Casino Enterprise Management

Editor’s Note: This month we continue our study of customer relationship management (CRM) and business intelligence (BI) solutions with Aristocrat Technologies Inc.

Many of the features of one vendor’s product are often found in other vendors’ products as well. Each CRM solution that we have explored so far—IGT’s Mariposa™ and Konami’s Patron 360™—for example, provides a means of storing data and generating reports. What is important to you as an operator, then, is how each unique solution will fit your business. With the flexibility and advanced features built into today’s CRM/BI solutions, making the final decision is not easy, but fortunately, there are a number of solutions out there that will support you well. This month’s is no exception: the Oasis 360™ Casino Management System from Aristocrat Technologies Inc.

“Oasis 360 is a comprehensive gaming solution for operators of any size and location,” explained Sean Evans, senior vice president of sales for Aristocrat North America. “Utilizing advanced technology, Oasis 360 comprises of a suite of configurable operational modules which collect, analyze and report player, gaming and non-gaming activity, thereby giving a casino operator a 360-degree view of their enterprise.”

Originally developed to provide rock-solid slot accounting functionality, Oasis 360 evolved over the last 15 years as technologies that casinos could effectively leverage progressed alongside patron savy and readiness. While gaming expanded outside of Nevada and Atlantic City, casinos became more accessible to players and competition increased, giving players a reason to select one facility over another. New marketing solutions created a sense of brand loyalty and new bonusing systems were brought in to deal with these smarter, more experienced patrons. Facilities grew and were forced to offer more to their players, adding restaurants, hotels and entertainment venues. Players wanted to take advantage of these amenities with less effort, and they still do. Today they want one card to do it all, even across numerous facilities owned by the same tribe or corporation. More than familiar with ATM cards, they want player cards with similar functions. By now, loyalty and benefits have become the hallmark of casino competition, especially in crowded markets facing substantial challenges that have nothing to do with gaming, but rather are driven by decreased discretionary spending and increased fuel and travel costs, among other factors.

During Oasis’  progression from a standard accounting system to a full 360-degree, venue-wide system, Aristocrat met with its customers to find out what their common needs and wants were. Now, regular and ongoing meetings with focus groups in every region of the country help identify standard features to be released in future versions. “Our dedication to listening to our customer base and providing products that work has solidified Aristocrat’s reputation as the premier gaming solution provider,” Evans said. “As a testimonial to our reputation, Oasis 360 has recently been awarded several all-inclusive system contracts over the last 90 days.”

In addition to customer research, Aristocrat has also formed strategic partnerships to add value to its Oasis 360 solution. Las Vegas-based Tech Results, for example, offered its extensive experience in CRM and BI, which gives Aristocrat a robust toolset to complement Oasis and allow operators to further maximize their marketing and operational efficiencies.

Freedom, Flexibility and Strength
“With Oasis 360, we believe there are three attributes that we provide our customers: freedom, flexibility and strength,” Evans explained.

Freedom
With the ability to customize Oasis 360 to match your operational requirements comes great freedom—especially since it does not require you to change your business to suit the application. “The players have the freedom to go wherever they want,” explained Kelly Shaw, vice president of Aristocrat’s Systems Sales & Marketing. “The operators have the freedom to use our toolsets in their business. It is customizable and flexible. They can customize it to tailor their particular operations. Who knows their operations better than they do?”

Particularly as you move into the CRM- and BI-facing parts of the solution, the user interfaces even become changeable as appropriate to meet your business. For example, the dashboards are fully customizable, whether delivered inside the BI portal or directly into one of the CRM applications.

Flexibility
No two jurisdictions are alike, nor are any two facilities the same. Even one enterprise operating in multiple locations will find that each location has a unique set of requirements. “We are not your standard ‘open up the box and here you go’ solution,” Evans said. “You can customize Oasis 360 to your business needs. Tomorrow you may need something different—we can change with you. At all times the product is built to maximize your operations. The key differentiator here is that the system is designed, from the ground up, with the intention that it should be flexible enough that it adjusts to your processes, not that it forces you to change your processes to work with it.”

