Casino Enterprise Management

What can you do when the economy is on a downswing, your market becomes more competitive, and you’re forced to do more with less and faster than you have before? The intelligent solution is just that—business intelligence. You likely have the foundation already in place. You have a slot system, player tracking, accounting, servers and an increasing amount of historical data. But how do you put it all to work for you?

Investing in a comprehensive business intelligence suite is no easy task. It requires a commitment from your organization, time and monetary resources to select and implement the solution, and ongoing dedication to training and working with that system. While the costs are high, the rewards certainly are too.

IGT’s Mariposa™ is a complete solution dealing with customer relationship management (CRM), business intelligence (BI) and predictive modeling. It allows you to understand and predict player behavior, make marketing more productive, and fully analyze your game performance. It is an integrated solution that gives you the resources and tools to understand your customers with the goal of maximizing your return on investment. The ability to make and act on strategic business decisions allows your entire enterprise to grow.

Poised for future growth itself, Mariposa is positioned for server-based and networked gaming. It’s an ideal time to start working toward the future, using tools that will help you make the right decisions for implementing tomorrow’s floor.

Mariposa is not only a suite of tools for the operator, but according to IGT Vice President of Strategy for Network Systems Javier Saenz, it’s a way of conducting business. “It’s just so fundamentally important—and it’s almost cliché—but if you don’t understand your customers, you don’t understand your business,” he explained. “Then all the marketing in the world may not work. And we’re talking about very detailed information, not a broad-brush. It starts fundamentally with understanding your business and your players, and from there you have the knowledge to go execute the right campaign.”

Mariposa: Built to Grow
Mariposa consists of a suite of products. It begins with a fundamental component: the data warehouse, of which IGT has recently released a much-enhanced version 3.0. “One of the big challenges in the data warehouse space is not only the schema of the data and (obviously) the storage of the data, but the population of the database itself—the ETL,” Saenz explained.

The ETL (extract, transform and load) is how you get data from various systems in your enterprise into one large, structured warehouse of data—a tricky, technical and challenging process. While it may seem like a fairly basic, even benign, part of the system, it is the most critical, often requiring months of planning and implementing. It is no easy process, but without a proper data warehouse that is regularly updated with valid data, organized logically and properly structured, there’s nothing that any system can do to help. To create a much more stable and reliable ETL process, Mariposa leverages a SQL Server 2005 throughout, which has fundamentally made its product more robust and a lot faster—according to Saenz, what previously took three hours at night to accomplish is now completed in less than an hour. “It’s more stable, it’s faster and it significantly improves performance,” he said.

Over time, much of this process has also been refined and automated, and a large portion of the installation is even done automatically off a DVD-ROM. But although up to 90 percent of the data warehouse setup can be fully automated, Saenz says there is a lot of engineering that goes on to get that last mile—and IGT has tried to enhance its ability to deliver on the installation quicker. “The engineering effort of that last 10 percent takes 80 percent of the time,” Saenz explained. “We’ve really focused on automating what we could and bringing out installation. Now we can do a complete implementation beginning to end in just a matter of a couple of months. If you think about implementing all the software, conducting the training, going through the quality assurance, and making sure the data is accurate, that’s just an amazing accomplishment of our engineering group.”

Automating the basics allows IGT’s engineers to focus their time where the value is for the customer. “Other than those issues of the warehouse, we have worked on optimization,” Saenz affirmed. “We have addressed some issues of scalability so that we can handle terabytes worth of data now and not have a problem. We really wanted to focus on our ability to scale.”

How Suite It Is
Mariposa consists of five primary sections: Reporting, Scorecard, Campaign Management, Player Contact and Data Visualization. It is important to note that these modules rely on each other and provide an integrated solution overall. While you may start out with an ad-hoc report, it could lead you to develop a campaign that includes predictive analytics and data visualization, which can be tracked in the scorecard. It is this interoperability between the modules that makes Mariposa so powerful.

Reporting
Operators just starting out with Mariposa are likely to be most comfortable with its ad-hoc reporting module. You can easily build your own reports by providing criteria to match your unique requirements. Designed to be easy to use with a shallow learning curve, you point, click and drag-and-drop for instant answers. For a quick start there are more than 2,000 reports included out of the box. These alone will give you a multitude of ways to segment your slot, table, player, hotel, retail and direct marketing data for a comprehensive 360-degree view of your operation.

One area that has received significant attention is what IGT calls its “players on games analytics,” which is a suite of reports that represent the intersection of the game and the player. Instead of studying how particular games have performed—be it one denomination, a type of line game or an individual theme—slot analysts can look at how those games did relative to their customer segments. Saenz is amazed at how this type of analysis can be easily overlooked. “Operators sometimes forget when they do their analysis of the game to put the player in the mix,” he said. “It’s not just about understanding the game, it’s about understanding the player. Which customers like which particular games? Are they the customers you expected? Are they loyal customers or new customers? These reports help perform this kind of demographic slicing and dicing relative to games.”

Scorecard
Scorecard is the analytics front-end, a desktop application to provide mission-critical operational information. Utilizing data collection enterprise-wide, Scorecard displays information for players, slots, tables, hotel, retail, etc., and includes more than 1,000 pre-designed reports to get you up and running quickly. The data can be quickly displayed on a dashboard, showing not only text and charts, but various graphs and gauge-style indicators to tell you at a glance how your operation is doing.

Over the next few months, a completely rebuilt and rewritten Scorecard application is due to be released. Currently in beta testing, it has been rebuilt on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and is essentially the look and feel found in IGT’s server-based products. “As we move into a more unified offering where all of our products move under a single umbrella, Scorecard is one of those first applications that will come across,” Saenz said.

