Game on: How BI transforms gaming machine operations for the better

Blog: Professional advantage - BPM blog

Arnold is the floor manager at a registered club on the Central Coast. The club is packed in the summer months, and there’s always a crowd in the gaming area on weekends.

Arnold spends a lot of time out on the gaming machine floor, but it’s also his job to track gaming revenue and individual machine performance. He needs to know which machines are most profitable and pass this information to the marketing team for their member loyalty programs.

When there is room in the budget for new gaming machines, Arnold makes recommendations for what to buy next. And if there are errors in gaming machine reports, it’s his job to identify them before the reports go to the finance team.

Like many other clubs, Arnold’s gaming machine system vendor doesn’t make it easy to access gaming data. The vendor demands a monthly fee for access to gaming machine data – even though that data is generated and owned by Arnold’s club.

That’s not the only roadblock Arnold faces at work. His club’s gaming system doesn’t integrate with other systems like food and beverage or point of sale, so gaming revenue is always viewed in isolation. He thinks he’s doing a good job at keeping members satisfied, but he lacks the data to back up his gut feelings.

Arnold has read a bit about club-specific business intelligence (BI) solutions. He can see why BI would be great for club marketers, finance teams and operations managers, but he can’t see how it would benefit the gaming floor.

If you share similar sentiments to Arnold, here are five reasons why BI is essential for club gaming machine success.

Analyse more than performance reports and cash flow

Most gaming machines generate performance reports, but that’s about it. With BI, you can analyse gaming machine performance relative to both floor space and positioning, as well as:

average member spend
how often members visit the club
individual month-to-month member spending.

By integrating with all club systems, BI can identify promotions that drive gaming machine revenue, as well as whether members prefer to play the pokies before or after a meal. This gives floor managers like Arnold improved insight into member behaviour, and a better idea of how to deliver great member experiences.

Make smarter gaming machine purchase decisions

When you know which gaming machines make the most money, you can use those insights to influence purchasing decisions. With BI, gaming machine data is presented in easy-to-interpret graphs and visualisations on a single dashboard.

This makes it easy to identify relationships, uncover relationships between data and determine which machines are worth buying next.

Automatically identify inaccurate gaming machine data

Because gaming machines capture information at 15-minute intervals, a system crash or reset between intervals can cause a spike in readings. This means that club employees like Arnold must spend a couple of hours each month trawling through gaming machine reports in search of errors.

Club-specific BI solutions give these hours back by automatically identifying errors. By identifying the maximum amount of times a member can play a gaming machine in 15 minutes, for example, BI platforms spot errors as they happen.

To find out more about business intelligence and clubs, call Professional Advantage on 1800 126 499.

You can read more about Professional Advantage and ClubIntel here.