The Challenge
Due to the pattern of Aon’s growth, the business had a diverse structure. Business activities as well as the approach to corporate hospitality differed between businesses and regions. This meant Aon used a variety of premium assets including hospitality boxes, season tickets and debentures. It also took part in hundreds of small event sponsorships and conferences.
Aon’s distributed approach to hospitality management had several implications. Firstly, the same guest could be entertained by multiple contacts within Aon for different events without any audit trail or method to identify the duplication.
In addition, staff were unable to see which tickets were available because Aon lacked a central inventory of sponsorship and hospitality assets. This led to people contacting third party hospitality agents to buy ad hoc tickets, for example for Premier League matches, incurring extra costs to the business. Additionally, existing inventory was not being fully utilised by teams when it could have been redistributed to other departments for use.
Aon’s agency, Generate Sponsorship, analysed the spend across a wide variety of suppliers. This financial analysis showed that over £1.5m was being spent every year on a mixture of hospitality orientated sponsorship, corporate hospitality at major events and ad hoc tickets.
Without a central purchasing, distribution or evaluation process, the business was experiencing a significant amount of duplication and wastage. Aon also needed a better way to see which events had the best outcomes for the business.
Specific obstacles and challenges included:
- Inconsistent hospitality approaches due to a diverse business structure.
- Multiple contacts entertaining the same guest without oversight.
- No central inventory, leading to visibility issues and unnecessary purchases.
- Underutilised assets and inefficient redistribution across departments.
- Lack of unified purchasing and evaluation processes resulted in over £1.5m in annual wastage.
Before and after
| Metric | Before | With Sponsorworks |
|---|---|---|
| Central audit of activity & spend | None | Every request |
| Asset inventory | No single view | One live inventory |
| Cross-charging & tax auditing | Manual | Automated |
Solution and results
Faced with these challenges the agency recommended that Aon introduce central control for its hospitality management.
The agency identified the Sponsorworks Enterprise Platform as a solution that met Aon’s requirements because it could provide a single view of ticketing and hospitality management across the whole business. Aon agreed to roll out the Sponsorworks platform as it could start using the off-the-shelf software straight away. As a software-as-a-service (SaaS) product, this also meant Aon automatically benefitted from regular updates and enhancements from Sponsorworks.
Over 200 staff within Aon were given access to the software platform to request sponsorship and hospitality tickets. After training by the Sponsorworks team, Aon managed and ran the platform on a self-service basis. The platforms built-in reporting suite enabled Aon to instantly track spending and identify any duplications.
The new platform also allowed Aon to carry out automated cross charging and tax auditing. This simplified these processes for the finance department as all ticketing and hospitality management was controlled through one system.
Modules used
What Aon runs on Sponsorworks.
The benefits for Aon:
- Every request captures its business objective and guest details, so compliance and impact are tracked by default.
- Built-in reporting tracks spend and surfaces duplication as it happens.
- A central audit trail cuts duplicated invitations and unused assets.
- Better visibility of spend enables cost reductions and more strategic use of each event.
- Consolidated spending delivers better guest experiences and clearer business outcomes.
- SaaS delivery means the platform keeps improving without an upgrade project.
How much of your spend is duplicated?
Aon's agency found over £1.5m a year going to waste before anything was centralised. A demo is the quickest way to find out.
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