One of the important points behind every successful event is the reliability of your vendors and suppliers. The last thing you want in any event is a vendor or supplier that fails to meet their delivery dateline! So how do you go about building your list of reliable and efficient vendors and suppliers?
Selection criteria
Here are a few industry standards that you can use in your selection of reliable vendors and suppliers. Remember that one of the points to keeping a good relationship with them is to be a good paymaster. There are a few points below that are fairly important in your selection criteria:
- Recommendations – a highly recommended vendor or supplier is the most reliable. This person or company would probably have a good track record and reputation to enable a recommendation. The chances of non-delivery or performance would be much less as they would have a reputation to keep. However this would also mean that they may be pricey in their quotations.
- Referrals – being a little similar to a recommendation, this would mostly be from sources online. If you are sourcing for suppliers from the internet, it is best to check if the site owned by the individual or company has any referrals or testimonials from past clients. Off 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 limit them to smaller responsibilities and gauge their performance before upgrading them in your list.
- Reputation – you may not know these suppliers or vendors personally but they have a good reputation in the market. In most cases these vendors or suppliers are in the top of their class. They are well established and have been in the business for a long time. They would also be just a wary of you as a client, so in this case the onus is on you to proof that you are a good client and paymaster! They would also be rather pricey and not so free with their credit terms.
- 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 much 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 time. A good way to segregate them is to know their past experiences and exposure to supply and demand of their product and service. Sometimes such startups may yet prove to be better than the big boys!
Two way reliability
It is not good enough to just have reliable vendors and suppliers. A big part of the supply chain is also the command chain. Communication and being organized is as much a part to getting your goods and services on time. If you are not organized and efficient, don’t put the blame on the vendors! So make sure that you are just as efficient in your command group 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.
A good event management system should have features that help you keep track of your vendors and suppliers lists. The event solution should also be very mobile and makes communication with your vendors or keeping track of the orders given to be an easy task. This means portability and great mobility should be one of the features of the system. You should easily be able to convey your orders and instructions to your vendors and keep track of their delivery schedule without having to run from north to south, wasting precious time. So even if you are an event Malaysia organizer, have an event project abroad or are an event company from abroad this system will keep you organized and well communicated.
