CWT Meetings & Events was engaged to develop a strategy and framework for a global, shared service meetings and events organization. Our client, part of a wider multinational conglomerate in a distressed financial situation, was experiencing significant internal change and restructure.
Challenge
The organization’s meetings and events function was decentralized with disparate groups planning meetings, numerous disparate processes for sourcing and planning and multiple instances of its meeting technology. The combined challenges led to initial recommendation for the development of a strong and sustainable business rationale for SMM, as well as options for viable funding models that would support its current infrastructure. It would also allow for a near cost-neutral implementation and effective organizational design. With no meeting policy in place, our team recommended developing a global policy aligned to the organization’s current environment and company culture.
Solution
We conducted an SMM strategy workshop with our client’s core team that led to recommendations for achieving a best-in-class SMM program. This included concept design and organizational structure for global deployment, as well as recommendations for KPIs to measure the efficiency and maturity of the program. Our approach also included benchmarking our client’s situation against best-in-class SMM programs of other, similar organizations.
We developed a comprehensive business case to identify areas of potential cost savings that a robust SMM program would generate. The business case highlighted the current state of meetings as well as potential costs and ROI in the first three years of implementation based on achievable adoption levels.
Our business case provided an innovative framework for the client’s organization, we wanted to ensure that the program’s benefits would be effectively communicated to stakeholders and drive the levels of adoption we knew were achievable. This led to the deployment of globally-accepted meeting cards as one of the key drivers for policy compliance and audit.
At the end of our consulting engagement, this best-in-class business case was presented to senior leadership and led to quick approval for global SMM deployment and implementation.
Results
Our business case clearly articulated a strategy and vision for the future, underscored by best practices, adoption targets, specific deliverables and anticipated cost savings and ROI that global deployment of SMM would bring to the organization. Other significant deliverables included:
- A business intelligence strategy, including technology and data analytics optimization
- A global meetings and events policy, including a payment solutions strategy to support compliance
- Streamlined processes and SOPs to drive operational excellence
What made CWT M&E’s consulting engagement so successful? We provided a custom solution tailored to the organization’s specific needs, including its company culture and propensity for speed.
To date
Since launching its SMM program, our client has:
- Consolidated multiple meetings technology instances into one
- Deployed the organizational design recommended in our business case to achieve optimized scalability and service delivery excellence
- Introduced the global meetings policy throughout the organization with metrics to support adoption and compliance
- Achieved over $200k in in cost savings in the first 6 months of implementation
- Consistently tracking double-digit adoption increases, including new meeting requesters and meetings sourced
Quick facts
- Global SMM strategy approval expedited by senior leadership team
- Achieved over $200k in cost savings in the first 6 months of implementation
- Consolidated multiple meetings technology instances into one