AEX Convention Services

AEX Convention Services designs and produces trade show exhibits, from floor plans and structures to large-format graphics, for dozens of shows a month in peak season. Sales works in Salesforce. Once an opportunity is closed-won, an account manager takes over and runs the show through what the team calls the launch sequence, a checklist of every step from kickoff to move-in. The account managers and design leads had come from a previous employer with a proprietary system that gave everyone a queue, a dashboard, and a proofing loop. At AEX they had Wrike, partially built out, and a habit of doing the rest by email.

In the team's own words on the intake call, if anyone needed a design, they emailed. Requests did not reliably land in the right person's queue for the right show. Proofs went out as PDF attachments, feedback came back scattered across email threads, and nobody could see proof status or version history in one place. Workload tools showed today's assignments but not future capacity, so operations could not plan staffing for upcoming shows. There was no roll-up of hours or cost per event, and dashboards for overdue tasks, design output, and hours by event were assembled by hand when someone asked. Design files lived in SharePoint and OneDrive while task work happened in Wrike, so people moved files by hand and permissions did not carry over.

This was a Wrike implementation with a Salesforce integration. We used to implement and support Wrike as a partner, and this is that work.

Discovery ran as process workshops with sales, account management, and the design leads, producing a blueprint and field mapping. From it we configured the workspace, with a space and folder architecture per show, launch-sequence blueprints so a new show is created with its full task tree, and a design traffic inbox. Four dynamic request forms, one per request type, route each request to the right team's queue under the right show, with auto-assignment and SLA rules. Time and cost rates were set up so hours roll up to the event they belong to.

The Salesforce sync, built on Workato, creates the Wrike project when an opportunity reaches closed-won and keeps the show record aligned as it changes. A later change order extended it with a button in Salesforce that creates a subtask in Wrike, a recipe that watches the move-in date and the assigned account manager in Salesforce and updates the related Wrike project when they change, and a sync of in-progress shows with a future move-in date, batched to avoid API rate limits. Wrike-on-Wrike recipes copy custom field values from a master project to its subprojects and subtasks, keep Ziflow (the proofing tool) and Wrike statuses in step, and route structure requests based on the feedback cycle.

Role-based dashboards give account managers, designers, and executives their own view of overdue tasks, utilization, and hours by event. Training was two live recorded sessions plus quick-reference videos. After go-live the engagement moved to a monthly support arrangement covering enhancements, the Salesforce and proofing integrations, dashboards, and ad hoc training.

Design requests moved out of email and into forms that land in the correct queue for the correct show, which was the thing the team said was killing them. Every show in production has a launch sequence in Wrike from the moment sales closes it, without an account manager re-keying it. Proof status and revisions are visible in the workflow, and Ziflow and Wrike stay in sync so a change in one does not go unnoticed in the other. Leadership sees hours by event and utilization without a manual report. The change order extended the sync beyond closed-won records to in-progress shows with a future move-in date, so the forward book of shows lands in Wrike, not just the ones already sold. The engagement began in mid 2025 and continued into 2026 through the change order and the support arrangement.

Given the same problem now, we would build AEX a production system of their own that holds shows, launch sequences, request queues, proofing with external reviewer links, capacity planning, and cost roll-up in one database, with Salesforce as a native integration rather than a set of recipes, and no per-seat licensing for the account managers, designers, and outside reviewers who need to touch a proof. The Wrike build works and is supported. A custom, client-owned build removes the middleware layer between Salesforce and the production floor and gives the team the proofing and capacity features that were only available on a higher licensing tier.

Before any of this was built, AEX hired us for a standalone software selection consultation in 2025. The team was partway into Wrike but second-guessing it, with old Workfront habits and a designer running graphics requests through Smartsheet on the side. We evaluated the launch-sequence process against ClickUp, monday.com, Smartsheet, Teamwork, and Wrike, and recommended staying on Wrike and finishing the build rather than migrating again. The implementation described above came out of that recommendation, priced by milestone so AEX only committed to one phase at a time.