Tuesdays with Talia: Why Do You Want a Preferred Supplier Program?

Talia explains why you would want a preferred supplier program

“Another hot topic for companies is creating a preferred supplier program in their non-hotel categories. There has been great technology that came out allowing companies to E-RFP and better manage their hotel spend. However, that is just a fraction of what companies are spending their budgets on for meetings and events.

You have your production companies, your transportation companies, your DMC’S, and there has not been enough visibility into what that spend is specifically. How can one efficiently aggregate that spend? How can a preferred supplier program leverage that problem?

I think the question is why is this coming now? Why do companies not install this preferred program? I think there has been a couple challenges until now.

The first challenge was our priority. We started with hotels and tried getting hotels preferred.

The second challenge has been the lack of technology that would support a preferred supplier program amongst suppliers and allow for communication across the entire organization of preferred suppliers.

Now that there is technology in the world that can manage these challenges there is truly an opportunity for a company to be able to build this intelligent and efficient program.”