PA Consulting Group Provides Mobile Solutions for British Design & Art Direction in Annual Awards
March 21, 1996 — British Design & Art Direction (D&AD), is a professional association and charity working on behalf of the advertising and design communities. D&AD's activities include the largest and most internationally respected awards scheme in the industry. Judges are leading practitioners of design and advertising.
The judging of such competitions has traditionally been a paper and pen process with a computer system only being used to print out 'judging sheets' from a database.
For 1996, there were over 15,000 entries, to be assessed by 130 judges over a period of six weeks. PA were commissioned at short notice to design and develop a voting system based on Newton PDAs. Before the start of each judging session, the entries were downloaded from the main database into a set of Apple MessagePads provided by Apple Computer UK. Each of the judges was given a MessagePad to record his or her vote on each of the entries. At the end of the session, the votes were uploaded and the results printed out.
The Newton-based solution enabled D&AD to cope with their largest ever number of entries on a tight schedule, and to reduce the number of errors in recording the votes.
Graham Fink, President of the D&AD is delighted with the results: "We're used to judging on paper at D&AD. In fact, only five out of 120 judges had ever held a Newton before, after 10 minutes everyone fell in love. With over 15,000 pieces of work to judge and votes to count, I'd say it speeded up the process by around 90%."
Notes to Editors PA Consulting Group is one of the world's leading management and technology consultancies. IT consultancy, for which PA has a global reputation, is managed through PA's Computers and Telecommunications Group and comprises a substantial proportion of PA's business. Independent market research by Business Intelligence into clients' assessments of their IT consultancies placed PA as the top consultancy for IT in the UK, with a client satisfaction rating of 4.15 out of a maximum of 5. In 1995, PA were also voted as the top IT consultancy in Computing's annual 'Awards for Excellence'. PA has a long track record of working with clients to produce market beating solutions using IT.
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