Tasracing

Tasracing is a state-owned company that provides strategic direction and funding to the racing industry in Tasmania across its three codes—thoroughbred, harness, and greyhound racing.

The company develops Tasmanian racing to ensure its commercial viability, including sharing data on racing form, payment of stakes, funding clubs, managing venues and tracks, and promoting race days and carnivals.
Tasracing’s suite of outdated business systems was making it hard for the company to trust and use its data, according to Finance Manager Andrew Clark.

“We had poor reporting, mostly based on spreadsheets. A lot of our systems were quite ineffective, which posed the risk that we’d have incorrect information flowing through,” Clark said.

“Tasracing has widely dispersed assets across the state. Managing those assets is important to us and it was becoming difficult to do so through the old system and an asset register in spreadsheets—so we needed to address that.”

The company’s legacy financial management software did not support timely reporting or budget management.
“We were relying on information that was almost a couple of weeks old by the time we could get reports out to our managers to review,” Clark said.

He said streamlining operational systems was key to being data-driven and creating a competitive advantage for Tasmania’s racing products in the global market.

“We wanted to consolidate everything into one ERP solution at the end of the day. Getting all of our data in one place, for the whole business to use, is really important.”

Replacing ageing systems with TechnologyOne’s integrated and easy-to-use ERP solution has allowed Tasracing to make significant efficiency and productivity gains.

“We’re able to access all of our information from the one platform. Whether it’s assets, contracts, accounts payable or accounts receivable—it’s all in the same place. That's made a huge difference for us, especially coming from a paper-based background,” Clark said.

“Asset management has hugely improved because we have reliable information.”

TechnologyOne’s SaaS platform is used by more than 80 employees across Tasracing’s eight core business areas, which includes back-office teams and people in the field statewide.

Simplified manual tasks and real-time reporting has resulted in time savings, better cost management, and clear-headed business decisions.

“One of the main improvements has been to our purchasing side of things. Before, you’d have to put a piece of paper in a tray for it to be physically signed, so workflow approvals are a lot stronger and more streamlined now,” Clark said.

“Just the fact that employees can self-serve has been a real benefit, particularly for our managers who are managing their own budgets.

“They're able to check where they're at, practically live now, whereas in the past we've had some issues with cost blow outs because their budget information wasn’t quite up-to-date or weeks behind.

“We estimate our senior managers are saving at least two hours a week, across the eight teams—a pretty significant saving of time. That allows us to direct our time into improving the racing industry rather than doing administrative tasks.”

Mobile processes have been readily embraced across Tasracing.

“Our workforce is based all over the state, and they're all working different hours—TechnologyOne’s SaaS solution allows us to respond to issues as we need to.

“You can access and approve things on your phone or tablet, you don't have to be in the office at your computer. It’s so much more flexible.

“Supply Chain Management is used by a range of different staff, from office staff to guys that work out on the track, and looking after the grounds. It seems to be pretty intuitive for them, so we've been really happy with that.”

“Our partnership with AWS enables us to deliver Tasracing with improved workforce connectivity, and a superior level of security to an on-premise environment," said Daniel Sultana, Director of TechnologyOne’s SaaS Platform.

Clark said the company’s finance function has become more productive and proactive.

“Compared to our clunky old system that we had, it's so much better and is leading us away from spreadsheets and a reactive approach.

“We’ve actually had time to spend on forecasting and other important things as key business processes and regular month-end tasks can be automated.

“It’s sharpened up our reporting, which has made making some decisions so much quicker and easier. We’ve got far more reliable information now and we can customise our reports easily to make a decision based on where we need to be.”

Moving to remote working at the height of the coronavirus pandemic was easy for Tasracing. In fact, TechnologyOne’s SaaS platform enabled the company to ramp up industry support as racing in Tasmania was shut down for 10 weeks due to COVID-19.

“System-wise there was really no difference for us: we were able to continue on business as usual.

“During that time, we made an extra 22,000 payments on top of what we ordinarily would do, as industry support, to keep the horses and dogs in work and healthy and ready to resume racing as soon as possible. Without TechnologyOne there's just no way we could've done that previously,” Clark said.

Tasracing implemented its new SaaS ERP solution gradually, working closely with TechnologyOne to determine an approach that addressed the company’s needs and timelines.

“We had a dedicated project team in-house and then the TechnologyOne team spent a lot of time on-site and took a hands-on role in helping us get things up and running,” Clark said.

“We did the vast majority of the product testing ourselves, especially the user testing.”

Partnering with TechnologyOne to purchase, implement and support its solution helped Tasracing to seamlessly transition.

“After go-live we didn't have many teething problems at all really, so I think that’s good considering that it was a big change for us.

“We thought some things would fall over as we started to use the system for real—things that hadn’t been considered during testing—but there were no showstopper moments.”

Tasracing also appreciates the fact that, because its SaaS platform is managed by TechnologyOne, it receives upgrades consistently and reliably.

“With our previous systems, we didn't have any upgrades for a long time, so it got to the point where it was way out of date. That’s one of the main reasons we moved to the cloud.”

Clark’s advice for companies planning a similar switch to an enterprise SaaS solution was to review processes first and apply technology in ways that empower humans.

“You need to critically have a look at your current processes and think about how you could improve them and what solutions are out there,” he said.

“Try to creatively consider how you can solve mundane time-consuming processes, to free up your team’s time for more important business problems that you might have. We've found so far that TechnologyOne has helped us do that.”