Procurement and Event Resource Needs

Procurement is an event's shopping list: every resource the show needs, collected from advance requests and added by hand, before anything is bought or booked.

Advancing tells you what people asked for. A presenter wants a handheld microphone, an artist needs power for a lighting rig, fifteen groups each want golf carts. None of that is an order yet. Somebody still has to decide what to actually source, in what quantity, for when, and from where. Without a place to do that, the requests live in one spreadsheet, the order in another, and nobody can say whether every approved request is covered.

Why Procurement Matters

Requests describe what someone wants. Procurement describes what the event must get. The two are rarely one to one. Ten presenters speaking at different times in the same room do not need ten microphones; they need one, shared. A request for a 400 amp power drop becomes a distro, cable runs and a tie-in. Fifteen golf cart requests become five carts on a rental order.

Procurement keeps that judgment visible. Each need stays linked to the requests it answers, so you can always trace a line on an order back to the people who asked for it. Each need also knows how much of it is on an order, so a list of a hundred needs tells you at a glance what is still unordered, what is short, and what you over-ordered.

How Procurement Works

Procurement lives under Resourcing in the event sidebar, with four tabs: Overview, Requests, Translation and Procurements.

flowchart LR
  A[Request block in an advance] --> B[Requests]
  B -->|Advance and Resource approval| C[Translation]
  C -->|drag onto a need| D[Procurements]
  D --> E[Orders]
  D --> F[Reservations from your organization]

Requests come from request blocks in advance modules. A collaborator fills in a request block, for example five golf carts, and the request lands on the Requests tab. A request block can require two approvals: Advance approval, the production side's decision, and Resource approval, the supplier's confirmation that it can be done.

Translation is the consolidation step. Approved requests sit on one side and procurements on the other, and you drag each request onto the need or schedule block that fulfills it. Many requests can feed one need.

A procurement is a named container, such as "Stage and Audio" or "Green Rooms", that holds resource needs. A need is a resource type and a quantity, with optional details: an area, a collaborator, attribute values, schedule blocks, a rate card, rule sets and an owning department. Needs can sit in groups inside a procurement, and each need shows whether it is Needs Ordered, On Order, Short or Excess against the order lines covering it.

From there, needs are filled in two ways. You put them on orders to vendors or to your own team, and you can reserve your organization's own people and gear against them from the organization's Procurements workspace, which lists every need across your active events beside a calendar of what each resource is already committed to.