With 600 cyclists allocated into 100 teams, the annual Tour of Margaret River is one of the largest competitive road cycling events in Australia.
Cycling Eventures organises and manages Pro/Am cycling races and events in the picturesque south west of Western Australia. The biggest event in its annual calendar is the renowned Tour of Margaret River which has around 600 participants and runs over a week each November.
The Tour of Margaret River is an event designed for teams and has a unique format where amateur cyclists can complete directly against riders from the pro tour peloton. With 100 teams participating annually, it is one of the largest competitive road cycling events in Australia.
Heading into its ninth year, the Tour of Margaret River has grown from humble beginnings with just 30 riders to 600 riders expected to register for 2017. Capturing registration details, checking and chasing payments, allocation of teams, and keeping up with the administration and participant communications of such a large event was becoming unmanageable with manual processes and spreadsheets.
The Event Director sought advice from Satalyst, part of Canon Business Services Australia, for a technology solution to centralise and automate the participant registration process for the Tour of Margaret River and other events it runs throughout the year. The solution needed to be online and enable participants to register, update details and make payments via a portal accessed from the main website.
With a constrained budget and a short timeframe, Satalyst recommended leveraging the out of the box features of Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Sales and building necessary customisations to suit the particular needs of setting up, managing, and running a mass participation event.
Once given the go ahead, from requirements gathering to the delivery of the minimum viable product took less than four weeks. The term “minimum” may conjure the notion that functionality is small and not valuable. But this is not the case. The minimum viable product approach involves prioritising requirements to the point that they deliver core functionality to deal with the client’s immediate problems; the rest is only “nice to have” and can be added as needed or as budget allows.
Leveraging the Microsoft Azure platform and the Dynamics 365 platform enabled rapid development and significantly reduced the cost of developing the events registration management system. More importantly, the solution can be used for multiple events at the same time. Keeping all the contacts and registrations data in the backend database from each event means organisers can run analytics on the data for insights and trends into who is participating and to support and optimise marketing and communication efforts.
The ongoing costs for Cycling Eventures are minimal and easily budgeted for with predictable monthly subscription costs for Dynamics 365 Sales and the small hosting costs of the Azure web app for the customer portal. As a complete end to end service, Satalyst looks after everything for Cycling Eventures, from the cloud subscriptions to training and ongoing support.
Rebecca Cotton – Event Director, Tour of Margaret River
As CBS is a Microsoft Cloud Solutions ProviderTM we can package our solutions and services with Microsoft cloud services for a single, subscription-based offering. We will look after you with a complete end-to-end service from subscriptions through to ongoing support.
Our success is based solely on our customer’s success. If we do not provide innovative, functional, and highly useful solutions to our customers, then we have failed. Our customers see us as trusted advisers. If you think we might be a good fit for your business, then contact us to discuss your project. We would love the opportunity to earn your business.
