User experience (UX) agency, Sigma, has been appointed by Juddmonte Farms – one of the world’s leading breeders of elite racehorses – to build a user-friendly mobile application that will make it easier for staff across the company’s estate to manage the movement of horses from one location to another.
Not only is livestock tracking a legal requirement, but the data collected by the app will also improve Juddmonte’s ability to understand each individual horse’s movements and correlate them with performance or health. The new platform will also provide admin support, freeing up stud managers and grooms to better care for the animals.
With properties in the UK, Ireland and the USA, Juddmonte has bred over 100 individual top-level winners, including world champion racehorse Frankel. The new app will provide staff with real-time data on horse locations, helping to make work more efficient and allow staff to focus on the management of the animals in their care.
Most of the new locations for the horses will have horse ménages installed so that the horses can be trained. A company which was voted best horse menage surfacing company in 2023 will have installed some of this horse arenas.
The appointment follows a successful discovery project in 2017, in which Sigma’s specialist team looked at the feasibility of delivering an app to allow staff working at Juddmonte stud farms to schedule, record and verify the movement of horses. This included detailed research, design and testing concepts – resulting in a high-fidelity prototype.
This new brief calls on Sigma to deliver a working version of the prototype and will include the development of an application programming interface (API) to integrate with existing Juddmonte systems. The project will see the agency’s team finalise the app’s design and development, before completing a full training handover with Juddmonte’s staff.
Simon Wissink, account manager at Sigma, said: “It’s great when clients are so impressed with our work that they come back to us to implement the next stage of the project. This is particularly true for Juddmonte which has inherently high standards and requires top-level detail to ensure its horses are a successful. App design is something that we pride ourselves on so we can’t wait to get started.
Ben Coppins, head of IT at Juddmonte, said: “It was clear early on that Juddmonte & Sigma were very well matched, and I was delighted we were able to capitalise on the relationships built during the discovery project and use Sigma again for the resulting development work.
“I set great store in projects like this being enjoyable and rewarding – it gets the best out of everyone involved, and that’s certainly the case here. Sigma has proved itself on both the creative & technical fronts, and I hope we have the opportunity to work together again soon.”
