End of the line

As professional congress organisers become increasingly indispensable, the days of in-house planning could be numbered.

When the department head wants a meeting room and lunch for 10 delegates booked for the day after tomorrow, most corporate event planners wouldn't bat an eyelid, but when you add international travel, large numbers of delegates, and a seriously high profile event into the mix, the effectiveness of an in-house planner begins to pale.

For example, in a regional conference for 250 people, planners would be responsible for handling the transportation, accommodation, venue hire, food and beverage arrangements, visa issuing, marketing and communication, and event design and production, to name but a few of the areas that will need dedicated attention.

Major multi-national corporations with events teams of 30 people or more might have the time and manpower to handle this kind of event, but smaller companies or those that only have a handful of event planners on their team are unlikely to have the means to carry it out successfully, argues Roger Tondeur, founder and president of Geneva-based MCI Group.

"When you are doing an event in-house, you are giving this job to an event manager who ends up being a general contractor who has to do everything," he explains.

"He or she has to choose the hotels, transportation, design of the web-page etc. They will perhaps use some suppliers, but you are actually watering down the content and the quality of the event."

But by employing a professional congress organiser (PCO) or an event management company (EMC), planners are effectively bringing in a team of professionals who are responsible for planning events on a day-to-day basis.

Like many large international PCOs, MCI dedicates individuals experienced in different aspects of an event to each client account to take care of particular aspects of their event, while other members of staff will be assigned to other areas.

"By outsourcing, you can get access to talented staff that are only working on one specific part of your event and have done the same event a hundred times before," Tondeur explains.

"In MCI you have as many people as it takes working on a project and they will each spend a few hours a day working on their particular areas. In the end you have a number of full time equivalents [of in-house staff], working on the project."

The most obvious reason companies would chose to organise their event in house is the perception that using a PCO or EMC is much more costly than managing the event themselves.

The reality is that the PCO adds value to the event and will guarantee a quality delivery, for a relatively small profit margin, Tondeur argues.

"Keep it in-house by all means, but what you get as an advantage is not that great," he says.

"We make approximately 8% profit - you can look at our books. Agencies are not making 30% or 50% profit on this!"

And since companies will be looking at the same cost structure - i.e. the costs of all the elements that make up the event then the salary of a full time planner on top - the end cost is unlikely to differ that much, he adds.

Working with an internationally recognised PCO or EMC also afford planners the luxury of having several hundred members of staff with experience in all aspects of meetings industry planning in destinations across the world on hand.

"Say you need a 250 person event in October next year in Mauritius or Egypt or Tokyo - we are almost certain to have people here that have already organised an event like that before in those places, whereas it is impossible in an in-house environment to have organisers that have worked with all these places," Tondeur explains.

"We will pool our resources and pull people out of different offices if necessary."

What the planners say

The number of large corporations moving into the region is increasing every day, but not all of them have large meeting planning teams and many are young companies taking advantage of the tax free climate the region offers, which might lack the sophistication of larger corporates with dedicated meeting professionals.

In many major firms in the region, the planning of meetings, conferences, product launches, conventions and exhibitions is often down to whoever finds the e-mail in their inbox.

This can include procurement managers, sales and marketing personnel, HR managers, personal assistants etc. very few of whom have the time to manage a major event as well as carry out their day-to-day jobs. Consequentially, these duties are often then delegated to the firm's travel agency implant.

"We have a travel agency implant in the office reporting directly to the purchasing department," explains Marwan Hatoum, purchasing manager at the Jeddah regional HQ of pharmaceutical giant Sanofi Aventis.

"The thing is that a lot of the time these guys can't prepare anything good. Let's say I want to organise something in Holland. They bring me quotations with huge prices and sometimes they can't get the availability or get the tickets or the visas or they have some problems finding a hotel with six or seven meetings rooms."

Due to the contractual agreements between travel agencies and suppliers, agency implants are often obliged to limit their searches to certain partners, which restricts the buying flexibility of the client.

"Consequentially, I have to outsource them and go directly to someone else," Hatoum explains.

"I'll search through my database for some contacts - people that I meet in person at events like GIBTM in Abu Dhabi (April 8-10). I may contact them and give them the full details and tell them to give me a quotation."

As well as taking the burden of organising the event off of his shoulders, using a supplier like a PCO or DMC also guarantees a job well done, Hatoum adds.

"Sometimes I don't have time to do any of the organising," he says.

"Normally with an event you have to book the hotel, the conference, you have to see the speakers, you have to arrange the travel tickets and the travel agency and transportation - there are many things to think about.

"I do around 60 to 70 purchase requests per day, and I only have two or three people with me. Most of the time I just want to be able to give it to somebody; I don't have time and I just need the results to be done."

The bitter end

MCI's Tondeur believes that the only people who would be in favour of in-house meeting planning are the people whose jobs might be on the line if corporations realise the true value of PCOs, or companies organising events with highly sensitive company information or a top secret product launch.

"In the product launch you have to work for, say, six months in advance on the logistics, so automatically the people working on it are privy to the information about that product," he explains. "The company doesn't want its competition to know what it is up to."

But respected PCOs would sign a confidentiality agreement to protect the client's information, and some go as far as agreeing on mutually exclusive contracts, whereby if they are organising the event for one mobile phone company, they would not be able to have any competitors as client for example, he adds.

Apart from those exceptions to the rule, Tondeur feels that it is always more beneficial for a company to use a PCO when planning any event.

"I don't know any argument in favour of in-house planning," he stresses.

"My prediction is that a few years down the line, 100% of all event business will be outsourced, just as it is today in the advertising business. It will happen - I am absolutely convinced of it."