Gearing up for the Games
The largest single clothing distribution project in Australia’s history has begun with the opening of the Sydney 2000 Olympic and Paralympic Games Uniform Distribution & Accreditation Centre (UDAC).
Approximately 150,000 Olympic Games and 27,000 Paralympic Games staff, volunteers and contract staff will visit the UDAC to receive accreditation passes for their Games time roles.
Of the total 150,000 Olympic workforce, the UDAC expects to outfit 80,000 people in their Games uniform. Of the 27,000 strong Paralympic workforce, 14,000 people will be uniformed by the UDAC.
Jim Sloman, Deputy Chief Executive and Chief Operating Officer of the Sydney Olympic Games Organising Committee (SOCOG), said the UDAC is already proving to be a great success.
‘The UDAC opened its doors to Olympic and Paralympic Games staff last week and more than 5,600 people have been processed,’ Mr Sloman said.
‘The processing of accreditation passes and distributing uniforms to the entire Olympic and Paralympic Games workforce is an enormous operation. The success of the UDAC in managing this volume of people is largely due to the experience of UDAC staff and our sponsors at the site.’
‘The 8,500 square metre site has been developed in close consultation with Olympic and Paralympic Games sponsors Pacific Dunlop, Bonds, IBM, Kodak, Nike, Telstra, Visy, and Woolmark,’ he said.
Bonds will produce more than 1.1 million items of clothing for the Games workforce, including over 198,310 polo shirts, 90,143 casual jackets, 157,980 pairs of casual pants, 142,000 pairs of socks, 20,000 pairs of shorts and 35,000 T-shirts.
IBM is responsible for developing and installing the UDAC’s information technology, including cabling and developing the accreditation software system. The Worldwide Partner is providing 234 IBM PCs, 13 printers and over 10,000 metres of cabling. IBM will store 150,000 workforce records for the Olympic Games and 50,000 records for the Paralympic Games.
Kodak is providing all Games accreditation passes, including those for volunteers, sponsor workforce, athletes, media and VIP officials. As the Imaging Partner, Kodak has fitted the UDAC with 46 DVC 323 Digital cameras to take the photos required for the passes. Passes are printed on one of Kodak’s 54 thermal printers in less than 2 minutes.
As Official Supporter, Nike will be outfitting the Olympic Games workforce with 56,000 wide brimmed hats. The wool used in the 6,250 blazers for judges’ and officials’ uniforms is supplied by Woolmark.
The UDAC will be fed by two Telstra exchanges, supplying the venue with 92 standard phone lines, 66 Olympic Network phone lines, two ISDN lines, five 2 Megabit per second data links for IBM technology and two pay phones.
Over 500 pieces of Visy cardboard furniture is in use within the UDAC, including desks, tables, bookshelves and partitions. The UDAC is the first functional building of this size in Australia to be furnished with environmentally friendly, recycled cardboard furniture. Three truckloads of recycled paper and cardboard collected from over 2,000 households has been used in the production of the UDAC’s cardboard furniture – the equivalent of saving 575 trees.
The UDAC is conveniently located just 500 metres from Redfern Station and operates from 11am to 6pm Tuesday to Friday and 9am to 4pm on weekends. From 3 September the UDAC opens 7 days per week.
Source: SOCOG