Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has shared its meetings management methodology with the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA), making it available for members to download.

Speaking at the Business Travel Show, Carole Poillerat, AstraZeneca's global category leader for meetings and events, said she had been working on designing and implementing the policy for two years, which included a mass culling of event agencies.

“My strategy was to reduce the number of meeting management companies,” she said. “There were more than 1,000 when I joined. Every country had five or six agencies bidding on each meeting. I’ve stopped all the bidding where it does not offer added value and now only have it where creative is concerned.

“We have finalised a global agreement with a meeting management company and when the global supplier can do it we go with them but if they can’t we do it locally. My strategy was to outsource because our core business is drugs and not meetings.”

Poillerat also developed aligned meeting definitions, a cost per delegate indicator by meeting type and country and a reporting template.

“That’s how I’m rewarding the performance of my agency,” she said. “When I joined there was no process, every meeting management company was doing what they wanted. Now they are all sending back raw data which is analysed by a company in India. This is fed back to the lead agency and used for our quarterly business review where we set the strategy.”

To learn more about the resources available to GBTA members visit gbta.org/membership