During the last three weeks of February, Dow brought 800 employees from the multiple centres that the company has all over the world to Tarragona so as to conduct the UAT (User Acceptance Test) of NEA (Next Enterprise Architecture), its new global management system.
Dow entrusted PortAventura Business & Events with the organization of the event and accommodation services for the participants. Meetings were held from 10-28 February, with PortAventura Convention Centre as the main venue. The convention centre was adapted to create a work and meeting area for the 800 employees of Dow, who were all accommodated at the hotels of PortAventura Resort.
The NEA project
NEA comprises a series of IT tools that will be implemented progressively at all Dow’s centres, with the aim of improving workflows and carrying out processes transversally. This will signify key improvements for the company’s competitiveness, as well as increasing its technological efficiency, quality and client hospitality.
After studying several alternatives in different destinations all over Spain, Tarragona was chosen because of the city’s good facilities, safety, and close vicinity to Barcelona Airport and Dow’s industrial complex in Tarragona, among others advantages. As a result, the locality of Camp de Tarragona hosted over 800 participants of 31 nationalities, flying in from 100 airports located in 25 countries. The attendees and coaches also had the opportunity to visit Dow Tarragona’s industrial complex, in addition to cultural and tourist attractions in Tarragona and Barcelona.
PortAventura Convention Centre: the event’s main venue
Belen Madrid, director of PortAventura Business & Events, explained: "From the start, we were very aware of the relevance of the NEA project and, for this reason, we worked closely with Dow so as to fully understand the company’s needs and to define all the details of the group’s stay at our resort. Our role was to provide faultless logistics so as to ensure that Dow’s employees focused exclusively on making the most of this event."
With this mind, PortAventura Business & Events mobilized a team of over 200 people to handle event logistics, including production teams and technicians, as well as catering, hotel, security, cleaning and maintenance staff. All of the convention centre’s available space was partitioned off to create work, meeting, presentation, rest and networking areas. The 20-day stay required more than 12,000 hotel nights at the resort’s hotels and the preparation of more than 30,000 breakfasts and meals both at the restaurants of the PortAventura and Gold River Hotels and at the convention centre itself. It is one of the largest events that have been organized to date at the PortAventura resort.
Fernando Aldecoa, CEO of PortAventura, stressed that "it has been a privilege to be able to contribute to the success of such an important event for a multinational like Dow, a chemical industry benchmark on a global level and, at the same time, a key company for the province of Tarragona’s economy. This event has also allowed us to demonstrate the enormous capacity of our staff and the facilities of PortAventura for hosting highly complex events."
Dow’s employees at PortAventura