Below is an abstract that I submitted to the MPI-PEC meeting for an educational session on Feb 2nd in Atlanta.

A problem facing many strategic meetings management programs (SMMP) is that the people who request meetings often what realistic costs are in today’s event market.  If the meeting request form asks for budget estimates, then the planner will receive wildly inaccurate guesses.  If the form omits budget estimates, then the meeting professional must educate the meeting requester and their manager on the reality of what they want compared to their desired budget.  Furthermore, the meeting planner must re-work the meeting requests prior to submitting an RFP to hotels, or face the concealed wrath of national sales managers who don’t appreciate responding to unrealistic requests.

This session will discuss a solution to this problem: using web-based software to automatically prepare a preliminary budget estimation as part of the meeting request process.  First, the professional meeting management group sets up rules which relate “layman’s terms” to “meeting costs”.  Examples of such rules could include: a single room for one night costs X dollars (on average), a continental breakfast costs Y, and a specific geographical region costs 50% more than the average, and 4-star quality costs 25% more than 3-star, etc.  The exact values set up during the system implementation phase are not critical, since over time the system will learn from actual costs.

After the meetings group configures this system, an individual within the organization can go to a web site, prepare a meeting request, and enter values they know, such as the number of attendees, meals, location, facility quality, A/V requirements, and room-nights.  Next, the system uses its pre-configured rules to create a “Preliminary Budget Estimate”, which is displayed instantly to the meeting requester prior to the completion of their request.  This budget allows the requester to see an order-of-magnitude estimate of their meeting expenses, so that they can make changes to their meeting request prior to submission in order to approach their budget limit.

Once the meeting request is submitted, the preliminary budget estimate routes to both the designated Approver (typically, a manager) and Planner in order to continue the meeting management process.  As the meeting cycle progresses, the planner enters actual expenses from proposals and, eventually, invoices.  Over time, the system learns from the differences between the estimated, proposed, and actual costs, and it can adjust the rules used in the Preliminary Budget Estimation step in order to more closely match existing market conditions.