Toyota Program: Slash Meeting Costs

As companies move to trim off-site costs, Toyota uses StarCite event-planning software to manage more than 400 annual face-to-face gatherings

By Damian Joseph

Toyota Motor (TM) is often idolized for its super-efficient logistics and manufacturing operations. But after less than an hour on the job as Toyota's meeting services manager in 2006, Louann Cashill discovered that the carmaker could be as wasteful as Detroit's Big Three when it came to planning off-site events. "It was like walking into an office that still used typewriters," she jokes.

Toyota holds more than 400 meetings and conferences each year in the U.S., with an average of 3,500 employees on the road every month. Not long ago each round of travel began with hard-to-read, handwritten registration forms pouring forth from a fax machine to be manually typed into a computer. Hotels had to be selected, contacted, negotiated with, booked, and sent attendee information. Three full-time employees were needed to handle the workload.

Cashill had just researched event-planning software for her previous employer, Amgen (AMGN), where she ended up using a program called StarCite. She quickly enlisted Toyota in the same service. Today, all Cashill has to do is enter basic information about a meeting into a StarCite template, along with a list of employees who'll be attending. StarCite automatically sends online registration forms to attendees, books their reservations, and sends the information, along with payment, to the hotels.

Since switching over, Toyota has cut meetings expenses by 23% and its event-planning staff to one. The company has also saved nearly $1 million by using another StarCite feature that enables it to bank canceled bookings—like a store credit—and fill the space later when another Toyota group needs to meet.

Meetings cost 3% of company revenues

With a few clicks of the mouse, Cashill can also generate detailed financial information on something as large as a year's total meeting budget or as small as how much a particular employee spent at a conference. "Technology is the foundation of putting together a meeting program," Cashill says. "Until you can collect, capture, store, and organize the spending, you don't know where you sit."

StarCite's creator, a Philadelphia company also known as StarCite, charges a fee of 0.5% to 1% of what its corporate clients spend on meetings for which they use the software.

The cost-cutting tool has become even more timely as Toyota and other StarCite clients look for savings to offset sales declines. According to Boston-based research firm Aberdeen Group, employers fork out 3% of revenue on meetings. One option, of course, is to hold fewer face-to-face get-togethers; indeed, conference attendance is broadly down. But even though videoconferencing is becoming cheaper and better, many companies have concluded that employees still need to gather in person with buyers, sellers, partners, and one another.

Vendors say StarCite's automation has helped them, too. Michael Beardsley, vice-president of global sales for Paris-based Accor Hospitality, a $11.2 billion-a-year hotel operator, says that StarCite's client database provides a "prospecting list," that helps his sales representatives know what would-be customers need for upcoming meetings, which in turn enables them to prepare better bids.

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