One On One With...
APEX's Mickey Schaefer, CAE
After years of work and the rollout of individual initiatives, the Convention Industry Council (CIC) is nearly ready to launch the final initiatives of its Accepted Practices Exchange (APEX). To find out more about the latest status of the initiative, ConventionSouth interviewed Mickey Schaefer, CAE, APEX chair and president of Mickey Schaefer and Associates LLC.
What is the goal of APEX?
Eventually, APEX will allow for the seamless exchange of data between suppliers and planners. A lot of time and money can be wasted if that communication and exchange is not there. One hotel I talked to said that because a meeting planner didn't know the difference between a podium and a lectern, the hotel had to set and reset several meeting rooms to change out the podiums. It cost the hotel about $1,500 in labor costs. There are all kinds of examples of inefficiencies between suppliers and planners that could be resolved with better communication.
APEX will save hard dollars by giving suppliers and planners better information about the meetings, which will also result in better guarantees and better meetings histories to negotiate better rates. It will also save a lot of staff time for both the planner and supplier.
What is the current status of APEX?
We will be through with the initial development of the accepted practices this summer, including the seven initiatives, but that doesn¹t mean APEX will be done. It's an ongoing philosophy to make sure that we, as an industry, are being as efficient as possible on the supplier and planner sides.
7 APEX Initiatives - APEX Industry Glossary: A list of industry terms and definitions.
- APEX Post-Event Report: A template for writing a report summarizing an event's activities.
- APEX Event Specifications Guide: A template for delivering information to event suppliers.
- APEX Housing & Registration Accepted Practices: Accepted practices for collecting and reporting of housing and registration data.
- APEX Toolbox: A CD of templates for communicating housing and registration data, including requests for proposals.
- Meeting and Site Profiles: A series of templates and standardized information profiling destinations and an organization's meeting for exchange between planner and supplier.
- Contracts: Accepted practices for contracts between an organization and a supplier.
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For a long time, APEX was just a vision that some people could see and some people couldn't, but for the most part the industry said APEX was a great plan. Now that we're further down the road, the industry is really seeing the benefits. We have about a 70 percent awareness rate within the industry now, but we want people to have a better understanding. So, we're going to be doing webinars and promoting APEX through other methods.
What initiative will be launched next?
The sixth initiative will be from the meeting and site profile panel. Often, sales people call a planner and say, "tell me a little bit more about your meeting," and they're going to have to tell them about their board meetings, committee meetings, education meetings and annual meetings. That's at least a 30-minute phone conversation that most meeting planners don't have time for.
The meeting and site profile will allow planners to develop snapshots of their meeting. In other words, the planner can fill out a snapshot form that says, "This is what I need for an average board meeting," or "This is what I need for a committee meeting," and so on. That way, the property can look at the snapshot and be able to see what the planner's needs are.
On the other side, we will also have snapshots or profiles of cities that will offer meeting planners a description of information, such as the size of their convention center's meeting space, the number of hotel rooms, what their largest arena is, and so on.
What's next for APEX?
We are working on our datamap program that will allow for the seamless exchange of information between a planner's and supplier's computer system. Our technology council, made up of the best and the brightest from across the industry, has identified 7,000 fields of data that are used back and forth between a planner and a supplier. Through the datamap, these fields of data will be easily recognized by both planner and supplier computers. For example, I might say "company" in my database and you might say "organization" in yours. That datamap will find both terms as interchangeable. Therefore, a technology person at a hotel can then tweak his system through the datamap to understand that the "company" field also means the "organization" field.
