What do you need to know?

Use the search box below to type keywords and get instant results ...

Read This First – Introduction to Director

06 Apr, 2020 About Director

The Director Athlete Management System allows mass participation organisations to accept, modify and consume event registrations to deliver critical aspects of their events. The system is part shopping cart, part entry list, part timing system … in fact it is all of these things rolled into one!

Director AMS is comprised of three primary modules; Registrations, Stores and Results/Timing. These are represented on the main menu of the Admin system.

Registrations

At its core, Director AMS is an Online Registration system. That is, its primary function is to allow participants to sign up for a particular event, make payment of their entry fee and be issued with a receipt and – in most cases – a bib number.

The key entities of the Registrations module are described below.

  • An EVENT is a specific instance of a mass participation event on a specific date (in rare cases the event may span more than one day). Events are grouped together and inherit some details from their parent PROPERTY. So an example of a Property might be “Big City Marathon” and examples of events would be the “2020 Big City Marathon”, “2019 Big City Marathon” etc.
  • Each event will contain at least one RACE. A Race is normally defined in terms of how people might compete together for overall placings. So obviously, people taking part in your 10K race distance would not be competing against those doing the Marathon. Therefore, they would be separated into races which gives meaning to finish times and placings. Some events, however, may not be timed or awards any placings – they are purely for participation – so it’s up to the event organiser if they want to create more than one race. However, at least one race must be created for each event as participants signs up for a race, not an event.
  • A REGISTRATION is the core element of Director AMS. Registrations are participants (generally individuals, but they could be relay team members sharing a single registration) in a particular race. A registration may have a BIB NUMBER associated with it and that bib number must be unique within the event. Bib numbers can be automatically allocated by Director when the registration is created, or they can be manually assigned by the organiser.

Stores

If it has to do with money, then it is handled in the Stores module of the system. Stores are used to sell merchandise items like caps, tshirts, etc but they are also used to sell event registrations. Everything that has a monetary aspect to it is controlled within the Stores module, so that means that not only will you set the prices for merchandise items here, you will also set the entry fees for your events here.

The key entities of the Stores module are described below.

  • All of the financial transactions that take place in Director are linked to a single STORE. In many cases, you may end up with one store for each event. For example, it makes sense to have a “2020 Big City Marathon” store as the primary place to sell registrations for the “2020 Big City Marathon” event. However, you need to be limited to this. Stores can sell registrations for more than one event at a time and a good example of this might be a Series Pass type registration. However, we do not recommend using a single store to sell normal individual registrations for more than one event. You can also have stores which are not directly linked to event registrations at all. These are called Merchandise stores and are typically used to make sales of merchandise or other items which need not be linked to a specific event registration.
  • All transactions made through your stores are performed within the context of a CART. The Cart is mainly comprised of CART ITEMS – a list of items that are being purchased – and CART PAYMENTS – a list of financial transactions (which can be payments or refunds) that have been made for that cart. The vast majority of carts will comprise one or more cart items plus a single cart payment. The sum of the value of the cart items will normally be equal to the sum of the payment (and refunds).
  • PRODUCTS and SKUS are used to describe the items you wish to make available for purchase. These can be merchandise items like t-shirts and caps, but they are also used to define your event entry fees. In most cases, each product will only appear in a single store, however Director includes the flexibility to display and sell products in more than one store. This allows you to make common items available for sale in more than one place, but have those sales properly aggregated. This means you could have a generic t-shirt available for sale in multiple stores, but only define it in one place and – crucially – have Director monitor stock levels and mark the item as sold out using the aggregated data from both stores.
  • VOUCHERS (sometimes called Discount Codes) are used to provide particular entrants with discounted (or free) pricing based on inputting a particular voucher code at checkout. Vouchers can be defined as a “multi-use” – where the voucher code may be used a specified or unlimited number of times – or “single-use” – where Director can be used to generate any number of unique codes ideal for a Grab One type promotion.

Results & Timing

The results and timing module is not for everyone. A common model among mass participation event organisers is to hand over the timing and scoring of their events to an external timing supplier. Generally, these third parties will have their own scoring database and will take a copy of your entrant database at a particular time prior to the event. This will then become the “master” registration database for your event because it must be kept up to date with race day and post-race changes – otherwise the results would be wrong.

Director strongly recommends organisers take full control of their registration database – the lifeblood of their business – by driving their race results and all race day changes through Director AMS. This rewards you with a “single version of the truth” – an accurate and complete picture of your event.

The key entities of the Results module are described below.

  • The RESULT entity holds all race time and placing information and is the primary entity used to drive the display of results. The result is summarised from the SPLIT data. A split is the recorded time for a specific registrations at a specific TIMING POINT. All races must include a FINISH timing point and many events – especially large running events – also include a START timing point. Larger events may also have one or more intermediate split timing points.
  • Although they are defined in the registrations module, DIVISIONS are primarily used as an alternative method to rank race results. Typically, they allow results to be ranked by a combination of gender and age.
  • SERIES are used to tabulate results across a number of events to present a “league” or “ladder” type presentation to allow participants to compete across multiple events. Series results rely upon the unique identification of participants by First Name, Last Name and Date of Birth to link across events. Therefore, if Date of Birth is not captured for an event then it cannot be used to generate series results.

The Timing module within Director is a fully-featured, tried-and-tested, real-time event timing system. It is currently configured for real-time timing using the MyLaps bib tag system, however other implementations may also be available. Even without real-time race timing, results can be calculated using uploaded files containing “reads” or “passings” from timing systems.

Please enquire with Director AMS for further details and pricing information on the Timing module.