Strength
The strength of Oasis 360 comes from both its history of proven functionality and its powerful toolset. Figure 1 shows a snapshot of the complete system. Aristocrat’s placement of CRM and BI in it’s system illustrates the comprehensive solution that envelops every aspect of Oasis 360. It is designed to integrate the system and your operations into a complete picture, be it a picture of the business or of a player, composed of the most granular data or the highest-level summary. It goes beyond traditional CRM/BI solutions by allowing every person in your enterprise to be part of the solution, maximizing their relationship with your customers.
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Technological Solution
With networked gaming on the horizon, casino operators are in the process of upgrading their serial slot floors to an Ethernet network. Oasis 360 customers can leverage this infrastructure with FloorLogix™. FloorLogix monitors the Oasis 360 system, capturing all floor activity and dispensing it to the proper user applications and supports both serial and Ethernet communication simultaneously. This capability allows easy and multi-staged conversion for networking capabilities, while this flexibility of a core component provides tremendous capabilities and a robust solution.

When considering the CRM space, it is particularly beneficial that the Oasis 360 promotional, campaigning and player development capacities are laid over the FloorLogix backbone. This provides the ability to leverage CRM activities in real-time back to the guest, either at the slot machine, through a mobile device used by hosts or other staff members, to a wireless unit in the pit, or to kiosks or other types of self-service.

“Our core competency is not POS or property management systems. We are a casino management systems provider,” Shaw said. “However, with our partnerships, we are a patron management systems provider. And because we are on the board of the Gaming Standards Association, we can leverage new technologies such as S2S and G2S to access and leverage the information gathered by the customer’s POS and property management systems to deliver that comprehensive view of the business (hence the “360” moniker). Moreover, the core casino management system has products available that meet the S2S specifications, which can interface to both POS and PMS solutions.”

This flexibility allows third-party vendors an interface route for auxiliary solutions. With these interfaces, players may be able to swipe their cards to earn points, pay for meals, or be eligible for further promotions. Common interfaces include ticketing kiosks, marketing kiosks, point-of-sale devices and systems, and property management systems.

WAGER™ is 360’s centralized BI solution and an answer to customers’ analysis questions and concerns. This application and its data warehouse sit on top of the gaming solution, as well as hotel, POS, labor, payroll, general ledger, scheduling, etc. It offers powerful automation, detail reports, analytics, dashboards and scorecards. “The key point in making that as effective as possible for gaming is making sure that we have the finest granularity that we can before we start to aggregate,” explained Lars Klander,  president and CEO of Tech Results. The more fine-grained that data is, the more specificity we’re able to get.”

With these tools, Oasis 360 is now at a bridging point to go to server-based and downloadable gaming—and to help operators make sense of the exponential increase in data that those types of solutions will represent, then leverage that data into more powerful loyalty-, marketing- and operational/revenue-driving solutions.

“There’s also a bunch of embedded data mining inside the solution set, which allows you to mine what you already know—  that is, all the data you have already gathered—and from that make decisions,” Klander said. “These decisions are predictive and bindable back into the applications and your guest interactions—even to the point where mining-driven results can prompt users in real time to deliver offers right to the guest at the game.”

The offer can also be sent to a host so the host can go to the player and interact with the guest. The results of these offers roll back into the analysis to allow you to study the results.

Marketing/Bonusing Modules
Part of the newest technological benefit of Oasis 360 is SpeedMedia™, which is coupled with the Sentinel III® in-game display. This marketing brandability product allows the operator to be highly visible to the patrons, encouraging play and offering rewards and incentives. Promotions are configurable and include customized multimedia content. “Everything is a toolkit for our customers to modify the solution to their needs and their environment,” Shaw said. “We offer bonusing applications as well as campaign management through the Sentinel III devices. In SpeedMedia we give the property the freedom and flexibility to create the multimedia content that is displayed on the Sentinel III.”

The modules allow you to target different players or different areas of your casino with different messages or bonusing content. High-denom games could have different content than low-denom machines. The capability to reach individuals with the offers they will value is easily accomplished.

This in-game display, coupled with the ability to create targeted promotions based upon your player criteria and other KPIs, is incredibly powerful. Traditionally, marketing campaigns have occurred after some trigger. Perhaps a player has had a recent play level and a new win per day that qualifies him or her for a special reward. A direct mailing will attempt to have that player return to your property. With the Sentinel III device, however, you can target that player while they are still on your property. Who adds more value to your facility, an average player who is currently playing or a high-value player who is not? By encouraging your players to stay and by increasing their time on machine, you have instant feedback and results from your marketing campaigns. This can also create a much more enjoyable environment for the players, further increasing their probability of returning. The ability to direct campaigns to your players while they are still at your facility creates a tremendous opportunity and gives you an immediate indication of how well the endeavor is working. You can even modify the campaign based upon real-time data while the player is still in your facility, making changes even more effective.

Splashdown Countdown™ and Ricochet Rewards™ are bonusing modules that create gaming excitement on the casino floor. Running over an Ethernet floor network and displaying on the Sentinel III devices, these programs will utilize configurable play driven triggers to award players with a variety of rewards while strengthening the casino’s brand equity through the use of customizable in-game messaging.

