Ligue Nationale de Rugby (LNR)
Founded in 1998, the LNR organizes, controls, develops, manages, and promotes professional rugby in France and provides assistance and advice to clubs.
LNR holds itself to the highest standards: providing the best product, the highest quality of service, and high-quality entertainment to all of its stakeholders and rugby fans worldwide.
Transforming the Rugby Match Experience with an Agile 360º Platform Application
Business Problem
LNR needed to modernize and simplify its IT system and make it more robust. It lacked an intuitive user experience and had high supervision costs — all of which LNR aimed to improve.
The overall goal: provide LNR’s many stakeholders with a high quality of service through a robust cloud solution, strong data security and certification, and tools a small-sized organization could easily control.
Appian Solution
LNR, Appian, and Solypse worked together to develop ELLIS, named after William Webb Ellis. Ellis invented rugby during a football game in 1823 when— according to legend—he picked up the ball and ran with it.
For LNR, ELLIS manages the many aspects of professional French rugby competition: calendars, teams, game equipment, contacts, sanctions, tasks, rankings, statistics, task monitoring, and re-notification.
For rugby clubs, ELLIS offers contact management, team composition information, match signing, and data consultation.
ELLIS enables match officials to check team composition, fill in game-day checkpoints, enter game facts, and supervise score signing/validation
ELLIS manages:
- 450 matches per year, during which 40 game facts per game add up to 18,000 game facts per year. Each fact is synced with third-party integration.
- 60 competition stages per year, with rankings.
- 4000+ daily contact synchronizations.
As ELLIS is a compliance, not a business, application, the main measure of ROI is not financial but quality of service for the user, as well as robustness, high availability, agility, and reliability.
To date, ELLIS’s optimized and simplified layouts have reduced work complexity. For example, the LNR legal department now spends less than 20 minutes on Mondays checking sin-bin* status, observation reports, and the match officials checklist. With the old system, this task took two hours to complete. ELLIS has saved 24% of time per week in this task alone.
*sin bin: An area where players are temporarily confined while suspended from play following an infringement of the rules of the game.
Appian’s low-code application platform was chosen due to its capacity to respond to our specific challenges around game days. With the great help of our Appian partner Solypse, we built an agile 360º platform application, in a reduced time period, that helps us run and maintain our core business of organizing rugby matches. Olivier Hommey, Software Development Manager, LNR.
