PURE Canadian Gaming
As Alberta’s largest and longest operating casino organization, Pure Canadian Gaming offers greater customer service, more action, more excitement, the richest Players Club Rewards program and the strongest commitment to their surrounding communities.
Challenge
Business leaders were operating with limited access to information both for daily operations and for strategic mid and longer-term strategic planning. Operational and strategic reporting came with many hours of manual effort invested in data extracts from various systems, daily faxes of gaming activity and an extensive integration of Excel workbooks.
PURE needed to accomplish three key objectives:
Cut reporting time to free up resources
Increase accuracy of projections
Use insights to drive bottom line improvements
As a lean organization, it was recognized that they must make better use of tools to become more efficient. Future growth was going to be dependent on freeing up the existing team to do more. Ongoing accountability to investors, the need to be accurately reporting to stakeholders and effective alignment of performance expectations with all leaders has direct impact on the organization. By using insights to improve all aspects of business performance and the customer experience, everyone wins.
An efficient, automated, secure and self-service way to put the insights of gaming operations in the hands of up to 50 business leaders and managers was needed. Leadership recognized that timely, dependable insights were essential to enabling fact-based decisions and empowering managers to optimize business performance on both a daily tactical basis and on a longer-term strategic basis.
PURE’s CEO needed the insights he was accustomed to having while running larger gaming organizations in the US. He needed insights that could help determine what’s next and enable forward thinking to grow the business and maximize customer satisfaction.
The CFO was looking for ways to deliver better daily forecasts to optimize staffing and standardize her strategic planning, while the Director of IT was looking for integration, security, automation and better accessibility of data to business leaders.
One of the many goals included the accurate forecasting of casino attendance to optimize staffing levels for efficiency and customer satisfaction. In addition, improved understanding of patron activity and high-rollers would provide managers timely information to optimize business performance by identifying gaming patterns and tracking activity on the gaming floor.
Action
Clear Insight identified IBM Planning Analytics Express as the ideal solution for PURE. With the integrated functionality of Cognos Analytics for business intelligence and Planning Analytics for forecasting, PURE could not only understand HR / Payroll optimization but enable integrated analytics, budgeting and planning across all gaming divisions. Clear Insight also brought in their partner Reva Solutions to implement IBM Datacap for the automated capture of data coming in on daily faxes.
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The combination of Clear Insight’s experience, the IBM tools and the collaborative partnership with the team at PURE we were able to maximize the use of existing data sources (MS Dynamics, ERP, Chronos, Aloha, Alta Gaming Reports, Salesforce, etc.) and establish the foundational data and software analytics platform to produce the Daily Operating Report (DOR) as the first business enabler.
PURE knew the solution could deliver much more than the DOR and so together a Road Map was established based on the specifics of what each of the lines of business needed. Together we are navigating the roadmap and moving forward one step at a time.
Results
The solution immediately addressed the business risk associated with the daily delivery of the DOR. Freeing up an estimated 4 hours of effort every day and related hours of effort from others who were manually recording daily fax information. 2 FTEs are now able to focus their organizational knowledge and skills to focus on process improvement, rather than periodic reporting. In addition, deeper self-service analytics enabled inquiries into the what and why questions of business performance, freeing up support staff further and giving better insight into the business.
With the new DOR firmly imbedded in daily operations, the team together built on the foundation of the DOR to design, model and build the Daily EBITDA report. By collaboratively reviewing each revenue stream, associated expenses and related operational drivers, detailed business projections are now being made 30 days ahead of time, within 5% of actuals. The benefit of having this real-time business measurement tool and related insights within the gaming industry is proven world-wide, but only companies with a supportive solution like this can achieve it.
It may be perceived that only large Las Vegas Casinos could build systems to provide daily insight into the business but PURE did it in less than two months.
Collaboration between departments now focuses on solving strategic forward-thinking challenges, rather than trying to collect accurate historical results. Given a single repository where data can be collected from multiple sources, cross-department insights are now surfacing that previously could not have been seen. Collaborating around one source of the truth across the enterprise but allowing each department to control its own data has started to break down departmental silos and improve teamwork across the enterprise. In addition, connecting with a larger IBM PA community has grown their support circle to include the vendor, the user community and others.
PURE’s investment in software, services and training has paid off in transparent, trustworthy, reliable, actionable insights, which all agree are critical to current and future success.