Live Event Procurement

The Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply (CIPS) have produced a guide to buying event management services which is available to download from the CIPS website. The guide set us thinking about procurement in live events.

The Guide identifies an important choice organisations make - to contract their event suppliers in a 'bundled' or 'unbundled' way. By bundled, they mean a one-stop production company - someone who in one contract for one fixed fee is going to take care of all the diverse elements needed to bring an event to fruition. An unbundled approach would see the client contracting a multitude of specialist suppliers to achieve the same aim.

CIPS tell us that the advantages of an unbundled approach are:

• Greater cost transparency
• Specialist service provision
• Better service delivery, rate, price, knowledge and expertise

That all makes sense. In hiring independent contractors for lighting, sound, set, marquees, power, catering, transport etc, you're likely to be able to find the best value provider in each field, ideally placed to deliver for your particular event. Compare that to the one-stop production company. You're likely to get an event designed around whatever equipment they happen to own, and that happens to be left in their warehouse. You're likely to benefit where they have particular strengths, but to suffer if they have weaker departments.

So what are the disadvantages of unbundled procurement? Well again according to CIPS:

• Multiple contracts to manage
• Considerable time required to source multiple suppliers
• Management Information is split by provider
• Potentially poor communication between the specialist agents resulting in a less than perfect job
• Who does what and by when?
• Who manages the agency relationships and acts as the central pivot in the relationship between the various agencies and the client

Now for many party planners and event organisers, these disadvantages are critical. For the majority of events they will make it impractical to take an unbundled approach. Unless of course they bring in an external production management function.

Good production management covers all of the listed issues. It's project management for events. It makes sure that a multitude of contractors have the right information in a timely fashion to make sure they can deliver.

Not all events are complex enough either to benefit from unbundling, or to require external production management to achieve this. So it doesn't make sense for event organisers to have full production management capabilities in house. But when the event is complex enough to demand it, the right solution may well be to outsource the required production management service to enable the very best specialist suppliers to become one big temporary team.

And where an unbundled approach is appropriate, it's not just the quality that can benefit, it's value too. We've found in the past that we can deliver events at lower cost to the client than one stop AV production companies after production management fees have been accounted for. That's in line with CIPS - better cost transparency, and better rates.

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