Senior planner Colleen Logan Brennan, CMP, of KPMG Global Services Centre in Woodcliff Lake, N.J., uses lots of forms and checklists to plan an international meeting like the one she held recently in Rome. Communication with suppliers at home and abroad can be difficult, so she uses APEX (Accepted Practices Exchange) templates and checklists to smooth the process.
“We were into a large-scale production for a Rome location,” Logan Brennan says, “and the APEX checklists prompted me to think about and remember all the items and elements I needed, things I might have forgotten in the chaos of putting together a major meeting—especially an international one. The AV list, for instance, was a really big help. And so was the language section on the event specs form.”
Logan Brennan says she has been using APEX forms since the industry began releasing them several years ago, and believes utilizing APEX templates for various tasks associated with the planning process saves her much time and effort.
“APEX templates add a lot of value because they save me from having to create them,” she says. “The RFPs are fantastic and so is the contract addenda, because they help me avoid missing something important.”
Laura Sanders, senior secretary at Holy Cross Institute at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, says the APEX post-event template is a key tool she uses to plan her annual conferences.
“That report template is a great help to us in tracing statistics about attendees and room block usage,” Sanders says. “With the standardized format, we’ve been able to compare apples to apples from year to year. Also, with that and other APEX resources, we’ve negotiated better contracts and navigated the dangerous waters of room attrition.”
APEX Now
APEX is an initiative of the Convention Industry Council that purposes to unite the meetings, conventions and exhibitions industry in the development and implementation of voluntary standards that promote efficiencies and deliver ROI.
The development of technology tools that will integrate digitized standard reports and forms among compatible systems are also part of the initiative.
The initiative has been in motion since 2001, and the industry continues improving and adding to a growing list of approved best templates and practices, including the following:
- APEX Industry Glossary: Which contains over 4,000 terms and abbreviations used by the meetings industry (www.conventionindustry.org/glossary)
- Post-Event Report (PER): A template that profiles the event, with details on hotel rooms, F&B, etc.
- Event Specification Guide: A consistent format that enables planners and suppliers to share information on meeting details
- Housing and registration: A standards tool for room block management that also defines disclosure of third-party involvement
- RFPs: This report presents industry-accepted practices for consistent and thorough requests for proposals that profiles an event and its schedule, plus vendor specs
- Contracts: It does not include a standard contract—which is arguably the steepest hill to climb in the ongoing APEX effort—but it is an educational document that profiles several industry contracts and includes a sample outline, plus information on common sections included in contracts
- Meeting and Site Profiles: A template for profiling primary location and facility types, such as hotels, resorts, convention centers, etc.
APEX Next-Gen
In a fast-changing industry, standards aren’t static, they need to be reviewed and changed to meet contemporary needs, so crafting the next generation of APEX standards is under way.
Among the new features is an Exhibitor Data Standards panel that is working on standardizing the data exchanged between exhibitors during trade shows, and a Green Meetings and Events Practices panel that is organizing industry discussion groups across the U.S.
The new standards review council is at work on existing practices, starting with the glossary.
Doug McPhee, chair of that council and a national account manager for Experient Sales Network, says recommendations to the APEX Commission will be ready by year’s end.
Also, new APEX educational resources are appearing at industry conferences and on webinars this fall to enable both new and seasoned users; the APEX Technology Advisory Council is continuing its work to develop technology that assists the movement of standardized electronic data among systems; and APEX PowerShop meetings technology is now available (see sidebar).
Sanders and Logan Brennan aren’t alone as APEX cheerleaders; many planners and suppliers are joining them in applause and use. But others are still operating from many different pages.
On any given business day, a hotelier might receive 30 or 40 RFPs in various formats, and staff must spend many hours finding and filling in the needed data and issuing responses.
Hundreds of volunteers and managers from all industry segments have accomplished much already, but plenty of work remains, APEX organizers admit. Impediments to the adoption of APEX practices range from incompatible technologies to good old-fashioned human resistance to change.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, they argue, and neither were standards that automated the retail or banking industries. The work took years and is not static.
What’s in APEX for You?
APEX practices can save planners massive amounts of time, effort and budget resources, and can also improve leverage with suppliers, mitigate contract risks and ensure compliance with SOX (the Sarbanes-Oxley Act). If planners have meaningful meetings data to show senior executives—such as, say, a 50 percent or more savings on time or money expended—APEX can give them the tools to prove the ROI of an organization’s meeting department to the brass.
