6 minutes read

Cricket stadium planning: the hat-trick of benefits OnePlan delivers

Cricket event plan in OnePlan

Cricket stadiums can be complex venues to plan events in. There’s typically a high volume of matches throughout the season, involving multiple teams of people working at the venue, not to mention partners, suppliers and other stakeholders. Everyone needs to know the plan to make every match safe and successful. 

But the tools used have till now created a planning headache. Endless documents, spreadsheets, presentations with out-dated screenshots of maps, CAD and floor plan files that are difficult to update… it’s not a solution for the modern cricket venue.

Image of two halves showing multiple tools to OnePlan

OnePlan solves this challenge for stadium planning. It’s real-time, collaborative software that you simply login to via the website, and makes your teams’ jobs easier. It delivers a hat-trick of benefits that we’ll explore here: substantial time saving, easy collaboration with partners, and a significant risk reduction.

Making Stadium Planning Way Easier

OnePlan is a visual planning platform that has specialist cricket objects, houses your data, and reduces the need for countless planning files. It’s easy for anyone to use and gives venues three big benefits:

1. Save thousands of hours’ planning time

The demands on event planning at cricket venues is increasing, with a greater range of needs than ever before. Test matches, 4 and 5 day matches, one-day matches, Twenty20, youth games, men’s cricket, women’s cricket, wheelchair cricket, training camps. The list goes on. And that’s not even to mention non-match day such as corporate events. 

OnePlan will save you time for every event. It’s a visual version of your venue that anyone in your teams can access via a website with their secure login. You can access past plans, and duplicate events to easily amend for new plans. Our clients have told us the huge number of hours and days they’ve saved by switching to OnePlan. This includes the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games who have realised a massive 80% time saving thanks to our software.

Image of Cricket event plan, with cricket pack objects

That’s why the team at Adelaide Oval in Australia have made the switch to OnePlan. By uploading their existing CAD and floor plan files into OnePlan, anyone in their team can now plan directly in the easy-to-use live system. This reduces the need for multiple tools, documents and contractors that was previously the only way to plan. 

In the last year, our users uploaded over 1,000 CAD and floor plan files into OnePlan, simplifying their venue planning process. This new, repurposed use of architectural files is a game-changer for them, with anyone in their team now able to access them 24/7 rather than relying on expensive external specialists to make minor updates.

Venue CAD file in OnePlan

This delivers both a money and time saving benefit. Lee Zeidman, President of Crypto.com Arena, home of the LA Lakers, LA Sparks and other sports teams, says: “Using OnePlan takes CAD updates out of the mix because we’re now able to make updates ahead of time. We’re able to rapidly customize the venue for every event we host.”

2. Real-time collaboration for ‘living’ plans

The second big benefit of OnePlan for cricket venues is its live, real-time nature. Multiple users can be logged in at the same time working on the same plan, and there are numerous ways to share plans with stakeholders. 

Suppliers, brand partners, local authorities, vendors, security services – any stakeholder – can be given access as a sub-user to your plans and with whatever access rights you want, be it Edit or View-only.

This is a positive break from the past. Where previously organizers of cricket events would have had to use email or messaging tools to transfer large files, and then incorporate amends and feedback, now this can all be done centrally in one place. It means plans are always up-to-date and can be reviewed during the event itself.  

Britain’s biggest cycling race, the Tour of Britain, gets this benefit. Its Finish Director, Rob Kennison, says: “With OnePlan, plans are ready six months in advance and they’re a ‘living thing’ until the day of the race instead of weeks’ before.”

Tour of Britain Savings GIF

3. Reduces Risk with one single source of truth

Thirdly, OnePlan reduces your risk when planning cricket matches and other events at your sport venue. It provides one single source of truth that all stakeholders can unite around to optimize your plan. 

This includes the planning of all areas outside your venue, including traffic management and crowd management. Areas can be drawn, with OnePlan’s intelligent calculators instantly showing area sizes and crowd capacities. With clear labelling, and the use of our road signs and other wayfinding icons, it means your venue can be set to create a safe, enjoyable experience for cricket fans going to and from the stadium.

Cricket event plan

What’s more, OnePlan also has an in-built Cricket Pack with over 100 specialist objects that can be placed on your plan. This includes placing the workforce – be they stewards, groundspeople, officials, Medical and anti-doping managers, and many more – plus TV broadcast positions, Sports presentation objects and more. We’ve created it with our cricket clients to have everything you need when planning your cricket stadium.

The Cricket event pack has over 180+ objects specific to planning Cricket matches, including:

Security Icon

Security Camera

Field of Play Access Icon

Field of Play Access

Camera icon

TV Camera

Replay Icon

Replay Screen

Floodlight Icon

Floodlight

Speaker Icon

Speaker

Ice Machine Icon

Ice Machine

Our sports venue clients are on the front foot in other ways thanks to OnePlan. One of these is through the integration of what3words location tags, that are automatically shown for everything you place in your plan. For venues that use that software (for example, in consumer comms), it makes the plan joined-up across multiple technology providers. In a similar way, supplier products can be named and shown within OnePlan, for the most well-rounded planning possible.

"The overarching benefit to using OnePlan for planning events is the live planning information that everyone has access to. As well as the w3w locations for every bit of kit, it just means that everybody's singing from the same hymn sheet.

Silverstone

Jacalyn Morgan

Senior Events Manager, Silverstone

Silverstone, home of the Formula 1 British Grand Prix, provides a great example of this risk reduction. Through its extensive use of OnePlan for their 50+ events all year round, the venue achieves a 13x return on the cost of their OnePlan subscription, and has cut planning time for their team and contractors by 15%.

Watch the Silverstone case study video >

Interactive visualisations: future-proofing your stadium planning

The planning revolution OnePlan provides doesn’t stop there. There are two ends of OnePlan’s wicket, with the second being Venue Twin, our multi-award winning digital twin view. This provides visualisations of any part of your venue, so you can do customer walkthroughs, scenario planning, TV broadcast planning and so much more in an interactive, virtual version of your cricket stadium. 

Venue Twin is a powerful operational and commercial tool. Our customers use it for sales and marketing, be it for commercial deals at ExCeL London, or in promotional videos such as this by the LA Clippers for the 75th All-Star Game.

Easy to start and easy to use with instant benefits

OnePlan is being used by some of the world’s biggest cricket stadiums in England, Australia and beyond. The hat-trick of benefits – saving time, real-time collaboration, and risk reduction – is providing a value far beyond the low subscription cost for these venues. 

To get your team started at a fast pace, we can provide onboarding and training sessions to suit your requirements. And our OnePlan Academy provides professional online training, over three courses, resulting in qualification certificates for your team members in their expertise for using OnePlan. 

So, how’s that? A hat-trick of benefits for your cricket stadium planning delivering you instant benefits. Want to see it in action? Simply click here to book a demo and meet our team.

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