Instead, they can be bundled on the AirPlus Meeting Card and aggregated in one invoice. This collective invoice outlines all expenses incurred.

The principle is this: The hotel portal facilitates faster searching and comparisons of hotels. Once the event planner has opted for a venue, the invoices no longer need to be settled individually or reconciled.

Combining an online tool with a universal payment solution can streamline the entire process significantly and also save time. One option is to use a hotel portal in combination with the AirPlus Meeting Card.

the individual steps in the process. Because the time needed varies depending on the type of meeting or event, the authors of the study defined ten event types. Then they calculated average values for the time required to process an event.

As part of the study, Steinberg & Partner GmbH determined how much time event planners and accounting staff spent on

Steinberg & Partner GmbH used the supplier revenues generated at six of ZF Friedrichshafen AG’s sites for the study’s empirical foundation. Additional data was collected in interviews with travel managers, event planners and accountants.

Making inquiries online directly via a hotel portal generally takes less time and allows event planners to at least cut in half the time they used to spend on research on average.

Hotel portals also offer a large variety of functions that help planners make their decisions for or against a hotel, for example, by generating documents automatically. Today, ZF Friedrichshafen AG’s event planners only need eight minutes to make their decisions regarding venues and the time they save is an impressive 85 percent.

The next step is for the event planner to select the right offer. On average, ZF Friedrichshafen AG’s planners spent close to 90 minutes on this task per event. Hotel portals also have proven to be efficient aids with this task: The automatic program comparison function clearly juxtaposes the hotels selected with the added bonus that at anytime event planners can see whether a given hotel has processed the inquiry.

ZF Friedrichshafen AG specifies the terms of booking and submits them to the hotels along with the inquiry. The company enters into a contract with a hotel when it accepts the offer the hotel makes in the portal. The terms of booking become part of the contract automatically. In general, ZF Friedrichshafen AG no longer is required to make deposits – thanks to the AirPlus Meeting Card – and therefore has minimized its financial processes and saves a great deal of time.

Changing the number of participants or canceling parts of an event also costs time and money. For ZF Friedrichshafen AG it turned out that on average almost 25 percent of the time and money used for planning was spent on implementing such changes. Hotel portals help reduce this time by a third.

The great advantage here is that an initial invoice review is conducted in the hotel portal and a structured statement is provided to the event planner for review. Any necessary approvals of unexpected invoiced amounts can be mapped in the tool. Invoiced amounts are not settled in the portal through AirPlus International until the event planner has confirmed every item listed on the statement. This process renders correcting invoices obsolete.

Rather than having to review every receipt separately, customers paying with the AirPlus Meeting Card are provided with all the required details in one AirPlus-issued invoice. In addition, AirPlus’ schematized invoice layout simplifies the allocation of expenses to accounts. This helps ZF Friedrichshafen AG save approximately four minutes (39 percent). Time-consuming inter- mediate steps such as repeatedly requesting lists of participants are omitted entirely. As opposed to other companies, ZF Friedrichshafen AG does not allocate detailed meeting costs to multiple general ledger accounts; if it did, it could save even more time.

On average, ZF Friedrichshafen AG’s
accounting department spent
almost ten minutes to process each
invoice issued by a hotel for
a convention. For example, each
invoice had to be reviewed for
accuracy and then scanned. These
steps quickly add up if there
are many invoices to process. In
contrast, customers using the
AirPlus Meeting Card are issued one
collective invoice that is uniform
and standardized yet contains every
detail about every event. This
not only facilitates transparent and
efficient analyses, it also saves
time: ZF Friedrichshafen AG reduced
the time spent on these steps by
93 percent!

Fewer invoices, faster reviews: The collective invoice issued by AirPlus also significantly reduces the number of affected payment runs. ZF Friedrichshafen AG had automated its payment processes to a degree that the actual time saved barely carried weight. Yet, during the trial the company achieved a 75 percent saving of time.

The study was based on the assumptions that every year ZF Friedrichshafen AG’s accountants check one hundred times to determine whether they need to create new creditors in the system and that only 50 new suppliers
actually have to be created every year. These numbers then were broken down to the number of events. The time savings were huge: The entire process can be eliminated because AirPlus is the only creditor.

Payment reminders no longer
need to be processed because AirPlus pays the hotels in advance. The authors of the study assumed that a customer such as ZF Friedrichshafen AG otherwise would have to process 100 reminders every year.

Facts & figures on event management

ZF allows vehicles to see, think and act. In the four technology domains ofZF is a global technology company supplying systems for passenger cars, commercial vehicles and industrial technology, enabling the next generation of mobility. ZF allows vehicles to see, think and act. In the four technology domains of Vehicle Motion Control, Integrated Safety, Automated Driving, and Electric Mobility, ZF offers comprehensive product and software solutions for established vehicle manufacturers. With some 165,000 employees worldwide, ZF reported sales of € 43.8 billion in fiscal 2022. The company operates 168 production locations in 32 countries.

the accounting department, receipts already will have been approved and pre-allocated to an account and all documents related to an event will be complete.”

“ZF Friedrichshafen AG is open to the introduction of a portal and the AirPlus Meeting Card. The finance departments in particular will benefit enormously from the controlled flow of receipts and approvals that will come with the introduction of these tools: By the

Savings per event

“The study has opened our eyes to the large potential of optimizing our MICE processes. Going forward, structured planning, booking, and payment processes will provide us with the level of transparency we desperately need in this segment. In addition, we will benefit from better cooperation with the hotel sector.”