California’s County Fairs just took a giant step into the 21^st century with the launch of a new wireless operations system at the 2007 Orange County Fair. The system is the first of its kind in California and marks a revolution in the way that carnivals are managed. The FunCard system was developed by Funtastic Traveling Shows out of Portland Oregon and was purchased by RCS Ray Cammack Shows to run their operations. While the software provides all of the business logic, without a viable network in place it will not work properly.

A typical traveling carnival is a very hostile environment for high technology. Factor in the sheer size of a typical California County Fair and it can quickly become a technology nightmare. Carnivals put on by Cammack get 9 million visitors annually. The company needed to provide a reliable business environment to serve all those people, including real-time e-ticketing, inventory management and time card tracking for more than 500 employees, all while moving frequently from site to site. 

With the sheer size and magnitude of their deployments it was imperative that a highly scalable wireless network be developed.  The operation mandates were to have a network that could be moved, setup and be fully functional within just a couple days. 

BCS Solutions of Garden Grove was up for the challenge and led the team for this groundbreaking project. Starting in 2006, BCS Solutions began to build a system that would allow Cammack’s IT department to operate more efficiently. 

The result is a robust, highly reliable and efficient system that was developed in under a year. “It is basically a rapidly-deployable wireless infrastructure capable of operating in any environment that Cammack’s IT team might face,” said David Marin of BCS Solutions. “We have been able to migrate Cammack’s entire IT infrastructure to wireless and achieve all of their business goals.” 

Consider that the company must keep track of and transport all the rides, equipment and personnel needed to assemble and disassemble an entire County Fair midway. The company is doing this about every three weeks all over the country. Once on site, the Fair’s new wireless network can be set up and operational in 12 hours. This includes 46 wireless nodes, 35 access points and more than 300 handheld cordless scanners and POS terminals. Information gathered by the system is beamed wirelessly in real time to an operations center. Complete disassembly takes only two hours. 

What does all this mean if you attend or work at the fair?  Tickets and ride cards can now be purchased at the fair or via the Internet and brought to the fair. Ride cards are preloaded with a specific number of rides. The scanner located at each ride or game booth is used to conduct ticket redemptions and verify how many rides are left on each card. If a card or ticket is lost, it can be tracked and reissued. Inventory management for the many Midway game booths is also conducted in real time via the scanners. 

The system keeps track of over 500 employees at any given time, from ride and concession operators, to security and operations personnel. Employee ID badges function as time cards. Each employee clocks in and out of the system via any available scanner. Employee training is also conducted via the scanners. “At the end of the day,” says BCS Solutions’ Marin, “this is a whole new level of operational efficiency for a major County Fair and none of it would be possible without a stable wireless infrastructure”.