CASINO MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
recently integrated technology from MicroStrategy into its Oasis 360 casino management system – which it says is the most widely-used in North America, with more than 270 sites live – to provide reporting with dashboard-style interfaces, as well as predictive modelling of likely future trends on the gaming floor, based on the data amassed in the past. Said President Nick Khin: “MicroStrategy’s interactive dashboards with advanced data visualisations will allow our clients to view complex data in an easily understood and graphically appealing manner to improve decision-making.”
Aristocrat is also making its casino management
system available on the BlackBerry, iPhone and iPad, for managers on the move.
While actual gameplay is beyond the remit of a management system, the process of configuring the slot floor with tools like IGT’s sbX Floor Manager is closely linked to the broader tasks of monitoring and managing games and players.
Like Konami, Bally and Aristocrat, another gaming
company that also offers a management system is International Game Technology (IGT), which complements its sbX server-based gaming technology with the Casinolink management system and EZ Pay ticketing software. All three have recently been deployed at Grand Casino Helsinki, for example.
Indeed, sbX itself is a good example of the
crossover between casino management systems and server-based gaming. While actual gameplay is beyond the remit of a management system, the process of configuring the slot floor with tools like IGT’s sbX Floor Manager is closely linked to the broader tasks of monitoring and managing games and players. Explained
Chuck Hickey, VP of Slot Operations at Barona Resort and Casino in San Diego, which was a pilot site for sbX before rolling it out fully: “With the addition of sbX, we at Barona have an advantage over our competition because we have the ability to quickly identify and adapt to our guests’ needs. We may see
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our guests choosing one type of game over another and, with sbX, we can quickly change directions on game types to meet their demands. We are not dependent on the next mail delivery to configure a new, hot game – it is simply a matter of scheduling a few minutes in the server room to adapt our games to the ever- changing preferences of our guests.”
Konami, too, stresses the importance of keeping an
eye on what’s being played the most, in terms of both time and money. This element of its casino management system is built around a hardware box, the Network Accessed Mother Board or NAMB, which not only examines the data it has already amassed on individual players, games and machines to look for patterns – so-called data mining – but also scans new data as it arrives in real time. Underlining the significance of reliability for casino management systems, Konami says it has 99.98 per cent uptime, which translates to less than 20 seconds of downtime per day.
These, then, are the vital components of almost
every casino management system – collection and analysis of data on individual machines, games, and where possible players; presentation of that analysis in a format that’s easy for management to grasp and act upon; integration with financial and other systems; and management of operations such as loyalty programmes.
But there’s a huge range of other functionality that
can be provided too. For example, Swiss Gaming Corporation offers modules for employee scheduling and key security. Table Trac’s marketing and promotional module will manage SMS communications. Smart Card Integrators says its system will help create “a totally cashless, printer-less casino floor”. The system from Today’s Business Computers – developed by former Atlantic City Tropicana Director of Management Information Systems Louis Vilardo – includes software for managing a visitor service kiosk as well as the more common modules. And then online casinos have their own ecosystem of suppliers such as Playtech.
But there’s no need, of course, for any one site to
roll out all of this. A tight definition of what the casino needs, led not by technical possibility but by business objectives and challenges, will deliver the specification for a management system that quickly pays for itself – and, as a bonus, makes the life of human casino managers a little easier.
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