Major Gaming Company

Summary

A major gaming company’s revenue analyzing and reporting system was plagued with problems stemming from disconnected transactional systems and error-prone manual processes.

By deploying a deFacto solution the company was able to eliminate these problems, integrate and streamline its reporting processes, and enjoy a host of benefits.

Problem

A gaming industry leader dealt with millions of casino transactions daily. However, managing and analyzing revenue and other business data became burdensome because the environment in which reporting took place was antiquated and inefficient.

Reports were created by manual and automated data processes from multiple transactional systems. The problems associated with this system were many:

• Many reports had to be accessed and aggregated, which required a lot of manual entry and manipulation, leaving room for error.
• The process for estimating costs was highly manual and time-consuming.
• Multitudes of data had to be gathered and analyzed to understand and optimize costs and guest experiences, such as slot data and table revenue.
• Many reports had to be scanned to be e-mailed, which also took away valuable resource time.

Because of these problems, the reporting system required an abundance of manpower not only from the finance department but from the IT group as well. Because transactions and reporting were key to the company’s quality of service and overall success, its management team realized the need to deploy a better platform for data integration and reporting.

Solution

After investigating potential replacement solutions, the company chose deFacto Global because of its multidimensional platform and dynamic report building and analyzing capabilities.

For a company with many properties, functionality (including drill-down and trend analysis) was an important requirement to navigate through the many reports that had to be generated. Further enhancements were achieved by applying customized ETL (extract, translate, and load) processes to load and lock data. The deFacto system also enabled data to be stored down to a very detailed line item (including account, department, and property) without having to generate multiple reports.

The general-ledger data for the company’s properties was gathered from several sources. By implementing deFacto, the finance group was able to load and maintain all account-specific data under one roof. They also gained the flexibility to have specific users run on-demand packages according to each property and produce actuals on a daily or monthly basis, to better serve that property individually and the corporation as a whole. Finally, the Customer took advantage of Book Publishing, which enabled multiple users to run and publish a given set of reports and automatically have them in the correct format needed.

Results

The company realized a host of benefits by implementing deFacto Global as its reporting and daily revenue management tool:

• The reporting process was streamlined for daily data entry from multiple sources of data, allowing for automatic input and real-time access.
• Cost estimating became automatic and more efficient.
• Outdated labor-intensive processes were eliminated, replaced with a more efficient process to load, store, calculate, organize, analyze, and report data.
• With the click of a button, the financial analysts are able to generate reports and detailed line items on a consolidated basis and for each individual property under ownership.
• DeFacto’s data-lock feature gave users improved data integrity and control over when submissions and entries are posted.

The financial group was able to eliminate manual mistakes by taking advantage of business rules within the application to handle frequent standard calculations that were previously controlled by Excel formulas. The financial team also was able to improve its cost-estimating process by developing and maintaining input schedules using fixed and variable components over a specific time frame. With a more advanced system of report distribution, time efficiencies increased to focus overall on the new process.

Based on the success of its integrated data warehouse, the company moved forward with implementing an additional model within their current PM application to maintain and improve on its Corporate Tax Reporting. Similar to its daily revenue management, the company needed improved processes and efficiencies developing reports and controlling accounting data to be updated and submitted on-demand, specifically from multiple sources. This project is still underway and coincides with updates to its existing model.

About the Client

The client is one of the nation’s leaders in casino entertainment and prides itself on offering exceptional customer service. This dynamic entity is able to withhold the sense of a family-owned business while continuing to grow across the nation and deliver valuable service to not only its guests but its communities as well. The company continues to grow through acquisitions and maintain competent members of its organization to ensure a high-quality service is delivered to guests at all times.