Smart shipping of trade show components

When Olympus Medical does an event, the company might have as many as 500 different prototype products to keep secure. Robert Bosch has dishwashers and other kitchen appliances that must be steered from the truck to their final locations at a show.

If you thought shipping your event components to your site was the hard part of getting them there, think again. It’s what happens on the receiving end that really can put kinks in your plans.

When events require large or delicate components, an on-site, pre-event inbound delivery inspection is mandatory. “Access to the event room is critical,” says Scott Jameson, manager-trade shows and events for Robert Bosch Corp. This includes the loading dock situation, the size of the access doors and hallways to the area where you’ll be using, available equipment and security. Some considerations:

Check out receiving. How do you plan to ship your pieces? Can the site accommodate the truck? “Some loading docks are not big enough for a 50-foot truck,” says Joshua Stevens, trade show manager at Xerox.

You’ll also need to be sure you can access the dock when it’s time to unload. Jameson always checks out access road restrictions and asks venue staff who Bosch will be sharing the dock with, because the additional traffic can impede move-in. Verify that the dock can accommodate any equipment you’ll need to unload—fork lifts, palette jacks, or dollies. If the venue doesn’t own its own equipment, you’ll have to make arrangements for that as well.

Walk the delivery route. Ceiling heights, duct work, and lighting fixtures may be obstacles between the dock and your components’ destination—as could tight corridors, tight turns, small elevators, or narrow stairs. If dollies or palette jacks can’t get through, you may need extra staff to move the properties by hand.

Assess security. To keep its prototypes safe, Levi’s examines the loading bay, transfer route, and ultimate destination for possible security issues. “If venue security isn’t adequate, we supplement with our own,” says Mike Mecham, event manager at Levi’s. Mecham also lets facility security know that the shipments are confidential. Once items are transferred to the desired location within the venue, Mecham takes additional precautions. For smaller shipments by common carrier, Levi’s includes instructions to hold for pick-up by the company’s own staff.

Plan your attack. “Pieces that need to be together need to deliver together,” says Sarah Kramer, marketing communications manager for Zephyr, which makes high-end range covers for designer kitchens. Once when Zephyr needed to put together a new showroom facility—in a building without storage and staging space—Kramer created a multi-day move-in plan, timing each portion of the delivery based on when the installation team would be ready for it. And each palette was color-coded to correspond to the specific region of the building where the load was headed.

Think about the outbound. To avoid chaos after an event, a move-out plan is essential. Levi’s shipments arrive already addressed for the return trip. Xerox clearly marks which materials must be saved and reused for repacking.