The England and Wales Cricket Board is the single national governing body for all cricket in England and Wales and is headquartered at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London. The ICC is the global governing body for cricket. Representing 105 members, the ICC governs and administrates the game and is also responsible for the staging of all ICC Events
Organiser’s requirement
In April 2016, EAS Group received an RFP from The England Wales Cricket Board (ECB) to provide an accreditation platform for all the ECB Matches held in England and Wales as well the International Cricket Council (ICC) Tournaments being played in England and Wales including the ICC Champions Trophy, the Women’s World Cup in 2017 and the Men’s World Cup in 2019.
Prior to implementing Accredit, the ECB ran accreditation primarily by having to load spreadsheets received from various organisations into a basic accreditation system for each match that was played. There was no option for the collected data to be transferred from one match to another, essentially meaning that the accreditation process had to take place for each match and all data reloaded into the system against the next match.
Outcome
In October of 2016, EAS Group was awarded a 10-year contract and began the rollout of the newest iteration of Accredit to handle all accreditation for the matches and tournaments including contractors, staff, volunteers and Media.
Accredit implemented a system which allowed for contractors, staff and media to register for both the ECB season and ICC tournaments at the same time if applicable and for the data within the system to be shared across the seasons and tournaments to avoid duplication and the need to reimport information or for the applicant having to make multiple applications for accreditation.
After implementing Accredit, the ECB and The ICC could get data into the system through individual registrations, grouped accounts, data uploads, and from previous events, by using the group account functionality of Accredit the onus for collecting information and registering contractors, staff, volunteers and media was put on the internal and external stakeholders, leaving the organising team to spend their time accrediting the records.
In addition, Accredit allowed the ECB and the ICC to create a variety of different passes to allow for various access levels and privileges for both seasonal and day to day passes that were unique for each day, venue, and tournament.
For the Champions Trophy and the Women’s World Cup, The ICC engaged the Greater Manchester Police Force (GMPF) to run background checks on everyone going through the accreditation process. EAS Group integrated directly with the GMPF’s database system through web services and transferred encrypted data from Accredit to GMPF’s database and back again once the 2nd level of vetting had taken place, facilitating a second level of high security vetting and accreditation.
Key points
The ECB and ICC for the matches utilised Accredits Mobile Access Control solution (AMAC) which connects directly with the Accredit system and allows for real-time scanning, approvals, cancellations and rejections on the spot.
AMAC provided a high level of control pulling relevant data including name, organisation, accreditation status, and photograph from the Accredit Platform to check for pass validity, zones/access level permissions, date and time restrictions, as well as cross checking photos, names and pass types in real-time.
The AMAC solution worked on mobile connected devices which were downloaded to iPad and iPod utilising the camera functionality to scan the barcode, for extremely high or low lighting AMAC was linked Bluetooth laser scanner.
Accredit revolutionised the way in which the Media could register and attend the events. We built on our experience of previous Media Portals and created automated selection processes that determined the events which various media could view and attend dependent on their media credentials, locations of matches and type of match.
Accredit has been used this year alone at nine different international cricket venues in England and Wales including: Lords Cricket Ground, The Oval, Edgbaston, Cardiff Wales Stadium, Ageas Bowl, Trent Bridge, Headingley, Old Trafford, and County Ground in over 70 international matches that have been viewed by over 600 million people in person and on television.