Additional powerful promotion, expanded campaign management, and player development solutions are also available within Oasis 360. Coupled with powerful analytics, marketing and no-cost reinvestment, these modules are designed to lower costs while increasing revenue. Allowing one or multiple promotions to be run simultaneously, your promotions are targeted where they have the best chance of being effective and yielding positive results. These modules give the power to those who can use it to interact with customers and increase customer satisfaction. These campaign management tools include SMS connectivity, e-mail connectivity and the capacity for you to set up and define rules around campaigning concepts without necessarily knowing the individuals you are campaigning to at design-time. As someone reaches and qualifies for those campaigns, it can then deliver an offer to them in real-time. It’s a much more interactive capacity and capability to help casinos be more competitive, while still supporting the highly traditional casino model of mailers and calendars.

The Players’ Perspective
Oasis 360 empowers players to manage their own accounts and know what rewards they have earned. By inserting their players’ card or showing their card at a table, they can utilize the Sentinel III display to see what points and comp dollars they have. If they want to see a movie or eat in the steakhouse, they can bypass the line at the players club and wait until the last minute before arriving, swiping their card, and having their points deducted from their account. It is seamless to the player, not to mention quick and transparent. Customer satisfaction is increased and operators have more knowledge of what the players are using their points for.

A Complete Solution For U
A slot machine manufacturer may have a different focus and core competency than a systems solution provider specializing in CRM/BI. The two together will complement each other, expanding on what operators require to perform their business. An almost dizzying array of modules targeting every aspect of the gaming floor, gaming operations and non-gaming facilities is available in Oasis 360.

A long history of development and evolution, which includes operator-driven focus groups and a desire to incorporate new technological advancements, has positioned Oasis 360 for the future. Already taking advantage of an Ethernet network, the system is ready for tomorrow’s technology when you are, minimizing your costs and retraining requirements. Oasis 360, with its comprehensive offering of core gaming and accounting functionality—plus its expanded offering of player tracking, management, relationship management and more—is a sure hit for your enterprise.

Oasis 360™ in Action
Chumash Casino Resort, with 2,000 gaming machines and 48 tables, has been running Oasis since 1999, originally using its predecessor, CDS. Prior to the partnership between Aristocrat Technologies Inc. and Tech Results, Chumash was utilizing Tech Results’ systems separately. Executive Director of Technology Peter Saccullo has been with Chumash’s Technology Services department for almost five years and sees the partnership between Aristocrat and Tech Results as a natural step.

When originally implementing a CRM/BI solution, was there any skepticism?
Peter Saccullo: BI can be a deep hole—a mystery! And with many of our end users not having any previous BI experience, the BI concept was difficult to understand. However, with the Oasis 360 and Tech Results solution, our users who did not know much about BI were able to really jump-start information awareness. …[With Oasis] canned reports and analysis tools, we could move forward quickly.

How does the integration between Oasis and Tech Results work?
PS: They are separate solutions. When you’re looking at core data, it’s through Oasis. The CRM and BI tools pull and integrate the tools from the core Oasis, but you’re going to a different application. However, the integration of the data is very seamless. The separation is fine the way it is because you want your CRM/BI folks working on their tools. You’re separating your front-line employees from your BI employees. There is no need to have both applications open at the same time by the same person. They are totally different disciplines throughout the application.

How easily were you able to hit the ground running in your implementation?
PS: With the Oasis 360 and the Wager, you’re really starting to see some value to the product within the first few months after you’re up and running, where the end-user is able to grasp what they’re doing. With other BI tools, it may be years before you’re able to see any value. I won’t say ROI because I don’t think you put ROI on BI tools; you put a value. It’s too hard to calculate a return, but you can calculate how much value that tool provides through the organization.

How does Oasis fit into your day-to-day operations scheme?
PS: From a day-to-day standpoint, we have built a business intelligence group under our casino operation and technology realm. This group has freed up our IT resources while giving the end-users the opportunity to get at their data, which they need on a day-to-day basis. The tools free up IT resources and switch them to the end-user, allowing them the capability to access their data without necessarily utilizing IT. This ability removes the necessity of IT staff in creating reports, allowing BI personnel to access the information themselves. This empowers them and means that the people who best understand the questions can find the answers. From an IT standpoint, that’s a big piece. What happens is the more information you give to the end user, the more information they want to absorb. They can grab it with the Wager tools we’ve been able to provide them.

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.