Challenges
The International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) is the global trade association of the shopping center and retail real estate industry. They host hundreds of events each year to provide professional networking opportunities to their members. These events range from divisional meetings to in-person live events using one or multiple venues.
In the absence of a dedicated event planning solution, ICSC struggled to plan, manage, and successfully execute large-scale virtual events and faced several challenges in the process.
ICSC’s member/non-member information was stored in disparate systems. Overall data quality was poor with duplicate and incorrect/incomplete information. Client-specific information couldn’t be captured and the system lacked comprehensive tracking of an attendee’s true event participation. Enterprise-wide data standards were also not adopted which prevented any meaningful analysis and informed decision making.
Several key processes related to event and venue planning, invoicing, payroll, and others were manually executed which increased manual work, human error, and ultimately business risk.
Spending on dozens of supplies for each event was not tracked in a consolidated manner, which added to cost inefficiencies.
Solution
For large-scale events, there was a strong case for an ideal event planning solution that could keep pace with booth management, venue-based sponsorships, and equip the event staff with real-time information on services, booth, freight, exhibitor, and attendees.
After doing a deep-dive analysis of ICSC’s people, process, and technology, we proposed our flagship event planning solution EMS.
EMS is a unified platform that allows show organizers, planners, and venue management companies to create the best experience for their exhibitors and attendees.
Powered by the Microsoft technology ecosystem, the solution’s powerful capabilities helped ICSC and venue management companies to work through the details to optimize the venues for success.
By seamlessly integrating with a POS solution, EMS streamlined payment processing and invoicing. Moreover, in-event apps were equipped with advanced analytics powered by AcuitySpark – Visionet’s AI-powered data analytics platform.
As per the fit/gap analysis, around 80% of the client’s high-level requirements were fulfilled by the out-of-the-box features of our resulting solution.
Download the full event management case study to learn more.