Case Study: The Banff Centre
Utilizing the SCORE Assessment to Optimize Conference Sales
THE BANFF CENTRE: INSPIRING CREATIVITY
Banff, in Alberta, Canada, may be best known for its skiing and scenery with three ski resorts located around the stunning beauty of Lake Louise. But skiing and sight-seeing aren’t the only activities bringing in the crowds to this unique area. Located in the heart of the Banff National Park is The Banff Centre, Canada’s creative leader in arts and culture. With a
mission of Inspiring Creativity, The Banff Centre brings exceptional artists and leaders from around the world to create and perform new works of art; share skills and knowledge in an interdisciplinary environment; and explore ideas and develop solutions in the arts and leadership. The Banff Centre is a full-service conference facility specializing in providing accommodations, catering, and meeting services to the corporate, post-secondary, government, and association markets.
The Banff Centre has over 400 guest rooms, eight performance venues, multiple restaurants ranging from a pub to a first class restaurant and over 60 meeting facilities that can accommodate up to 1,000 people. The Conference Sales team is responsible for marketing and servicing the Banff experience to organizations from all over the world. Some businesses develop long term programs with the Centre, while others schedule and hold specific events. In all cases, the planning and execution of meetings must be of the highest level to maintain the reputation for excellence associated with the Centre. For
conferences alone, the team handles over 500 meetings per year and the catering staff manages over 10,000 event orders. At any one time there are over 1,000 artists and business leaders on campus serviced by a full time staff of 450.
PREPARING FOR GROWTH
In 2009 The Banff Centre began a program of revitalization with a $100 million investment to replace, upgrade, and improve the functionality and technology of the campus buildings. The centerpiece of the revitalization program, The Kinnear Centre for Creativity & Innovation will be opening in 2010. The Kinnear Centre will provide improved meeting space but will also increase the number of full service kitchens to three - changing the logistical complexity of catering programs and events across the campus. In light of all the changes, the Centre’s Conference Sales team took the opportunity to review how their sales and catering processes would meet the increased demands placed on them by the new opening.
The Conference Sales team decided to evaluate their business practices with Newmarket International’s SCORE Assessment, a best practice evaluation of group sales standard operating procedures, to measure the efficiencies of the current processes and identify areas for improvement. The objective was to determine if the current team structure, technologies and processes could grow with the business without having to add significant overhead or increases in staffing levels.
“The SCORE Assessment provided clear areas of operational improvements that we could implement in our business. We had been following the same procedures for some time, and with the growth of the conference center wanted some assurance that our sales team could grow with it. The SCORE Assessment helped us identify changes we would need to make to scale our business without having to add staff.”
Leslie Vanderzwet, General Manager, Conferences, The Banff Centre
BUILDING STRENGTH FOR THE FUTURE
While The Banff Centre has applied best practice to many business processes, the SCORE Assessment report identified three key areas of the business that presented significant opportunities for improvement:
- Account management is not managed consistently, impacting reporting and prospecting. Resolving how accounts are captured and tagged with information will drive an increase in the volume and quality of new meeting opportunities.
- Reports for certain business metrics are created manually, inhibiting full visibility of business performance. Centralizing reporting data will save time and increase flexibility in business reporting.
- Catering processes largely met best practice, but the introduction of the new kitchens will mean that traditional methods of distributing and manually managing changes to Banquet Event Orders will not be efficient. The assessment identified new procedures that are going to be required to deliver the right information to the right staff at the right time – and to manage changes proactively through automation of the change log.
“Working with the Newmarket International team on the SCORE Assessment gave us real value. Not only did we get an objective view on changes we should make to our procedures, the report also included a breakdown of cost saving opportunities associated to the recommendations. We look forward to continuing our partnership with Newmarket International as we strengthen our capabilities to manage the new and exciting challenges ahead of us.”
Leslie Vanderzwet, General Manager, Conferences, The Banff Centre
ABOUT THE SCORE ASSESSMENT
Newmarket International has developed the SCORE Assessment, a best practice evaluation of group sales standard operating procedures, to measure the efficiencies of the current business processes and identify areas of improvement. The SCORE process is designed to be appropriate for evaluating group business across a variety of organizations in the hospitality industry. As the primary focus of the process is to optimize group business processes at the property level, it is suitable for working with enterprises, management companies and individual hotels.