A year into development…
It has now been a year since we started the development of the Racing Digital platform and it feels like a good time to give an update on progress.
Our first 5 months of work saw us build the Fixture List management process which was used in live for the production of the 2023 fixture list process. Launching our product to the world was a big milestone for us as a team and this mini-project allowed us to test our full end to end capability with a standalone piece of work. We had great support from our colleagues across the racecourses and the BHA in the design of the product. This really brought our vision of putting our customers at the heart of what we do to life. Our internal team, supported by our technology partner TEKenable worked tirelessly to train and educate users to ensure that the transition to a new system was seamless. The team at the BHA also gave us great support throughout to ensure the end to end solution resulted in a successful and on-time fixture list being produced.
Fixture List Planning goes live
Attention then moved to probably the most challenging piece of development in our programme, that of Race Planning. Whilst from the outside, this may seem like a fairly straightforward process, the sheer amount of attribution involved in each race in the British Racing calendar is incredibly complex and often deeply interwoven. The simple concept however is that the attribution of race conditions can match attributes of a horse, a jockey, owner or trainer to allow the right horses to enter the right races.
We heard from customers some key needs:
Ensure that the new system has sufficient agility to be able to deal with the changing requirements of the sport (currently, this area takes up circa 70% of development spend year on year to maintain).
Allow race planners to spend less time on administration freeing up more time to shape the programme.
Where possible, only allow horses that are qualified to enter races (whilst the output of this work will only be seen when we launch our Entries & Declarations function, the building blocks to allow this to happen are in this area).
As of February, we have the majority of the system built and we will move into a phase of testing with our Race Planners and Racecourses.
This product will be released into live as part of a Racing Package towards the end of this year. That package will also contain Entries & Declarations.
The next 6 months will see our development work move into two channels.
Channel 1 will look at Ownership Registration and all associated Ownership processes alongside Horse Management.
This channel will see us release Ownership functionality in the second half of this year. We have spent a great deal of time designing with owners, syndicate managers and those responsible for this at training yards to ensure the product looks great and performs the tasks as those customers need. This will provide a great first digital impression of our sport as Owners join the industry. This release will also encompass a revised ownership fee structure, again, driven by customer feedback.
Future releases in this channel, after the initial summer launch will see Stable Employee management and Licensing functionality introduced.
Ownership Dashboard Wireframes in Design
Channel 2 of our work will focus of the remaining elements of the Racing Package, crucially Entries & Declarations. This area aims to deliver significant improvements in a number of areas whilst retaining the elements which customers like from the current system.
Ensure the system is timely, reliable and intuitive, building on the success of the current Racing Admin platform.
Allow qualification checks to be completed before an entry is made, removing the need for manual intervention and eliminate NQs in all but the most extreme races.
Give trainers and owners a more intuitive race planning tool
So, a 12 months in which we have learnt an awful lot about the Programme and how we get the very best out of our opportunity but also one that has seen our work move from designs to reality in some key areas. We ll look forward to working with all of our customers over the next 12 months as we enter our most crucial period.
Many thanks, Steve and the Racing Digital team.
