Casino Enterprise Management

Riding a major wave of success is a company some CEM readers may know as New Wave Automation. But as of March 2011, they went through many changes, including a new look, new logo, new leaders, new products and services, and are turning a tide now as NEWave.

This is the story of the new NEWave.

Origins
The company originally formed as a “mom and pop” operation in the early ‘90s with the initial goal of taking all the documents a gaming business used, automating them and archiving them electronically. It didn’t take long for them to test the waters and gain some major installations and customers. In fact, their first openings were at the Luxor and MGM, which at the time was the biggest property in the world. They moved on to work in various properties throughout the U.S. and did a lot of work in the tribal arena and in the Midwest riverboat market and California.

Now installed in more than 230 casinos, it quickly became evident that changing the company model would be necessary in order to handle a larger amount of business. And so, several major gaming industry veterans were brought in to help—Bart Lewin as CEO and CTO, Claudia Winkler as senior vice president of professional services and Clair Rogers as senior vice president of sales, with Tom Bechtel promoted to COO.

Two gentlemen who have been there from the beginning are company founders Jim Bach and Dick Favero. Bach, who serves as current chairman, says that their customers have reacted very positively to the changes. In fact, many of their clients prefer to have a more formal process with added support and installation, which was required as NEWave quickly grew.

People and Philosophy
One of NEWave’s key strengths lies in its people. By gathering experts with so much experience in the industry, they present one of the strongest teams in gaming and hospitality, who know the industry inside and out. “It’s an extreme asset of the company, because as we meet with our customers, we have walked in their shoes, we understand their problems, and we have been on the other side of the table dealing with their issues (no pun intended),” Bach said.

But it goes beyond the company’s employees, as NEWave also treats its customers as family. “We want to be a partner with our customers,” Winkler commented. “We’re not just a vendor selling them a bill then just going away. We want to be part of their process, we want to share our roadmap with them, and we want to understand their roadmap so that we can work with them to help them meet their goals and objectives as well.”

Lewin says that maintaining a high degree of ethics is all part of the process at NEWave. “We always want to do what we say. It’s a way of life here to try to partner with our clients in a meaningful way, where we are listening to them and responding very quickly,” he added. “As we grow, we want to continue to be agile so that we have the advantages of a small company in terms of service, but as we grow we also want to capture the advantages of being a Tier 2 company and come up with innovative solutions that save companies more money.”

“Our principle is an advantage over our competitors,” he added. “We’ve been around for 18 years and profitable for 18 years—we’re not going anywhere. Simply put, no one can touch us in terms of our integrity, stability and our interoperability.”

Products and Solutions
Since NEWave has so much experience in gaming, they know that everyone is a little bit different and each customer needs a plan tailored to their unique needs. And so, they make their solutions flexible to meet a variety of both operational and regulatory requirements.

Though there’s a variety of solutions NEWave offers, they consider there to be three major product lines.

The first, myCompliance, helps ensure adherence to gaming and government entities—local, state and federal—by completing, filing and archiving all of your required forms for money laundering, suspicious activity and taxes. Beyond that, it validates identification documents, verifies tax identification numbers and provides alerts for OFAC and other watch lists.

The second, myRevenueAudit, reduces internal and external audit time and effort by addressing key procedures from electronic audits on vouchers and forms. “Because we’re a very cash-oriented industry, all that information has to be monitored, tracked and audited,” Bach explained, “so we developed a set of products that automates and streamlines that process for both internal and external reporting.”

The third, myDocumentManager, captures, stores and exports documents into digital files to reduce paper and manage and integrate applications. It’s easy for paperwork to get lost in the shuffle, and this product automates the document flow for an end-to-end solution.

