Quality vs. Price: Going Through Procurement

Meetings are all about face-to-face communication, Meyer says. Anything that stands in the way of that communication reduces the ROI. If meeting planners don’t help procurement officers understand what’s needed to communicate with attendees, the company can end up shooting itself in the foot.

“Why do you need a 5,000-lumen projector instead of a 2,500-lumen projector?” Meyer asks. “Maybe 5,000 is $1,000 a day, while 2,500-lumen is $500 a day. What they don’t understand is that there’s a certain amount of ambient light that diffuses that light from the projector, and therefore 2,500 isn’t strong enough.”

The idea of the meeting is to convey information, he emphasizes. If the presentation is washed out, or if the room lights have to be kept so low that nobody can see to write, the meeting is not a success.

“A meeting of 2,500 people at $1,500 a person costs $3.75 million,” Meyer says. “If they can save 10 percent on that meeting, that’s $375,000. But if they choose the wrong areas to save the $375,000, the message doesn’t get conveyed, and the company doesn’t go in the direction that it hopes to go. So what they’ve really done is wasted more than $3 million.”

Even when a procurement department takes the planner’s experience into account, the very existence of another layer of bureaucracy can slow down the planning process. Beth Beutell, manager of meetings, events, and trade shows in the Minneapolis-based cardiology division of Boston Scientific, a medical-device manufacturer, has to go through procurement for recognition pieces for employees, because procurement has established a preferred-vendor relationship. She says she’s glad her other decisions are her own.

“I think speed is one big reason,” she explains. “If we are working on meetings that are unplanned and come up suddenly, we need to check availability right away. It’s so much easier to go directly to our sources and to be able to execute on the meeting right away.”