Preparing for Exhibitions

| 5 minutes

Purchasing Dept. must visit all the relevant exhibitions in China and India, relevant to medical industry.

The list of relevant exhibitions is the following:

  • CPHI (Shanghai and Delhi)
  • IPHEX (Delhi)
  • HNC/NPC (Shanghai)
  • Pharmchina (Shanghai)
  • CMEF (Shanghai)
  • Pet Fair (Shanghai)
  • Others

Responsible Purchasing Person or Purchasing Dept. Supervisor is responsible to monitor the dates and inform Purchasing Dept. in advance to prepare and make necessary bookings. Activities need to be scheduled 2 weeks before the exhibition to start preparing in advance.

Preparation for the Exhibition

  1. Register all the attendees as visitors for the exhibition. Registration has to be done online in advance as it might not be free or closed on the exhibition date.
  2. Bookings: plane or train tickets, hotels. Responsible Purchasing Person or Purchasing Dept. Supervisor needs to choose the most convenient tickets and hotels, get budget confirmation from Purchasing Dept. Manager, and inform Accounting Dept. to make the payments or Office Assistant to do the required bookings.
  3. Prepare the Exhibitors List: go through the list of exhibitors posted on the official website of the exhibition and prepare the gsheet with the following columns:
  • Vendor Name;
  • Range;
  • Booth Number and Hall Number;
  • Comments/Questions

All existing Vendors must be included (all Vendors that AdvaCare is working with or ever worked with, including all Vendors with ongoing Orders/RFQs/Registrations which will be attending the exhibition).

New potential Vendors must be identified based on the list of exhibitors from the official exhibition website. Add to the list all the vendors that can potentially be interesting, if there are too many vendors the list can be refined later.

Once the list is prepared, split the vendors by hall for convenience during the exhibition.

Questions for existing Vendors must be collected and prepared. Discuss any ongoing issue with the existing Vendors, all ongoing RFQ/Order/Registration need to be added to the list of questions. Send a task to Sales Dept. and Purchasing Dept. Manager to add questions for existing Vendors.

Printed Materials to be taken to the exhibition:

  • Lists of questions;
  • Floor Maps (must be printed out from the official exhibition website);
  • Gsheet with all the Vendors from point #3;
  • Blank AdvaCare General Criteria Evaluation template (to be filled out during the exhibition)

During the Exhibition

  1. Responsible Purchasing Person or Purchasing Dept. Supervisor to lead the conversation and introduce the company to the new Vendors according to the Script written below.
  2. Every meeting with every Vendor is not to take more than 15 minutes. The exceptions can be made for the existing Vendors if there is a lot to discuss. Responsible Purchasing Person or Purchasing Dept. Supervisor to strictly control the time of every meeting with every Vendor to make sure not to spend too much time.
  3. The route to take during the exhibition needs to be decided in advance. The attendees need to go through the corridors one by one in a structured manner, without having to run back and forth. The exhibition halls are huge and if this is not done there will be too much walking and not enough visiting of the Vendors. Use Floor Maps to help to build the most time-efficient route.
  4. Need to get to the exhibition as early as possible. The exhibitions close early and there is no time to waste, Attendees need to make sure to meet every Vendor in the list.
  5. Take notes of everything discussed in the printed blanks of AdvaCare General Criteria Evaluation. Ask each Vendor all the questions in AdvaCare General Criteria Evaluation and write down all the answers.
  6. Take all catalogs possible. If a Vendor does not seem interesting, take the catalog and do not spend time to talk to the Vendor. If there is not enough time, skip the meeting and only take the catalogs.

Script for the Exhibition

We are an American owned pharmaceutical company with presence in 72 countries worldwide. We have our production based in India, China, USA and offices in India, China, Hong Kong, USA. We outsource production of our branded products to manufacturers in India/China. We have a wide range of pharmaceutical, veterinary products, as well as supplements and medical devices. Our main markets are Africa (Kenya, Ghana, Guinea, many others), Middle East (Iraq), South East Asia (Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia), CIS (Uzbekistan for pharma, Turkmenistan), several countries in South America (Guyana, Suriname, Trinidad). We only work with our own brands.

Can say if asked for details:

  • For India Office: In India office we only have Procurement dept. for now, but we will expand to have Registration Dept. in India as well as we have a lot of ongoing registrations with our India manufacturing partners.
  • Our company has about 50 people in different offices.
  • We are planning to start our own distribution in Philippines and Guinea. In fact, we were planning to start in 2020 but then Covid-19 happened and we had to postpone our plans.
  • Our brand AdvaLife (supplements) in Iraq is very well recognized.
  • If asked about Annual Sales Revenue of our company: around 17 million USD for pharmaceutical products specifically, and you are not very familiar with other ranges as from India we mainly focus on pharma.
  • If asked about USA office: Our USA operations are separate. US office deals mainly with supplements manufactured in US for US market. We do not distribute pharmaceutical products manufactured in India/China in USA, our India/China operations are focused on ROW markets.
  • For India Office: Our main production base for pharmaceutical products is currently in China, but we are planning to move more production to India and hopefully make India our main production base. Therefore, we are looking for reliable India manufacturing partners that can give us long term support.

Cannot say:

  • We are a trading company.
  • We have only 2 people in India office/We have only 18 people in China office.
  • The word “Client” in any context.
  • Any vendor names that we work with to anyone (for example, if you are talking to Adnova cannot mention Cian or any other vendors we work with).
  • We are a small company.
  • I need to check with our Sales Dept. -> don’t call it Sales, say any other dept but sales (need to check with Registration Dept, or Marketing Dept, or my manager, my colleagues, need to check internally, etc.).
  • For India Office: We only produced several orders in India this year. Or any other similar statement that will downplay the company. (for India Office)

After the Exhibition

  1. Reuse the gsheet prepared for the exhibition to add notes from the exhibition. Include everything discussed during meetings and any other comments, opinions, etc.
  2. Send a task to Purchasing Dept. Manager and other members of Purchasing Dept. who did not attend the exhibition to read the notes.
  3. Add Site Documents in Registration Module according to the collected information about the Vendors.
  4. Send tasks for the relevant RFQ/Order/Registration with the information learned at the exhibition and to take further action.
Did this article help you?
 0
 0