Beyond that, there is also a suite of products for cage operations, and  many of NEWave’s innovative products can be deployed in the cloud. Not to mention a major new initiative for their Professional Services division, headed up by Winkler, and designed to ensure technology makes life easier, not harder. It provides implementation of NEWave solutions; document management business assessment; cage, compliance and revenue audit optimization assessments; strategic planning and comprehensive budget development; IT assessments; system implementation and integration, and more. Regarding this initiative, Winkler commented: “In today’s casino industry, technology is either your best friend—or your biggest challenge. All of our services are built on a foundation of partnership. We take great care to fully understand a company’s operations and overall objectives in order to architect solutions based on each individual client’s strategic imperatives. Given this unique ability, NEWave’s Professional Services team is a casino’s biggest advocate in this era when it is imperative for technology to work harder, faster and smarter.”

NEWave is also in the process of replatforming, or moving all of its products, from their current platforms to .NET, which will be more modern and easier for support and integration. They’re also making the necessary changes to their Title 31 applications to be compliant with the new FinCEN regulations, currently slated to go into effect in early 2013.

“FinCEN is one of the agencies that regulates all of the anti-money laundering and treasury reporting requirements,” Winkler explained. “Compliance is crucial to a casino’s operations, and if you don’t follow the rules, you are potentially subject to fines that can be very substantial.” And, as she explains, when they come in, they typically never find just one problem; they find many. So your $5,000 fine can quickly turn into $100,000.

NEWave is also moving many of its applications to mobile devices and tablet solutions so that the front-of-house employees can streamline the transaction processes. For instance, with tax forms, they can do signature captures to get the customer back in play sooner.

The testing process of NEWave’s products and services is quite rigorous for a small company. As Lewin explained: “It really starts from how a new product is conceived. We are very careful to document the requirements or business problems we are trying to solve. During that process, we’re clearly describing what the new software has to do right from the beginning.”

From there, a test plan is built, and development begins. They also go through a process called stress testing, which means many actions are sent through the software until it breaks so they know what it can handle. “Once it’s ready, we’ll test it and turn it over to our trainers and implementers, and we have a pretty strict process,” Lewin said. “We’re in the compliance and auditing business, and the software has to be reliable and dependable.”

Proven Perspectives
“It really is a necessity to be the mother of invention,” Lewin commented about the importance of staying on top of technological trends.

With such visionary leaders at NEWave, it’s not too surprising to learn that their years of experience have lead to innovative thinking and an evolved process.

Though Bach cites the initial challenge of going to the next level while maintaining personal service as business increased, the company has no doubt found its groove. “During this down economy, we’ve actually invested more in this business,” Lewin explained. “The bottom line is that our software makes things more efficient, more compliant, cuts down fines, reduces labor hours and ultimately saves casinos money. We have experienced this firsthand.”

In fact, for even further proof that their software is highly effective, you need only look at their track record. In the history of the company, not one client has ever been fined for non-compliance since using NEWave’s software, which is really quite remarkable. When services speak for themselves like that, what more do you need to know?

The Future
NEWave has some exciting initiatives to watch out for in the coming months and years. One of those is its expansion into other markets. Taking its proven technology from gaming, they’ll be entering new industries like retail, convenience and financial institutions. “Many of the operations we do surrounding financial processing allow us to go into other industries that have the same business concepts,” Bach explained.

Even sooner on the horizon is the evolution of the company’s Professional Services. Winkler shared her excitement for growing this division. “We are working with and building strategic relationships with other companies so that we can extend to our customers an expanded portfolio of Professional Services offerings,” she said. “We haven’t branded these yet, but we have C-level resources available that can help our clients from a strategic and operational perspective. For example, we can provide temporary CIO and CFO-type services, in addition to everything else that’s on our shopping list of professional engagements.”

Another important initiative this year is to create the ability for software vendors to easily incorporate and integrate NEWave’s functionality and software into theirs, as well as adding mobile device capability in 2012. 

Amanda Huggett is the Managing Editor for Casino Enterprise Management. She can be reached at (701) 293-7775 or editor2[at]aceme.org.