In The American Meetings Network and at our Global Procurement Days, the focus is on the supplier, not the meeting planner. You may find yourself asking, “How can this be?”
The answer is easy, at AMI, we have our own network of meeting planners and sourcing managers who service our Fortune 500 Clientele. We need thousands of qualified suppliers annually to support these initiatives. It is suppliers like you that help us provide stellar accommodations, incredible destinations, AV, technology, ground transportation and other valuable meeting services. Our suppliers are truly valued partners.
OUR SPECIAL GIFT TO YOU!
A $500 AMEX Gift Card just for registering to join as a Prime Supplier!
Access to Millions of dollars of supplier opportunities before sourcing begins on the open market.
Includes one attendee at one of AMI’s Quarterly, Global Procurement Days.
Access to our database of over 46,000 planners in The American Meetings Network.
Establishing long term relationships with AMI Sourcing Managers and Meeting Planners.
The American Meetings Network – Global Procurement Day
During Global Procurement Day, we develop stronger and deeper relationships with our partner suppliers, while also preparing them to work closely with our global network. The American Meetings Network brings together the best meeting planning talent, venues, technology, and services worldwide—to build and flawlessly deliver the meeting experiences AMI’s Fortune 500 clients demand for engaging their key audiences.
“This is literally the single most valuable event I have ever attended as a supplier. The way that AMI presets the meetings for you, your time is so well spent. It helps everybody feel focused because they are condensed time slots. They keep it moving beautifully and everything has been provided in a way that suppliers are set up to succeed.”
Rebecca Sahlin, VP of Sales, Commonwealth Worldwide Executive Transportation
Meet directly with our meeting planners and sourcing managers
Thursday, March 7th
Wednesday, May 22nd
Thursday, September 19th
Thursday, December 5th
Attend our next Global Procurement Day: March 7th, 2019!
American Meetings, Inc. (AMI) CEO, Andy McNeill, and the AMI Network Team hosted our quarterly Global Procurement Day on Thursday, September 20th 2018 at the Sonesta Fort Lauderdale Beach Hotel. The event was a success from start to finish, providing both highly effective business development meetings, with an educational session, and the opportunity to develop genuine connections and build relationships with our Prime Member Suppliers.
The event kicked off with an incredible welcome dinner at Boatyard in Fort Lauderdale that was both delicious, and a lot of fun! AMI team members played an informal game of musical chairs throughout the dinner, ensuring that our Prime Suppliers had an opportunity to not only meet but really begin getting to know our AMI Meeting Planners, Sourcing Managers, and Executive Leadership on a personal level. A special thank you goes out to our transportation sponsor, Just Right DMC!
The following morning the suppliers had the exclusive opportunity for business development meetings with AMI Meeting Planners and Sourcing Managers. The results of these 1:1 meetings were nothing short of amazing! Several suppliers left with business in hand! The Global Procurement Day Luncheon and Procurement Panel Session, sponsored by Caesars Entertainment, was both informative and inspiring.
Attendees had the rare opportunity to hear an in-depth discussion with two of AMI’s Tier One Clients, and the afternoon’s keynote speakers, Sara Friedlander, Director Enabling Services at Bristol Myers Squibb, and Monette Knapik, Director of Strategic Procurement at CVS Health. Both spoke about their challenges, successes, supplier diversity programs, and current best practices for managing the procurement of such large organizations.
Who Attended?
As part of our commitment to our supplier partners, in 2018, we have expanded the number of procurement days allowing for smaller, more intimate interactions with our talented AMI meeting managers and sourcing professionals. The purpose of our Global Procurement Day is to develop stronger and deeper relationships with our partner suppliers, while also preparing them to work closely with our global network. Attendee’s included:
Not to worry! AMI hosts our Global Procurement Day event(s) quarterly. Find out If your business qualifies to become a Prime Supplier on The American Meetings Network, by calling Paul Steinmetz, Director of The American Meetings Network at (954) 440-1274 or emailing suppliers@americanmeetings.com.
Once your event is in full swing, you and your global meeting planner will have a lot of priorities to attend to. The last thing you need is to find yourself micromanaging a disorganized event staff. You need a reliable team you can delegate simple tasks to so you have the bandwidth to focus on more pressing concerns.
