Event planning and management encompass a wide range of event types - from corporate events, cultural events, leisure events, to personal events and global workshops and conferences. What they all have in common is that successful event planning entails ability to plan and manage all aspects of the event in detail, including: 1) meeting with clients and sponsors to identify their needs; 2) planning and arranging the scope of the event including time, location, program, and budget; 3) negotiating with providers to achieve the most favourable terms, requesting bids from venues and service providers; 4) working with clients to choose where to hold the event and whom to contract for services; 5) inspect places to ensure they meet the client requirements; 6) coordinate event services such as accommodation, transportation, and catering services; 7) hiring and coordinating details with on-site staff (e.g. equipment, venue decoration, entertainment); 8) verification and testing of onsite services and setups; 9) monitoring event activities as they evolve ensuring client and attendee satisfaction 10) problem and issue resolution before, during and after the event; 11) continuing accounting, budgeting, invoice and payment reviews; 12) post-event evaluation and reports. To complicate matters further, these tasks depend on one another and in many cases, they must be performed in collaboration between the event internal team and different external event services providers using standard communication tools. Furthermore, event managers usually work simultaneously on several projects operating on different lead times which entail executing short term goals as well as dealing with long-term plans. Keeping track of such an enormous amount of information, stakeholders, deadlines, agreements and deliverables makes event management to be deemed the 5th most stressful career in the world (just after military, police, firefighters and pilots). To ease this situation, event managers currently must use a plethora of digital solutions that include tools for online registration, email/social network marketing, event surveys, event Apps, file sharing, participant engagement tools, project management software, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools. Within each tool category, there are solutions from different software providers that offer specialised features required for certain types of events (e.g. conferences, weddings, team building events, trade fairs, etc). This fragmented and incomplete software environment has forced today’s event managers into a complex and disconnected workflow that cause inefficiencies, delays, mistakes and additional workload stress. In the last years, a few all-in-one solutions have appeared in the market but about them, “event professionals lament great promises with poor implementation”. All-in-one solutions integrate poorly with other event software tools that provide advanced vertical services and therefore don’t allow the required customisation to match the needs of different industry verticals. A recent survey revealed that only 39.6% of event manager use event management software, but 73.7% among them are using more than 5 software tools coming from different software providers to coordinate their events. This mix of tools from different software providers pose integration problems and inefficient work performance that impede effective workflows and communication between all those involved in the planning of any given event. As a result, 96% of event managers must waste 30-50% of their time (which represents from €10.965 to €18.275 of the event managers’ average yearly salary) on manual and repetitive tasks jumping from software to software. These integration and effectiveness issues are considered to be one of the major restraining factors affecting the growth of the event management software market. As such, event planning and management remain some of the most stressful jobs globally characterised with inefficient workflows, job dissatisfaction, high overtime and burnout rates – where adequate and intelligent software solutions are still lacking while there is a huge global market and user need for tools that can help improve everyday jobs for millions of people working in this field.
