Hi, I'm Dan and I'm a Solution Architect with PowerObjects. Today we're here to talk about the American Birkebeiner Ski Foundation. The American Birkebeiner Ski Foundation is actually a nonprofit organization that's dedicated to hosting and running one of the largest cross country ski events in the nation. This year, they have about 13,500 racers. That number goes up every single year.

Birke needed a solution to effectively streamline and automate their Wave Placement process for ski racers during registration.

Wave Placement is important to Birke from a practical perspective, because for a race of this size and magnitude, you really need some level of segmentation for when people are starting the race. But beyond that, it's also important to the racers. Racers take their Wave assignment as kind of a badge of honor and because their wave assignment is based upon their previous race results with Birke, racers are really proud to be in more elite Waves.

Prior to working with CRM for Dynamics 365, Birke would actually do Wave Placement using very manual processes, using paper spreadsheets and employee word of mouth.

PowerObjects was able to work with Birke to take their Wave Placement algorithm and logic, and embed that in a CRM plug-in.

So first, a participant will actually register for a race in a Web Portal front-end. That registration information is communicated to CRM automatically and instantly. So, once a participant registers for a Birkie race event, CRM actually determines if they've race with Birkie in other events, or if they are a new registrant. If they've raced in past events with Birke, then when it comes time for Wave Placement, our CRM plug-in and algorithm will actually take the past three years' race result history for that racer and use that to place the racer in a given Wave, per the algorithm definition.

Because all Wave Placement information is actually stored within a few Custom Entities within CRM, Birke can actually run reports, real-time, to pull full lists of participants in given Waves for a given race event, whenever they need to. So, at the end of the registration process, the actual Wave Placement and registration confirmation our sent back to the racer using a PowerObjects Add-On called, PowerMailChimp.

So, prior to automating Wave Placement within CRM, Birke would spend countless hours doing Wave Placement. Now, all they have to do is click a button.

For more information on the work we've done with the American Birkebeiner Ski Foundation, check out their case study and testimonial video. Additionally, for more information on how PowerPacks and Power Success can help automate and build your organization, contact us.

Thanks for watching this Solution Spotlight.