And then there’s the larger industry good. If everyone were using what Sue Tinnish, APEX director and principal of Chicago’s SEAL Inc., calls the “industry-developed, industry-endorsed” practices, there would be much higher levels of efficiency and professionalism—and that’s strategic. Add in some technology tools to move the standardized data around systems and a revolution occurs, albeit not overnight.
Mike McCool, director of technology services for The Freeman Companies and a member of the APEX Commission (the entity with oversight of the initiative), touts the strategic advantages APEX provides to both himself and the industry as a whole.
“APEX offers Freeman the potential to save a great deal of time and effort,” McCool says. “In servicing approximately 4,000 trade shows annually, we spend close to 25,000 man-hours manipulating exhibitor lists for these events in order to import them into our fulfillment system. Implementation of APEX data standards could virtually eliminate all of this effort overnight.”
Cheers for Compliance
After Meeting Sites Resource (MSR), a site research and contract negotiations firm based in Irvine, Calif., began sending out electronic RFPs (as links in e-mails) with APEX standards to hotels late last year, the company tracked a noticeable reduction in supplier response time.
“At the time we became APEX compliant, we were seeing hotel response times of around 73 to 74 hours,” says Robert Wilson, MSR’s chief information officer.
“By mid-2008, we were tracking at 58 hours from Hyatt, and I think it’s because they are used to seeing our APEX data format. We’ve also seen about a 12-hour reduction from Hilton.”
Wilson says other benefits of being APEX compliant include consistency of information, data integrity, thousands of hours in savings on data entry, and having the ability to send leads electronically.
“The more hotels see leads in the APEX- recommended standard format and realize that standards streamline processes, the more the industry will be aware of the benefits in adopting APEX practices,” he contends. “MSR’s ROI will come by being an industry leader in complying with the standards.”
Efficiencies will multiply manyfold, Wilson adds, when buyers can one day shoot their leads straight into the systems of hotels and other suppliers.
Richard Aaron, CMP, CSEP, president of BizBash Media, a New York City-based event and trade show company, advocates APEX compliance not just within his own company operations but also to his event planning students. An associate professor at New York University’s Tish Center for Hospitality and Tourism, he directs his students to integrate APEX standards in their projects.
“The APEX toolkit is integrated into our studies,” Aaron says. “Students must use the marketing checklist for their projects and adapt that to their event management projects. I also use the checklist for legal contracts. I was on the APEX Contracts committee for several years, and that document resulted from the combined brain power of top industry professionals: lawyers, planners and others you would never have access to otherwise.”
Now head of the APEX Education Council, Aaron is promoting his belief in getting the standards into college curricula “because the next generation are the ones who will really reap the value from unity within the industry.”
APEX Challenges
Aaron and Wilson join Tinnish and many other industry leaders who are working to create the standards, knock down impediments to APEX standards adoption and convince both industry buyers and suppliers they should make time to learn and use APEX tools for the value they bring to everyday operations.
“Many people don’t realize how much better things could be,” Tinnish says. “Our system isn’t broken, but standards have revolutionized other industries, like grocery, banking and insurance over recent decades.
These industries have seen huge savings on both the buyer and vendor sides, as they’ve adopted smart, strategic supply chain management. Students of those changes speak about how much a bag of groceries would cost today if that industry hadn’t undergone the changes.
“One great problem our industry has in achieving majority buy-in is that we don’t have one customer that has the buying power to drive and force change,” Tinnish continues. “Back in the 1980s when General Motors was profitable, they went out to suppliers and dictated changes they would have to make if they wanted to do business with them. Wal-Mart did the same to its suppliers. Our industry isn’t organized that way.”
APEX-drivers dream of the day when standardized data flies among compatible buyer and supplier tech systems, delivering yet-unimagined industry-wide ROI in its wake. Currently, however, suppliers are strapped with more-pressing tech concerns just to keep pace with the competition.
“Hotels understand what we are trying to do with APEX, but they have so many internal technology projects that take time and budget priority over this,” Wilson offers. “What we are trying to do is extremely cutting-edge, and building this kind of infrastructure requires a lot of expensive change.”
APEX Technology Council Chair E.J. Siwek, founder and currently a consultant with Flashpoint Technologies, compares the industry’s efforts to standardize to a roadway.
“Think of this project as a highway between the East and West coasts,” he says. “We’ve been building it—creating the standards and working on the tech. Larger-company planners have traveled farther on it than the grassroots people. There are some people in the industry who will never go electronic because they don’t do that large a volume of meetings or events. But for the majority, it’s now a matter of marketing and educating people about the value in the standards.
