The Victoria Racing Club

Modernising an accreditation system for Australia’s premier horse racing event

Who are they?

Founded in 1864 The Victoria Racing Club (VRC) is a world leader in horse racing, hosting the annual Melbourne Cup Carnival, at the iconic Flemington Racecourse, each spring.

The jewel in the Australian racing calendar, the Melbourne Cup Carnival saw 498 horses compete in 37 races across Cup week, welcoming over 240,000 spectators to Flemington.

Held on the first Tuesday of every November, Melbourne Cup Day in 2022 saw over 100,000 spectators watch Gold Trip win “the race that stops the nation”. Such is the importance of the Melbourne Cup to the people of Victoria, a public holiday is held in Melbourne’s home state each year.

The requirements

The VRC had an antiquated accreditation system that was slowly becoming untenable. There was a need to simplify processes with a more streamlined system whilst being able to integrate with their incumbent access control partner, UMD.

The organisers wanted to move away from a role-based access model to a zonal-based model to better control who had access and stop the creation of thousands of roles to match each and every combination of job functions.

Due to COVID-19 the approval of the system was delayed and with events fast approaching, at the end of October 2021, a quick turnaround time was needed to get their Accredit system live.

The main objectives of the project were:

• Provide accreditation to all four race days via a single application process

• Allow account managers to select the zones for each individual applicant, for the accreditation team to later approve or amend

• Manage parking pass applications to organisation and individual levels for eight different parking areas

• Push barcodes to their access control provider’s system with a newly created API

• Vet the jockeys and strappers on arrival to ensure only people affiliated with horses competing on the day are allowed into the horse-yard areas

• Allocate organisations to specific accreditation team members to manage

Our approach

In our early scoping meetings it came to light that the VRC needed a full accreditation system to allow them to manage and distribute responsibility across the different departments for contractors, catering, security, media, as well as parking passes.

The VRC employs an accreditation team of over six members who were each provided with an Accredit personal login assigned to a list of organisations for them to manage. This prevented any crossover of work and streamlined the process greatly.

We also enabled our zone selection form configuration settings to switch on all of the zones and race day events within the invite and completion of application forms. This allowed the person responsible for each organisation to state what zones they believed each individual should be allocated to. In the approval process, the accreditation team were able to confirm or amend the zones and race-days allocated to each person prior to printing their accreditation pass.

As an extremely large venue to manage, the VRC’s vehicle access and parking process is similarly complex in nature. We configured an area for vehicle passes which allowed the VRC to allocate a strictly managed number of each type of parking pass to each organisation. Each pass application collected allowed for the driver and vehicle details to be stored in the system to be matched against each pass on arrival.

The most strictly controlled area, known as the Horseyard Areas, required us to ensure that each person entering had a valid purpose to be in that area. On top of restricting passes with a zone, each jockey and strapper (a horse attendant) was required to register their intention to be in that area each day by answering several questions pertaining to what horse they were managing that day. We were able to use our Accredit GO feature to facilitate this requirement and successfully restricted the number of uninvited people in this area.

In collaboration with the VRC’s access control provider, UMD, we successfully pushed barcodes and zones, through an API integration, into UMD’s system for real time actioning and cancellation of barcodes.

The benefits

• Manage a multi-day event via a single system

• Collect and incorporate photos onto the badges

• Ability to apply new processes and procedures on demand

• On-demand printing to plastic cards via the system, incorporating complex zone rules

• Full real-time integration with the existing access control provider

• Use of zone choices in forms and imports

• Integration of document collection, including health-related certificates and vaccination information

• Text message broadcasts to accredited members

• Management of vehicle access and car parking

The results

We worked closely with the VRC, within a tight timescale, to deliver an accreditation system perfect to their needs. The delivered system can cope with the requirements of today, but also has the flexibility to adapt as new situations arise in future.

Where traditionally industry participants had free access to the Flemington Racecourse site, the Accredit Platform suddenly gave the VRC complete oversight and control on who could enter, and which areas they were available to access. The system now forces people to pre-register their interest to attend, with a daily link to declare their intention to be onsite on that day.

VRC have now centralised their processes and improved the efficiency of their overall accreditation process. 900 Responsible Organisation portals were set up so stakeholders could collect information on behalf of their workers, contractors, and media to ensure all those entering the event are fully accredited. A complete integration with their access control supplier was achieved allowing for a seamless process from accreditation approval to entry to the site.

It was great to work with the Accredit Solutions team over the past 4 months to implement a new accreditation solution for the VRC and the 2021 Melbourne Cup Carnival.
Project Manager

VRC has successfully run two Melbourne Cup Carnivals, since system launch, and are now going to use their Accredit system for all future Race and Event Day accreditation.