    |
Procurement solution for leading event management company in USA
Stark Group is a specialized technical event production, design management, planning, engineering and development company.
Challenge
Procurement of goods and services, be it rental, leased or outright purchases have always been a problem in Event management. Event Producers and Planners have to find the right kind of suppliers for the equipment and services that they are looking for, get quotes, review them and finalize their decision well ahead of the event. This is not at all an easy task, with hundreds of items to be procured from thousands of possible vendors. Another issue which makes this whole process of getting quotes and evaluating them very inefficient is that the Event Planners and Producers may not know all the suppliers for each particular requirement, and hence the cost and time for event planning and execution increases substantially. Also there is no common method of requesting quotes from all suppliers, based on common information that should be shared among all of them.
Solution
The solution to this business problem was to disseminate valuable information using web technologies, thus providing a more efficient method of bringing together event producers, planners and suppliers to reduce cost overheads. Calsoft engineered a complete solution for the Stark Group based on the MarketServer Product. This web based business solution is built upon the Request for Quotations (RFQ) engine of the MarketServer.
Event Planners and Producers would register at the PRODUCERresource website as buyers while the vendors of the goods and services for events would register as suppliers. Buyers can securely login to this application and provide the parameters of the proposals they expect from the suppliers. The suppliers can log in securely and check the Requests For Proposals (RFP) and submit Proposals online. Buyers can view the details of all the proposals submitted, and accept the one that best matches their needs. This web-based application is free for buyers, but suppliers have to pay 3% of the accepted proposal to Stark group for the services rendered.
The application offers a wide variety of functionality to support an efficient procurement process. Bulletin boards are provided with each RFP for the buyer and the vendors to exchange common information. Buyers are allowed to maintain a list of their preferred vendors to facilitate quick RFP process. Emails are auto generated by the application to call the attention of the suppliers to RFPs of their interest. Emails also help in efficient workflow from the start to the end of the RFP process. Buyers and suppliers can attach detailed MS office documents, or AutoCAD drawings to provide added information or legal terms and conditions as part of their RFPs or Proposals. Credit card validation is also done by the application. The Site Administrator from Stark Group can view reports on the users of the site, the RFPs posted, the responses to the RFPs and also perform site maintenance through the web browser interface.
( Buyer can View list of all RFPs and responses )
( Buyer can View list of all RFPs and responses )
Technology
This solution was a Windows DNA implementation of the MarketServer. All code customized or generated by the MarketServer was in ASP and Visual Basic COM components, with SQL Server 2000 as the database. The solution was developed on Windows 2000. Microsoft SMTP is used for the web mail functionality and Credit Card validation is provided through integration with EMS e-commerce.