This project is a joint collaboration between the Office of Community Use of Public Facilities (CUPF), Montgomery County Recreation Department (MCRD) and the Montgomery Parks (Parks) division of the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission (M-NCPPC) to replace their shared, on-line booking and sales software application to improve efficiency and the customer experience. Software functions will facilitate registration for activities and programs, membership sales and management, point of sale (admission and product sales), league scheduling and management, reserving facilities and athletic fields, scholarships, and customer payment processing. Built-in tools to drive participation and customer engagement will include catalog export and targeted emails. Back-end business operations will include enhanced reporting capabilities, more efficient set-up of large bookings, and improved financial operations. Prior efforts to work with the initial vendor to provide these needed enhancements were unsuccessful. With support from the Department of Technology and Enterprise Business Solutions, CUPF, MCRD, and M-NCPPC staff developed a detailed analysis of the deficiencies of the current system, conducted an evaluation of over 20 different software products providing these services, and obtained feedback from other jurisdictions using these products. As a result of this work and their five years of partnering in these endeavors, the agencies have a clear sense of the features needed and available to replace the current system.

Vendor selection was finalized in FY21 and implementation began in FY22 based on a staggered schedule to coincide with and accommodate seasonal scheduling managed by all three agencies.

In 2010, the County Council first mandated that CUPF, MCRD, and M-NCPPC use a joint registration system to create a more streamlined and user-friendly system that enables customers to have a shared online portal for facility booking, athletic field permitting, activity/program registration, and membership sales. MCRD began using Class as a business software in 1994 with CUPF and M-NCPPC following suit in the next few years. Prior to the legislative mandate, the three agencies had been using different aspects of Class software to perform agency specific registration. When it was announced that the Class system was no longer going to be supported by the Contractor at the end of the Class contract term, the three agencies opted to move to the ACTIVE Network (ACTIVE Net) software since it was owned by the same parent company as Class software and it was portrayed as offering Class software-like capabilities with other enhancements including new, on-line capabilities. Unfortunately, the ACTIVE Net software failed to meet expectations, and efforts to work with the vendor on enhancements were not successful. The importance of having a good booking software and the complexities of meeting the needs of the three agencies cannot be overstated. In total, MCRD and Parks offer nearly 6,000 activities and memberships annually. CUPF manages coordination of approximately 17,000 school facilities, athletic fields, and county building facilities. Additionally, MCRD manages bookings for approximately 500 facilities and open spaces, and Parks manages use of over 1,000 fields, facilities and open spaces. The software must be able to handle more than 500,000 transactions per year for the three agencies. While the user benefits of having a single booking system are substantial, this creates complexities in terms of managing customer accounts and financial transactions across multiple agencies. Improvements are needed to ensure proper financial management, refund processing, performance measurement, and reporting; and, to reduce the need for manual work created by the deficiencies of the ACTIVE Net system.

Park's Enterprise Fund will contribute $195,000 in FY21 and $84,000 in FY22 to the project.

Office of Community Use of Public Facilities, Department of Recreation, Montgomery Parks, Maryland National Capital Park and Planning Commission, Department of Technology and Enterprise Business Solutions, Office of Management and Budget, Office of Procurement, and Office of the County Attorney.