News

Optimizing your spend management for meetings and events — new strategies for getting cost control over meeting and events spend

August 18, 2016

KPMG clients around the world are budgeting over $770 billion on meeting and events. This is led by the changing market place, demanding executives, and target oriented sales team. Corporations are looking to satisfy the ever changing demands of the organization. Executives want the best event experience possible with no logistical issues and will throw significant resources at it to make this happen.

It’s a dirty little secret of meeting and events planning business, but M&E organizations are driven by throwing the “best event ever”. That being said, it is highly likely that at the end of the day planners will not have a full and detailed grasp of how much was spent and what, at a very granular level, is needed for the next event.

It may seem surprising that meeting and events planners may not realize what they are spending such an enormous sum of money on. The challenge they face is that meeting plans change so much from plan to execution and the cost of change is buried in venue and hotel invoices with virtually no level of detail. The priority of meeting and events planners is to pull off the “best event ever” without participants being made aware of the mechanics behind it.

Meeting and events spend, has a lot of moving parts and levels of visibility. There is spend such as AV, transportation, catering and lodging, plus cost of emergency items. Event planners are focused on maximizing the attendee experience at the expense of the annual meetings and events budget. As procurement professionals – we can’t help event planners source the best portfolio of products and services, because it is very challenging to understand, at a detailed level, what was bought and whether the pricing, markups and rebates were appropriate.

Without visibility into this spend, Procurement finds it difficult to properly partner with their peers in Meeting and Events to help them deliver the “best event ever” while maximizing and extending their overall annual budget.

These issues can be addressed through enhanced processes designed to capture the meeting spend up front, manage the change process throughout, communicate easily with suppliers, and streamline the process from budget set-up to final payment and settlement. Simply put, a coordinated approach can be best. Benefits of this approach include the following:
•Helping meeting and event planners to focus more on optimizing the attendee experience
•Supporting hosts in achieving higher attendee satisfaction while still maintaining their budgets
•Enabling Procurement to demonstrate qualitative and quantitative value to the organization
•Helping Finance to optimize spend and manage on-time payments

It’s a very exciting time in Procurement across many categories. KPMG and Eved are helping clients across many industries put in new capabilities to drive measurable value back to the Meeting and Events group and category.

   

Pritzker Group Home Page

Pritzker Group Venture Capital

Pritzker Group Private Capital

Pritzker Group Asset Management