Piles of paperwork: a slippery slope

Every year, the Worshipful Company of Ironmongers invites their fellow livery companies to a charity skiing competition in Morzine, France. While the event is always a roaring success, the process of organising it was not.

Our client had identified a number of problems with their existing process:

• Time-consuming: The process of organising the event was taking up a lot of time, and was prone to human error.
• Repetitive: The same information was being entered into multiple spreadsheets, and the same emails were being sent to multiple people.
• Inefficient: The process was not scalable, relying on 1-2 people to manually chase bookings, payments and other information.

With the event growing in popularity year-on-year, our client needed a solution that would allow them to scale up their operations, and reduce the amount of time spent on organising the event.

Powerful new platform: up the ski lift

We worked with our client to identify the key requirements and success-criteria for a new system - for example:

• A centralised database: A single source of truth for all information relating to the event.
• Automated emails: Automated emails to be sent to participants at key points in the process.
• Hands-off booking: Participants should be able to book themselves onto the event.
• Delegated control: The organisers should not need to contact team captains to approve or reject bookings.
• Data export: The system should be able to export data in the form of spreadsheets for use throughout the event.

Following this, we formally proposed a solution to our client that addressed all of these and more. Critically, our proposal was future proof, adaptable and scalable - it can be used for any number of events, with any number of participants.

Après ski, ready for the first event

We delivered a fully-functional web platform to our client, which is now accepting registrations for the first event.

At time of writing:

• 30+ teams have registered for the event.
• 550+ participants have registered for the event.

The system has been well-received by our client, and we’re looking forward to hearing about it’s performance during the event itself.

Learn more about the event at liveryskiing.com, or find out more about the Ironmongers at ironmongers.org.