I suffered through handling registration for our club Concours on paper last year. The pre-registration process was OK, but handling the majority of entrants who register at the event was a big hassle. There was a lot of paper to fill out and a long line of people to take care of.

I convinced myself there had to be a better way - so I am in the process of putting together an Access database application that will handle the process and print out the various reports needed on the spot.

The application will handle general club membership information and will be the basis for producing our club Directory of Members as well as the Concours details.

If anyone else has taken this approach, or is thinking about it, I would be very interested in comparing notes. If it works out well at our November Concours, I would be happy to make the application available for general club use.

Dave

Submitted by wljenkins@usa.net on Wed, 08/20/2003 - 17:28

Hi Pascal,

Thanks for the information, that will be a big help for us next year. Gee, I'm kind of bummed out now that I committed the 17 character VIN# for my '86 XJ6 to memory!!

For our concours next year, I'll be sure to get an updated version of Carl's software which will incorporate the latest changes to the score sheets (which no longer require VIN# and license plate #).

Thanks again,
Bill

Submitted by wljenkins@usa.net on Wed, 08/20/2003 - 17:24

Hi Pascal,

Thanks for the information, that will be a big help for us next year. Gee, I'm kind of bummed out now that I committed the 13 charachter VIN for my '86 XJ6 to memory!!

For our concours next year, I'll be sure to get an updated version of Carl's software which will incorporate the latest changes to the scoresheets.

Thanks again,
Bill

Submitted by pascal@jcna.com on Wed, 08/20/2003 - 16:39

Bill

there is no need to gather and report VINs or license nrs... that was a short lived experience a couple of years ago and it yields no benefits. while VINs are easy for older cars, they're nightmare for the late models...

the new JCNA online scoring system use JCNA nr instead of the VIN which is much easier to manage!

Maybe Carl had included them when he started developing the app but their is no need for them and it should work if you leave them blank.

Pascal

Submitted by wljenkins@usa.net on Wed, 08/20/2003 - 16:25

Hi Dave,

A CD was made available to our club through JCNA that is exactly what Pascal referred to in his post.

I loaded the software from it on my laptop and we used it for the Jaguar Club of Southern New England concours this year and I have to say it worked pretty well. The only complaint I had about it was when you enter the information for a specific car, there was a dropdown menu for "car color" and a few people had cars that were colors that were not options. Otherwise I would highly recommend that you use this software instead of reinventing the wheel so-to-speak.

I brought a laser printer with me to the coucours and a nice feature about this software is that it PRINTS a score sheet for each registrant, pretty neat, huh? This way, you don't have to decipher an entrant’s handwriting. We went the extra step and had laser printed dash placards (using the boiler plate Word document dash placards that I downloaded from the JCNA website). This made for an extremely professional looking field of cars. It was a little hectic entering the information from people who showed up on concours day into the program and printing their dash placards but we managed to pull it off with out too much trouble.

One thing we forgot to do when we had people pre-register was to ask them for their VIN# and their license plate number as these are required fields when using Carl’s software as well as required information on the score sheets anyway. Well, live and learn. Next year we will add these lines to our pre-registration forms.

As the score sheets came back to the scorers room on concours day, a person would tally the sheets and hand them to the person with the laptop and once the score from the last car was entered, the results were automatically totaled, by class and with one click of a mouse, I handed the report to the chief judge so he could announce the winners.

I did have a problem with one of the “report” functions but I contacted Carl and I’m fairly certain he has fixed this very minor problem. While I did not upload the results to the website (I entered the concours results by hand using the present system on the JCNA website) I think that as Pascal mentioned, the software has provisions for providing a report that can be uploaded directly thus saving the concours chairman even more time.

I would strongly urge you to use Carl’s software and see how you make out. I can guarantee you’ll be very happy with the results and if you come across any problems, you can forward questions/concerns & comments to Carl who can then make improvements. They way I figure it, the more clubs that use this software now, the better it will be by the time other clubs get up to speed and start using it.

Bill Jenkins
“Official concours scoring guy”
Jaguar Club of Southern New England

Submitted by pascal@jcna.com on Wed, 08/20/2003 - 14:41

Check with Carl Motayaw of the cent Ohio club. email mottayawatmidohio.net

he's developed a very nice Java app that handles concours from pre registration all the way to reporting, including exporeting a file you can email me for direct upload.

for any show with 40/50 cars and up, it's worth it.

Pascal Gademer
South Florida Jaguar Club