Executive Summary
Digitization can help all business sectors, even some of the oldest traditionally manual business models. When Hascombe and Valiant, a Stud Farm operator based out of London, UK approached us to help with going digital; we at Nablasol were excited to get on board and help them through their digital journey.
The Challenges
The activities carried out by Stud Farm include managing the racehorses by taking care of their health and diet in tandem with the racing event conducted at regular intervals. Also, the farms also breed different horses based on their performance and are involved in trading these horses too.
The growth in the number of horses brought new challenges for them:
- Maintaining the information on the increasing number of horses based on their diet, medication as and when needed.
- Keeping records of the lineage of the horses and keep a track of the horses from particular family members. This activity is important from the trading point of view as genetically stronger horses are in more demand.
- Ensuring their staff has updated information about all races and events so that they can prepare the relevant horses for those.
All this information was being maintained on document files and PDFs that were printed as and when required.
Our Solution
Looking at the ever-growing business, we studied all the aspects of the business ecosystem and how they are interconnected. We knew that the first problem we would need to solve is to digitize their records and structure the data for digital applications. This was accomplished by building a script to read their PDF and converting it into structured data.
Next, we built a mobility solution along with a web interface to completely integrate the stud management ecosystem. The web interface was used by the stud’s admin staff to update and upload information about the horses, which was then accessible by the feeders, maintainers, breeders, and traders on the mobile and tablet apps.
Here are some of the characteristics of the solution:
- The mobile app was built for both iOS and Android, with a separate version for tablets to cater to a variety of different users.
- The app contains individual images & in-depth profiles for all of the Stud’s Foals, Yearling, and Broodmares, including comprehensive data for all Horses in training and pre-training.
- The data for the horses included their family lineage and people could browse through all horses in a lineage and see how that affected their performance in different races.
- Diary Notifications for key events and races were incorporated to assist in the Stud’s day-to-day operations and keep users informed.
- The web interface was built to easily add and update the info on these horses, link them as per their lineage, and upload images that could be resized and compressed for performance.
This app when integrated with the digital interface gave a live status to the administrator handling the stud farm. This interface also helped manage the bidding during the race events and trading activity. The integration of the Hascombe App with the interface made it convenient for the owner to check the live status of the business activity. The Mobility solution i.e. Hascombe App helped the on-ground workforce identify the horses which need to be groomed for the upcoming races. It also helped them keep track of events related to stud foal trading and other activities
Results
- Better tracking of the Stud’s Foals, Yearlings, and Broodmares assisted with their images, providing a live status for the management of the Stud Farm.
- Ease of browsing the lineage of the horses, which tremendously improved the ease of analysis.
- Regular updates for the on-ground workforce identify the horses which need to be groomed for the upcoming races and other events.
