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00 / Case study

Out of the inbox.
Into the app.

Organizing BMW's internal IT convention was a year of phone calls, spreadsheets and Word documents passed back and forth. I built a Laravel application that made the process largely automatic, and exhibitors ran their own stands through it for three conventions.

  • 60+

    Exhibitors
    per convention

  • 03

    Conventions
    run on it

  • 11

    Deadlines
    automated

  • 00

    Emails to book
    a stand

Client
Agentur von Thülen
Role
Sole developer
Stack
Laravel

01 / Starting point

Planning a convention is a year of decisions taken with people who do not work for you. Every exhibitor had a stand to furnish, staff to register, catering to order, files to send to the printer and a page to fill in the printed catalog. All of it was arranged by email.

The agency organizing it, Agentur von Thülen, was the bottleneck by construction. An exhibitor who wanted two more chairs, or a corrected job title on a badge, had to ask someone and then wait. Multiply that by every exhibitor and every detail, and most of the year went on relaying changes rather than planning the event. Deadlines existed, but they were not taken very seriously: any change could still be sent to the agency by email, and many arrived after the date had passed.

We started by going through the tasks that were being done by hand, then sat down with the agency to work out which of them an exhibitor could safely be trusted to do themselves.

02 / Constraints

The printer does not wait
The catalog went to print on a fixed date, which left no time to fix an entry that overran its page. So anything an exhibitor could type had to fit the page as they wrote it, not be found too long once the file was with the printer.
Self-service, within limits
Exhibitors needed to change their own details without being able to change anything that cost the organizer money or space. Where permission was genuinely required, asking for it had to happen in the same place as the rest of the work.
Deadlines that chase people
The agency had been the reminder system. The application had to take that over and tell exhibitors what was still outstanding, so that nobody had to keep the list in their head.

03 / What I built

  • B/01

    Exhibitor accounts

    Each company signed up, picked its stand and worked through its own checklist. Staff badges, furniture and catering were entered once and stayed editable until the deadline closed them.

  • B/02

    Booth configurator

    Furniture and decoration were dragged into a floor plan, so an exhibitor could see the stand before ordering it. The organizer exported the furniture lists for the whole convention in one click.

  • B/03

    Catalog page editor

    Exhibitors laid out their own catalog entry against a live preview of the printed page, and were warned the moment the content stopped fitting. It replaced several rounds of Word documents per exhibitor.

  • B/04

    Deadlines and reminders

    Every task carried a date and a countdown on the exhibitor's dashboard, with warnings as it came closer. Once a deadline passed, that part of the application locked. The administration panel showed at a glance who was late and on what.

  • B/05

    Support tickets

    Anything needing permission or a conversation was raised in the app rather than in the agency's inbox, so the request and the stand it concerned stayed attached to each other.

  • B/06

    Invoicing

    What an exhibitor ordered was what they were billed for, drawn from the same records rather than reassembled from correspondence after the convention closed.

The booth configurator with the lounge furniture list open, beside a round stand furnished with a lounge, standing tables, a counter, plants and a screen.
Fig 01 / The booth configurator. Screenshots throughout contain placeholder data.
The catalog page editor, with the exhibitor's text and logo on the left and a live preview of the printed catalog page on the right.
Fig 02 / The catalog page editor, with the printed page previewed live.
The exhibitor's information page, listing every deadline with its date, the days remaining, its status and a button to the relevant area.
Fig 03 / Every deadline and its status, as the exhibitor saw them.
Exhibitor records in the administration panel, with contact details, the billing address and the booked stand for each company.
Fig 04 / Exhibitor records in the administration panel.

04 / What changed

  • Booking a stand

    Before
    Email to the agency, then wait for someone to confirm it.
    After
    Chosen in the application, confirmed immediately.

  • Staff badges

    Before
    Names sent by email, and corrected by email.
    After
    Entered by the exhibitor, editable until the deadline.

  • A catalog entry

    Before
    Word documents sent back and forth, with overruns found at the printer.
    After
    Typed against a live preview that refused to overflow the page.

  • Chasing deadlines

    Before
    Deadlines on paper, and late changes sent by email anyway.
    After
    A countdown for every task, and a section that locked once its deadline passed.

  • The furniture order

    Before
    Collected from each exhibitor and added up by hand.
    After
    Exported from the configurator in one click.

05 / In their words

“The convention tool developed by Alexander helped us automate and optimize our procedures. Exhibitors were able to manage bookings, furnishing, employee badges, catering, and a lot more independently. Capturing and automating all these aspects in a single tool seemed impossible at first, but Alexander delivered! This allowed our team to focus on other areas and led to a lot of happy customers.”
Johannes Niculescu
Project Lead, Agentur von Thülen

06 / Credits

This application was built while I was running an agency, Webographen GmbH, later Designbase Studio. Design by Felix Brodbeck. Every screenshot on this page contains placeholder data.

07 / Next step

Have a process that runs on email?

Most internal tools start as a spreadsheet that outgrew itself. Walk me through what your year looks like now, and we can work out which parts are worth building and which are fine as they are.

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