Toyota Program: Slash Meeting Costs - BusinessWeek

Toyota Motor (TM) is often idolized for its super-efficient logistics and manufacturing operations. But after less than an hour on the job as Toyota's meeting services manager in 2006, Louann Cashill discovered that the carmaker could be as wasteful as Detroit's Big Three when it came to planning off-site events. "It was like walking into an office that still used typewriters," she jokes.

Toyota holds more than 400 meetings and conferences each year in the U.S., with an average of 3,500 employees on the road every month. Not long ago each round of travel began with hard-to-read, handwritten registration forms pouring forth from a fax machine to be manually typed into a computer. Hotels had to be selected, contacted, negotiated with, booked, and sent attendee information. Three full-time employees were needed to handle the workload.

Cashill had just researched event-planning software for her previous employer, Amgen (AMGN), where she ended up using a program called StarCite. She quickly enlisted Toyota in the same service. Today, all Cashill has to do is enter basic information about a meeting into a StarCite template, along with a list of employees who'll be attending. StarCite automatically sends online registration forms to attendees, books their reservations, and sends the information, along with payment, to the hotels...