One of the most critical points behind every successful event is the steadfast reliability of your vendors and suppliers. The very last thing you need at any event is a vendor or supplier that fails to meet their delivery deadline!
So how exactly should you go about building your list of reliable and efficient vendors and suppliers?
Selection criteria
Here are a few industry standards that you can keep in mind when creating your suppliers list. Remember that one of the main points to keeping a good relationship with them is to be a good paymaster and share as much information with them as possible, to make thier lives easier. Guessing is no fun, as we all know.
Here are a few points below that are relatively important in your selection criteria:
- Recommendations – a highly recommended vendor or supplier can often be the most reliable. This person or company would probably have a good track record and reputation to enable a recommendation, and would not want to jeopardize this. The chances of their non-performance would be way less as they have a reputation to maintain. However this could also mean that they may be pricier in their quotations than other suppliers.
- Referrals – being a little similar to a recommendation, this would most likely be from online sources.If you are looking for suppliers on the internet, it is often best to check if the site owned by the individual or company has any referrals or testimonials from past clients. Of course you would have to bear in mind that these referrals and testimonials can also be falsified. If you want to try such unknown suppliers or vendors, the best is to somewhat limit them to smaller responsibilities and gauge their performance before upgrading them in your regular and trusted suppliers list.
- Reputation – you may not know these suppliers or vendors personally but they have a good reputation in the market. In most cases reputation proceeds you, and any supplier worth their salt know this, therefore these vendors or suppliers are at the top of their game.They are well established and have been in the business for a decent length of time. They may also be just as wary of you as a client, so in this case the onus is on you to prove that you are a great client!
- Experience – you might consider a new fledgling company as your vendor or supplier as they are eager to please and are more often than not quite a bit cheaper. So depending on what you require of them, such companies are best tried out on a small scale building trust and service reliability over a period of time. A good way to judge them is to have a look at their past experiences and exposure to supply and demand of their product and service. Sometimes such startups can prove to be better than the big boys with their personalised attention!
Two way reliability
It is not enough to just have reliable vendors and suppliers. A very large part of the supply chain is also the chain of command.
Communication and being organized, as I mentioned above, is as much a part to getting your goods and services on time. If you are disorganized and inefficient, don’t put the blame on the vendors!
Make sure that you are just as efficient in your command chain or line before dishing out the orders. To help you keep organized, invest in a good event management solution. They are not that expensive and will help you a long way in your event management and event planning stages.
Make sure you share information with suppliers to enable them to do their job to the best of their ability, which in turn makes you look good – its a win win situation!
