Since 1977, MBM PRODUCTIONS INT'L® has been supporting companies, organizations and associations worldwide by producing high-quality communication projects such as Worldwide Meeting Planning, Worldwide AV Production, Spend Management Software & Website Development, Virtual Meetings, Corporate Video Production & Filmmaking, Destination Management, Global Air Travel, Online Meeting Registration, Hotel Sourcing, Incentive Meetings, Team Building, Speaker Management, Experiential & Event Marketing, Internet Marketing SEO & Social Marketing, Communication Consulting, Graphics Presentation Design and CAD, and Marketing and Public Relations by enabling organizations to accomplish their business goals while driving down cost, regardless of the size or location of the project.

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From The President's Desk

Meeting Spend Management Software | Top Ten Solutions To Commonly Asked Questions
Posted Feb 05, 2010 at 5:19pm by Steve Sulkin
One of the most talked about subject matters at all corporations is how to control meeting and travel spend and specifically, what software to use.  Below is a “Top Ten List” of meeting spend management questions that come across my desk at MBM and some food for thought on how to find solutions in this ever growing field of complexity as our industry searches for the right answers.

1.     What meeting spend management software should I use? 
Custom vs. Customized

This is the most common and most complex question, so I’ll spend some time answering it.

Not too long ago, the biggest buzz in the meetings industry wasn’t spend management software, but online registration software.  Application Service Providers (ASP’s) sprang up everywhere trying to be the company to capture the market, to charge a per attendee fee or no fee at all so as to attract millions of users to their site for future gain.  Everyone it seemed wanted to get in on what was perceived as the lucrative ASP model of licensing (essentially “renting”) registration software to millions of users via the web.  Eventually this turned into what so many Internet models turn into and that is a commodity with a small group of companies providing a low cost web based service to millions. 

Our industry then turned to browser available meetings management software again with ASP’s vying to become number one in that space. That was more difficult as meetings management is a much more complex proposition than online registration, harder to commoditize.  No one has come out the clear winner in that space.

Now the buzz is understandably, given this economy, all about meeting spend management software, which is yet another increase in complexity, far beyond online registration.  While online registration and certainly meetings management can be complex for sure, spend management adds in the complexity of financial accountability, accounting standards, the need to coordinate with other well established financial software tools in place at public companies that may be controlled by government regulation and oversight, a far cry from online registration.   And the level of intricacy in this software space is still evolving.  Yet nonetheless meeting spend management software is the buzz everyone is talking about with software makers and meeting companies scrambling to create the next off the shelf or ASP product that will become the template leader, as popular as PowerPoint, to the meetings spend management industry.
 
But, I believe, the difficulty in trying to create this holy grail of spend management software is the template approach.  While every ASP and off-the-shelf provider touts their ability to customize their software to the needs of each situation, they begin with the premise that tailoring a pre-created product as opposed to creating a custom product is the ideal route to take, or even possible.   The difficulty with the concept of customizing spend management software rather than creating software anew, is the enormous complexity that exists within each corporation due to their other existing financial software.

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Social Responsibility: Good for the Planet...and Incidentally...Good for Business
Posted 2010-01-05T00:07:00.000-06:00 by Steve Sulkin
Time and time again, my passion to help has led me down a road I would have never dreamed I'd be traveling.  Many years ago I was on the board of a not-for-profit organization along with a friend, a well known publisher. The not-for-profit's stated mission was to help needy organizations by supplying, at absolutely no charge, advertising and communication campaigns worth millions of dollars. It was a noble mission, a noble organization, or at least I thought.
For while serving on that board, I noticed that something was awry. Something didn't feel right. I investigated a bit and found that there was corruption that needed to be uncovered.  So I went to my fellow board member, who, as a well known publisher and editor of a famous magazine, was able to print my findings.  And in one day, that not-for-profit organization's nefarious dealings became known and eventually the organization ceased to exist.
What happened next I could have never planned.
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H1N1 A Meeting Planner Update
Posted 2009-10-10T23:03:00.000-05:00 by Steve Sulkin
Last week I was the chairperson of The International Symposium on Pharmaceutical Meeting Planning http://www.globalmediadynamics.com/upcoming-events/pharmaceutical-meeting which was held at the Westin Hotel in Philadelphia.  I was not only speaking at the meeting on the topic of technology and our industry, but my company was charged with providing the technology as well as charged with providing the keynote topic.

I chose H1N1 and how our industry is preparing for this outbreak.

I chose this topic because as meeting professionals, our obligations and responsibilities are far greater than when I began in this industry 32 years ago.  Besides the obvious logistic tasks we must solve, we are now responsible for everything from ROI to to supporting the overall communication plans of our corporation.  Clearly, we're more than mere "planners", we're communication professionals responsible for a whole host of topics.

So I asked myself about how prepared are we as an industry if an outbreak of H1N1 occurred while we were conducting a meeting?  I did exhaustive research on the topic and my conclusion is that we have an obligation as an industry to develop a much more thought out set of guidelines, not just for H1N1 but for any future communicable disease (or terrorist incident) and how we'd handle that situation if it occurred while we were executing a meeting.

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