Of course, part of how well your staff performs relates to the overall complexity of the training and directives you provide. If your staff scheduling is a nightmare and you fail to clearly assign posts and duties, staff confusion is to be expected.
Says Josie Rubio, Director of HR & Global Talent Acquisition at AMI, “If you want your staff to perform like a well-oiled machine, you have to create a simple and streamlined plan so that every team member knows where they’re supposed to be when they’re supposed to be there, and what they’re supposed to be doing.”
How can you and your corporate meeting planner ensure that your staff is well prepared to best serve event attendees? Here are a few tips to simplify staffing concerns at your upcoming event.
Have Your Corporate Meeting Planner Suggest Posts
Once you have your venue locked down and a clear plan of where meetings, presentations, and exhibits will take place, it’s time to sit down with your corporate meeting planner to determine where best to place staffers throughout your event space.
You’ll need registration staff and team members posted throughout the venue to direct attendees and provide assistance. You might also need staffers posted at doors to check badges, people assigned to act as ushers for presentations, and professionals that can man food and beverage stations, activity booths, and other service locations.
Knowing ahead of time where you’ll need to strategically place staff members can help you to secure the right volume of staff and select professionals that have the experience and personality to excel in their assigned position.
Simplify Scheduling as Much as Possible
Every event presents challenges for the host, global meeting planner, and staff members, and to some extent, you might need to compensate on the fly. However, it’s best to create a firm schedule for staffing ahead of time. What if someone doesn’t show up or a staffer needs to leave their post for an unscheduled restroom break?
Your best bet is to have a backup plan, such as a couple of extra team members that can act as runners or fill in as needed. A well-planned schedule and extra staffing can help you to optimize the usage of event staff and ensure that no post is ever left unattended.
Ask Your Global Meeting Planner to Streamline Maps and Itineraries
Event attendees are certain to approach staff members with questions, and some of the most common will focus on the timing and location of activities. You and your corporate meeting planner can prepare for this by providing staffers with maps and itineraries and going over them before the event begins.
A good bet is to offer attendees maps and itineraries via the app so they have their own copies, but giving staff members hard copies is also wise since it can help to make their jobs a lot easier and account for potential snafus like a low battery on devices or in-app crashes.
Your plan is probably to nail down every possible detail of your event in order to ensure it goes off without a hitch. As an experienced corporate meeting planner can tell, you, though, never know when an unexpected emergency might arise. This is why it’s so important to work closely with your global meeting planner to come up with a plan for emergency preparedness that ensures you address any emergency, large or small, with a suitable response.
How can you plan for emergencies at meetings and events when you have no idea what types of situations could arise? Here are a few tips to help you ensure the safety and security of event attendees in the unlikely event of an emergency.
Ask Venues about Emergency Preparedness
Says Chelsea Litos, VP Account Management at AMI, “Your event is not the first rodeo for most venues, which means they’ve already got plans in place for emergency situations, from a person experiencing a seizure or heart attack to a disaster level event like a mass shooting or a fire. They’ll have first aid on hand, numbers for the nearest emergency services, and protocols for evacuation, if necessary. This is your best resource when it comes to emergency preparedness for your event.”
Collect Info on Local Emergency Services
Even though your venue likely has solid plans in place for emergency or disaster situations, it behooves you and your global meeting planner to take steps to become aware of emergency services available in the venue and the local environs, especially if you have off-site activities planned. Collecting contact information for local PD and fire departments is a good idea, as is finding the nearest hospitals, pharmacies, alternative lodgings, alternative airports (and other travel hubs), and so on. This will only help you and your global meeting planner to create a comprehensive plan for reacting should emergency situations arise.
Talk to your Corporate Meeting Planner about Adding Event Security
There’s a chance your venue has security services in place, but you may want to go the extra mile to ensure the safety of guests by hiring additional event security. At the very least, you’ll want security details at points of entry to ensure that only registered attendees get into your event, but you’ll also want extra bodies in place to direct an evacuation, for example. Your corporate meeting planner should be able to help you hire an appropriate security team for the size and scope of your event.
