TMCnet News
New Software Creates Quick and Easy Manifests for Ground Transfers(Corporate Meetings & Incentives Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Is there a less elegant element of meeting operations than airport transfers? Probably not. But this Rodney Dangerfield of tasks has to get done! And while it’s not a huge part of your budget (about four percent of overall spending on a meeting, on average), it can prove a major hassle. It should be a simple process: Collect the names of arriving attendees, associate those names with accurate flight times and origins, and group the passengers efficiently in vehicles. But everyone involved in the process knows it’s not simple. First, all that information has to move from attendee to planner to destination management company to transportation provider, with data likely being re-entered into new systems at each step. Second, no initial manifest has ever looked like a final manifest: Additions, cancellations, changes, and corrections are a fact of planning. And third, all that initial inputting and continual refining can take days of work. So a couple of years ago, a ground transportation company decided to try to fix the process. At first they just did it for themselves, but it worked so well and saved so much time, they’re now licensing the system just about as fast as they can get the word out. “We thought there must be an easier way to get data and manipulate it,” explains Evan Michaels, CEO of tech company PowWow Smart and of ground transportation provider Coastal Car Worldwide. So with a team of software developers, Coastal Car Worldwide created a platform for performing some wizardry on the typical arrivals and departures list Excel doc and spitting out a clean and accurate manifest in less than one minute. More Planning TipsGlobal Meeting Checklist: Ground Transportation 50 Ways to Save Money Planning Meetings In 12 months the company has processed 3,400 manifests for 72 licensed users, and helped clients save $3 million, according to Frank Schnur, PowWow Smart’s chief marketing officer. But it’s not just the cost savings that the company emphasizes. While it will reduce your cost by an estimated 25 percent, using the system also saves you time, hassle, and errors, and thereby improves service—the service that DMCs are delivering to you and therefore the service you are delivering to attendees. How it Works “When anyone who’s responsible for handling ground transportation first receives a manifest, the format is never the same,” Michaels explains. “Columns are not consistent, cells are missing…” And remember, he points out, a spreadsheet of 200 people with 12 columns of requested data from the meeting planner equals 2,400 cells of data. Pow Wow Smart’s first steps are to run through the spreadsheet identifying all cell errors, blanks, or mistakes within the data, and to validate flight information in real time directly with the airlines’ systems. (The latter is itself a major undertaking, involving figuring out when attendees have entered the wrong info—their originating flight instead of their connecting flight, for example.) It then returns an “error report,” including only the problem cells. This process—which would have been done manually over several hours, and probably not with 100 percent accuracy—is completed by Pow Wow in seconds. After the spreadsheet is corrected, a single click groups passengers by terminal and by vehicle. Have additions and cancellations? “Changes are automatically integrated, validated, optimized, and re-priced,” Schnur says. “You’ll save four to eight hours on a typical 100- to 300-person manifest. The bigger and nastier the manifest is, the more time you’ll save.” A New Question for Your DMC RFPs DMCs are PowWow Smart’s primary target for licenses. The company has appointed Grant Snider, a longtime DMC executive who sold his business earlier this year, to its advisory board. “We wanted to get Grant’s insights into the meetings and incentive industry and especially the DMC market,” Michaels says. Snider believes DMCs will see the software as a major benefit. “DMCs need to exploit every technology available to reduce the time spent on repetitive, manual tasks that are not perceived as high value by planner clients,” he says. “This enables a DMC to focus on creative, higher value services.” Even more compelling, the system allows a DMC to be more strategic with what was once a purely repetitive task. “Because the process is automated, you can run different arrival/departure scenarios and see the price impact of those different experiences,” explains Frank Schnur. For example, how much might you save by using a minibus instead of vans? How much is it worth to build in a little waiting time so you can use fewer vehicles? DMCs can therefore move from order-takers to proactive consultants. They can say, “You spent $8,000 moving these people last year. Here’s how you can do it for $5,500 this year.” PowWow Smart recently completed a beta test with a global meetings company, which was so impressed it will be requiring the DMCs it works with to use PowWow Smart’s manifest software. PowWow Smart operates in the U.S. now, and has plans to expand globally over the next two years. The company also expects to announce some meetings industry tech partnerships in the coming months. © 2014 Penton Media |