Ultimately, Saenz would like to see Scorecard on every executive’s desk. “Every manager should have that kind of information to make decisions,” he said. “That’s the strategy with Scorecard.”

Campaign Management
A bread-and-butter operation for all operators, marketing campaigns can significantly increase revenues or generate tremendous losses. The Campaign Management System makes creating and managing successful campaigns simple by putting the power to create, model and analyze marketing campaigns in the right hands—yours. The system provides access to campaign performance, player, hotel, casino and retail information all in one place. Moving beyond the basics of direct marketing, advanced features such as predictive analytics make use of data warehouse resources, optimizing results and allowing for better marketing decision-making.

The goal of any marketing campaign is to get the right offer to the right player at the right time, and Saenz says this cornerstone application is designed to help accomplish that goal. “We’re taking the guesswork out of the pro forma process,” he explained. “The system automatically predicts the response rates for customers in your selected segment—and it does it quite accurately in terms of the type of offer, the value of the offer and how long that offer is valid. Those are sort of the key inputs when we’re predicting—whether the players will or will not take advantage of offers that they’re given.”

The system is also active in helping generate redemption rates, predicting a player’s worth when he or she returns for the redemption trip. Saenz says you can actually build segments based upon predictive models of a player’s likelihood to redeem a particular offer type, for example, if you want to drive a segment of customers to your buffet. If you select a customer segment, you can further select only those customers who are likely to redeem a food offer, so there is no need to send this offer to players who aren’t interested. Although this is a fundamental task, it can be difficult to achieve without the help of an automated model like Campaign Management.

Player Contact
Mariposa’s CRM solution, the Player Contact system, allows your staff to access the information required in order to deal with your most vital asset—your customers. Whether it’s a slot host, manager or F&B personnel, access to this information keeps them close to your players, and therefore keeps your players close to you.

The system includes a map of the floor to show where players are and what they’re doing. Using predictive analytics visually, players are color-coded to make their levels easily recognizable and the host may drill-down into the data to see more detailed information about that player, such as how much they have been playing. Of key importance are the “purple people,” the predicted high-worth customers on the floor who haven’t achieved VIP level yet but have a high probability to do so. Part of a new feature that uses the predictive component to display current player trends, green means a player is expected to increase in worth, yellow means a player will likely stay steady, and red means a ­­­­­­player is on the decline. (Of course, given this information, you may be able to take action to reverse this trend.)

Saenz says it’s all part of an effort to make high-level analysis easy to understand and immediately actionable. “If I predict that a player is going to have a $5,000 theo next month, there’s too much variability,” he explained. “If you put that in front of the user and the player comes in and spends $4,000 or $6,000, then the host starts to question it. But seeing that a player is on a downward trend, that’s most of what a host needs to know.”

Data Visualization
In the end, a data warehouse is only as good as your ability to access and interpret the information it contains, and with the Data Visualization system, finding important information is as easy as spotting colors on a map. Enhanced from previous releases, the system allows users to display a map of the floor, and besides seeing individual players, drill down to look at the underlying details of a particular gaming device, for example, the average age of its players.

Saenz says a lot of effort has also been put into improving time analysis, allowing users to compare time periods (for example, quarter to quarter), again using color-coded maps to simply indicate upward, stagnant or downward trends in handle, theoretical win, etc. This function can be used across properties, and the numbers can be crunched in countless ways, for example, to see how performance has changed for people coming from various geographical regions.

Saenz says this is particularly important for a networked floor, where a single gaming machine will offer several different themes. “We’re always looking toward the future of how server-based [gaming] will impact our analysis and our ability to analyze the game,” he assured. “It will improve it, quite frankly, a lot. Location is such a key driver of game performance as we know it. Strong themes can bring people into a less ideal location. It allows us to go back to this configuration or this bank layout or these changes in this location that slot directors enjoy tinkering with.”

Mariposa is for U
A comprehensive slot system like Mariposa is not only for upper-level executives. While they can certainly benefit from its advantages—such as an instant view of a KPI in Scorecard—the enterprise as a whole can benefit from the system. Finance and gaming operations can monitor current trends, predict future trends, and take action based upon solid information. Extremely complex models can be built, providing timely results. Marketing personnel can create campaigns, obtaining accurate predictions of the results before spending any money putting the plan in place. And this system brings the whole enterprise together—retail operations, entertainment, F&B, hotel, even the laundry department—can utilize the system. Accurate predictions on their demands can be made, and that includes the lifetime of towels and blankets. In short, the more you use this system, the further it will reach into your organization. Making it available to lower-level employees will only make it more valuable and bring your staff and various departments together. With a full set of security features, you can rest assured that personnel are only able to work with data they are required to have.

And of course, the key is the customer. While you can reduce losses by embarking on accurate, targeted marketing campaigns that will be well received by your customers, the primary objective is to make your customers happy. Mariposa’s diverse reports and tools give you the ability to work with your customers, tailoring your business to their needs.

An intelligent business knows its customers, understands their wants and recognizes the factors that drive them away. An intelligent business continues to put its customers first, remembering that they are dynamic. It takes a lot of work to gain a loyal customer, and they can be lost without any work at all. CRM is all about the customers. And Mariposa can help you make the intelligent decisions to gain loyal customers.    

John Wilson is the Technology Editor for Casino Enterprise Management and Owner of ICS Gaming, providing slot consulting services and game design. He has designed several slot games in both Class II and Class III markets.  He can be reached at jwilson@icsgaming.com.