Work with Your Global Meeting Planner and Venue on Evacuation and Disaster Plans
Although the odds of a disaster during your event are slim, you need to be prepared nonetheless if you want to avoid liability and keep guests as safe as possible. Working with your corporate meeting planner and the event venue staff, you should be able to come up with suitable plans for coping with disaster scenarios, including those that require a full-scale evacuation. Having these plans in place and being prepared to execute them if necessary could not only help you save face in the aftermath of an emergency but actually save lives.
Most people interested in technology have at least a passing familiarity with the concept of facial recognition software, especially since the latest iteration of the iPhone has added a form of this technology as a means of bio metric protection. However, the uses for this advancement have gone far beyond simply unlocking phones for users.
Car manufacturers are experimenting with this technology for unlocking and even starting vehicles. It is also being used by law enforcement agencies for purposes such as security, identifying and tracking criminals, preventing voter fraud, and more. Facial recognition software is being tested and used by banks, casinos, hotels, bars and restaurants, social media outlets (for tagging), and even dating apps (to match people based on similar facial characteristics).
Anyone planning meetings or working in event management should know that there are also applications for facial recognition software that fall within their wheelhouse. This technology can increase convenience for event attendees and allow the host or event company to improve security and measure the attendee experience throughout the event.
If you didn’t know all of this was possible, it’s time to learn how you can employ facial recognition software to your benefit at upcoming events. A good place to start is by partnering with a renowned meeting services and event company like American Meetings, Inc. (AMI) that can help to connect you to the right technologies for your event needs. Here are just a few of the incredible ways this particular technology can enhance and improve your meetings and events.
First, you have to choose an appropriate destination, one that offers the exciting and adventurous vibe vacationers expect. From there you can find ways to work the destination into the theme of your event to make every aspect of the affair unified and add the vacation aesthetic to what would otherwise be just another industry event.
Streamline On-Site Event Management
The main benefit of facial recognition software to date is the ability to use it as a means of identification. For the purposes of event management, this can mean streamlining all kinds of common headaches and adding speed and convenience for attendees. This is especially true when it comes to traditionally lengthy processes like registration, check-in, and lines for activities at events.
The trick is finding the right facial recognition software, one that can improve processes without putting event attendees at risk. The ever-present threat of identity theft makes it imperative to protect any sensitive data provided by guests, and some software solutions have safeguards in place to negate this potential.
For example, some software has features that encrypt data gathered from images and then delete the actual images after relevant facial geometry has been captured. This way, event attendees can feel safe providing a photo online during the registration process.
At the event, check-in can run a lot more smoothly with the use of smartphones, tablets, or other mobile devices that scan faces, quickly access information, and automatically print out badges on connected hardware, ensuring a much quicker process than checking paper or digital lists and trying to verify identities manually.
According to Tarique Stanley, Director of Technology at AMI, “An event company might reasonably expect to spend a minute or more checking in each event attendee by traditional methods, and that’s if everything goes smoothly. With facial recognition software, the time to scan and check-in an attendee could be cut down to as little as about a second.”
Improve Security
Facial recognition software today is incredibly sophisticated and reliable. It is generally estimated to be about 99% accurate, delivering very few false positives. This can help to tighten event security by making it nearly impossible for anyone not registered for the event to fake their way through check-in or sneak past attendants checking identification and matching up faces with IDs, for example.
Go Interactive
There is no shortage of ways to get creative when it comes to implementing new technologies at events, and facial recognition software is no exception. It can be used in a variety of ways interactively. For example, some software can recognize facial expressions like smiles and frowns.
Some companies have used this to set up kiosks around events that supply prizes to event attendees that smile at the camera. Your event management company can help you come up with clever ways to capitalize on the technologies at your disposal.
Improve Event Company Response to Attendee Experience
When you know that facial recognition software can be used to identify facial expressions, it should come as no surprise that it is also being used to track emotions. This means you could place cameras throughout your events to track attendees and determine whether they’re having a good experience or not. This gives you the opportunity to follow up with attendees exhibiting negative responses, or alternately reward those with positive responses or behaviors.
It’s a lot to wrap your head around, but with assistance from the experts at a reputable event management organization like AMI, you can determine the best ways to use facial recognition software and other technologies to your advantage at upcoming events.
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