Caterers, AV and technical contractors, equipment hire, security and everyone else you bring in. They keep their own catalogs current, receive and acknowledge their work orders, and update what is done. Your coordinators stop chasing confirmations by email.
Supplier work orders · shared catalog · delivery scheduling
Most venues run dozens of external suppliers: technical and AV contractors, caterers, equipment hire, security, cleaning, florists, entertainment. They are part of delivering the event, and almost none of that coordination happens in a system. It happens in email, on the phone, and in spreadsheets, at exactly the time of year when there is least capacity for it.
The Supplier Portal is a self-service surface for those partners. They maintain their own product and service catalogs, receive and acknowledge work orders, update fulfillment status, and track delivery and payment. Your team gets one view of which suppliers have confirmed what, for each event.
An admin dashboard for your team and a portal for the supplier, both reading and writing the same Salesforce records.
Suppliers keep their own products, services and prices current in the portal. Your team sees the live version, and curates which items are available for which events. Nobody quotes from a price list that expired last season.
Work orders generated from the event order and from exhibitor orders arrive in the supplier’s queue, and the supplier acknowledges them. An unacknowledged order is visible as exactly that, rather than assumed to be fine.
Suppliers update what is in progress, what is delivered and what is outstanding. The coordinator sees the state of the external commitments for an event without making a single phone call.
Delivery slots requested and confirmed in the portal against the event schedule, so clashes are resolved in advance rather than at the loading bay on a build morning.
Order-by-order payment status, visible to both sides. Suppliers stop asking where their money is, and reconciliation becomes a query rather than a Friday afternoon.
Each supplier sees their own data and nothing else, without your IT function setting up and reviewing an account for every external partner. That is usually the reason venues stay on email in the first place.
Every supplier in one view: contacts, catalogs, event assignments, orders, work orders, payment status and onboarding for a new partner. Search and filter by supplier or by event.
Every interaction recorded. Procurement reviews and post-event disputes are settled with evidence rather than with recollection.
An exhibition builds on a Sunday. The AV contractor, the furniture hire company and the caterer all need access to the same hall, in the right order, and all three were booked by different people in the venue over the previous two months.
Each has a work order in the portal, generated from the event order rather than typed into an email. Each has acknowledged it. Each has a delivery window confirmed against the event schedule, so the furniture arrives before the AV rig rather than behind it.
On the Friday before, the coordinator opens the event and sees three confirmations and one outstanding item: the caterer has not acknowledged a late change to the break times. That is a two-minute call, made on Friday, instead of a problem discovered on Sunday.
Your own teams work in the Operations Portal. Your suppliers work in theirs. Both are working from the same event order.
Where the event order and the work orders come from, and where your own teams do the same job internally.
Read more →Exhibitor orders that generate supplier work automatically, without anyone re-entering them.
Read more →Supplier cost against the event, and the payment status both sides can see.
Read more →Coordinating internal departments and external partners across the same operating day.
Read more →In-house or contracted out, working from the same covers, timings and dietary requirements.
Read more →The booking the event order is built from, including the room plan suppliers set up against.
Read more →A 45-minute call with the team. How supplier coordination runs today, where confirmations get lost, and what your coordinators would stop doing.
Operate hotels too? See the Thynk hotels platform →
