Don’t Be Fast and Dumb

It’s Vegas, baby! The high rollers are rolling, the roulette wheel is spinning, and you’re losing at the slot machine. Maybe you’re starting to feel a little uncomfortable about how much of your money you’ve lost to the one-armed bandit. Just one more try and maybe….

That’s when you feel a gentle tap on your shoulder, and look behind you to find the casino’s “luck ambassador” offering you two free tickets to a show on the strip. Good-bye slot machine, hello Engelbert.

What’s changed your luck is a new business process in use by casino operator Harrah’s Entertainment Inc. to keep the gambling experience profitable but pleasant for its loyal customers. Thanks to loyalty cards, the casino knows a lot about its clientele, and can calculate their pain thresholds when it comes to losing money. In the past, the casino might have made up to customers whose gambling experience turned sour after the fact, sending them a gift or special offer in the mail after reviewing their data. Today, making up is easy to do, in real-time.

Real-time Data, Real-Time Decisions

“They don’t want to take a lot of your money,” says Stephen Brobst, NCR Teradata CTO. “They want to take enough so that you still have a good experience.”

NCR has long been a leader in data mining, business intelligence and data warehousing services, and the NCR Teradata technology plays a key role in Harrah’s new business process.

Data from players who swipe their loyalty cards on the slot machines is fed into NCRs Teradata data warehouse, where it can be analyzed in real time. When a player goes past his comfortable loss level, a business process detects that event in the data warehouse and flags the luck ambassador to head to the machine with an enticing offer for the player before he gets too ticked off. Luck ambassadors and that business process could not have existed before Harrah’s deployed its Teradata system.

This is not your father’s enterprise data warehouse. The rise of the active enterprise data warehouse is enabling businesses to redesign and create new processes like this one, providing operational intelligence in real-time that gives decision-making capabilities to the frontlines of an organization. A traditional data warehouse is focused on strategic decision-making — the “corporate ivory tower,” as Brobst puts it. That’s important, but equally important to formulating strategy is using the data warehouse to execute that strategy.

“With the Teradata active enterprise data warehouse, you get the strategy and operational intelligence, in one single source of truth,” Brobst says. Brobst notes the technology is designed to support the requirements of companies as they move from early-stage implementations of their enterprise data warehouses, which they’ve deployed for strategic decision making, to an active data warehouse.