Situation

The Athens Olympic Games in 2004 surprised many of its critics when it more than adequately delivered the world´s most watched event efficiently, with style.

For the Opening and Closing ceremonies of the Athens Olympic Games, United States based company, Jack Morton, needed a database to track all of the logistical arrangements for over 2000 staff members, both temporary and permanent as well as local and international, involved in these functions.

Staff were broken down into a number of categories. The head office of the Opening and Closing ceremonies employed a constantly expanding group of people from the United States, Australia, and United Kingdom, as well as a large contingent of local staff in Greece. They were involved in everything from organizing transport and accommodation, human resources and budget control, to the actual choreography and production of the ceremonies themselves.

As the Olympic Games drew near, staff numbers swelled as hundreds of temporary and casual staff were employed to handle the massive workload of delivering a world spotlight event. Finally, on the eve of and onsite during the Olympic Games, Jack Morton employees were also looking after the hundreds of performers involved in the ceremonies.

Solution

With a complex logistical task of looking after all of these people, Certain Events played its part in simplifying the momentous task. Primarily used by Jack Morton as a logistics tool, Certain Events came into its own for the Olympic Games in the following areas:

Accommodation

Jack Morton had a permanent base of operations in Athens from two years prior up to the start of the Games. About 30 apartments were leased (in a staggered way as staff increased) to cater for the international staff that were permanently based in Athens. In addition, hundreds of international contract staff commuted to Athens on a semi-regular basis, either completing one-off jobs or commuting prior to being permanently based in Athens in the lead-up to the Games. All of these contract staff members were accommodated in hotels around Athens. Finally, during the actual 3 weeks of the Olympic Games, Jack Morton had fully booked two five star Athens hotels - The Divani Caravel Hotel and the Kineta Beach Resort Hotel.

All of this accommodation had to be managed with extreme accuracy. Certain Events' tasks were to:

• Provide accurate and meaningful reports to the hotels both before and during the Games
• Ensure that commission revenue was maximized.
• Contribute accurate fi nancial data (related to accommodation) for the purposes of budgets.
• Produce an accurate, rolling, overall picture of accommodation so that the location of any staff member could be pinpointed at any time.
• To ensure that accommodation dates always matched airline-booking dates.

Travel

Jack Morton had a deal with the local organizing committee and Olympic Airlines in terms of airfares. As a result, all travel bookings had to be communicated and managed through a third party in the local Athens organizing committee (ATHOC).

Certain Events was used to track all airline bookings and produce accurate daily (sometimes hourly) reports to ATHOC in the correct “ATHOC” format. Travellers´ itineraries were also produced and e-mailed directly from Certain Events.

Per Diems

A per diem amount (daily living allowance) was paid to all international staff.

A special utility was implemented so that Certain Events could calculate the correct amount for each person based on the number of days they were actually in Athens (remembering that staff were coming in and out of the country on a weekly basis for 2 years), as well as what “level” or “grade” of staff they were.

Accreditation

Certain Events was used to track over 120 fi elds of information relating to the accreditation process for each person. A neat interface was then written so that Certain Events could produce the accreditation forms for submission to ATHOC in the precise format required by the Olympic Games.

Budgets

One of Jack Morton´s biggest requirements was the production of a rolling budget based on hotel accommodations, per diem amounts, apartment costs and travel expenses.

A complex utility was written that would compile all of the current fi nancial data and produce a dynamic budget report in Excel, formatted to fit Jack Morton´s requirements, and be updated as often as required.

Onsite Certain Events was also given the enormous task of calculating meals and drinks for staff and performers during rehearsals and the ceremonies themselves based on a complex schedule and working itinerary.

Other issues

Allowances: Per Diems (allowances) were intrinsically linked to accommodation nights and staff grades. Thus, the per diem calculation had to use a combination of the accommodation and functions modules.

The challenge was to create a utility that could draw data from both these modules and combine it in an automated way, without altering the actual functioning of these modules and thus the accuracy of the accommodation reports. We achieved this with a combination of intelligent database coding and a smart, easy to use utility written by Certain Software programmers.

Reporting: ATHOC was extremely strict about the style and format of their reports and the information contained in them. One of Certain Software´s big challenges was to create custom travel reports that did dynamic things like highlighting amendments in one color and a travelers previous booking in another color, whilst still retaining their ease of use.

The Certain Events team rose to this challenge by creating a set of custom reports that were identical to the ones that ATHOC required, and could be produced with minimal or no filtering - essentially “one-click” reports.

Certain Events' booking status system was formatted to become self-updating and thereby reduce the work of the travel liaison to a small number of simple processes.

Greek Characters: Certain Events had to be able to cope with Greek characters for accreditation purposes.

Experience: Many of Jack Morton´s staff had never used the Certain Events database before and were suddenly required to perform complex and advanced functions within the database. Using a combination of intensive training, well written “staff help guides”, and a simplification/compartmentalization of processes, the eventsPro team was able to overcome this challenge.

Logistics budget: One of the biggest challenges for Jack Morton was their rolling logistics budget. It was a complex and ever changing animal that sometimes took the logistics manager days to complete. Using an advanced budget utility/report written by the eventsPro team, the task of producing a budget update was reduced to two or three clicks of a mouse.

Results

When Chris Buckley of Certain Software (formerly Amlink Technologies at the time of the 2004 Athens Olympic Games) first encountered the project and went to Athens to help implement the system, design the database, and train the Jack Morton staff, it was just after Jack Morton had signed on the dotted line for the software. Jack Morton freely admits that they should have implemented eventsPro a year before they actually did.

According to Chris Buckley, “When we finally got started, timelines were extremely short, there was a massive catch-up of data that had to be entered, stress levels of staff were extremely high due to the proximity of the Games, and there was a general feeling of panic, anxiety and skepticism surrounding the database.”

Jack Morton knew they did not have time to source another system if eventsPro failed and they also knew that they could barely afford the time investment necessary for training and data conversion.

“A measure of success with this project was the total turnaround in the attitude of the client to eventsPro. After two separate sets of training/consulting courses, we sat down together in April 2004 to review. In the short space of a few weeks we had fully trained staff confi dent in what they were doing and in the output that eventsPro was producing. It quickly became a fully integrated system that was producing accurate results and one very happy client,” remarks Chris Buckley.

Probably the two biggest technical difficulties encountered were the per diem calculation utility and the budget utility because they were too complex and required specialist programming from the Certain Events team, and they went through a number of drafts before the utility did everything it was supposed to do and in the correct format. Once these challenges were successfully resolved by the Certain Events team, the database and its infrastructure ran smoothly and without a hitch throughout the entire Olympic period.