Casino controller

Steve Beason, Enterprise CTO, Scientific Games

The casino-management systems of yesteryear were primarily used to link slot machines together in one casino to provide real-time slot monitoring, slot data collection, and casino accounting for both internal reporting and information required by gaming jurisdictions and regulators. They later evolved to include player’s club management and a patron database, enabling casinos to track, reward, and segment players.

Fast-forward to today, in which companies like Scientific Games offer sophisticated and full-feature casino-management systems that support the entire casino resort and go far beyond to offer powerful, customizable tools that are designed to deliver operating efficiencies and drive incremental revenue across a casino operations’ entire enterprise.

The newest casino-management system marketing tools are robust, offering an array of player-centric gaming innovations that create value and build player loyalty, increase slot machine revenue, strengthen player engagement, and provide casino patrons added fun and rewards.

Player-loyalty systems, while not a new component of casino-management systems, have evolved to become significantly more sophisticated, featuring powerful, versatile industry-leading tools that engage players through patron-rewards programs, player extracts and analysis, group and promotion tracking, multiple-casino support, hotel integration, direct mail and more.

  The newest casino- management system marketing tools are robust, offering an array of player- centric gaming innovations that create value and build player loyalty   

The industry’s most sophisticated providers of casino-management systems and player-loyalty systems offer more than just tracking of slot play; they offer real-time solutions for table games, enabling casinos to track and reward table and poker players as they do slot players. Cutting-edge table and poker management systems replace the manual rating process with electronic automation, creating a paperless environment and eliminating the hassle and delays of entering and updating ratings into the casino-management system. Through mobile touch-screen interface, casinos can track players, configure and manage tournament functions, manage wait lists, send player alerts, and much more.

All this data, available through a casino-management system and other systems, enables casino personnel to analyze and act on the extensive data using state-of-art business intelligence tools. These solutions include mobile-enabled live floor views of the casino that track slot performance and identify carded and uncarded “hot” players, along with powerful applications that provide information and control through visualization profiling, campaign management, reporting dashboards, and predictive analytics.

Another powerful marketing tool available with advanced casino-management systems on networked floors is picture-in-picture-style touch-screen displays on each gaming machine that provide self-service account access, drink ordering, and enable casinos to communicate and market directly to each player, offering customized messages, offers, and rewards based on the player’s profile. By turning every game into a robust communications device, casinos can reward their customer’s right at the gaming machine as they play, announce a new promotion in split seconds, and personalize messages to their most valuable players. These same displays facilitate powerful systems-based promotions, instant slot tournaments, random bonuses, mystery-style jackpots, and virtual-racing events, adding dramatic levels of excitement on casino floors, driving incremental play, and encouraging players to keep enjoying the experience.

In , one large casino resort in the Northeast used a virtual-racing application across its , square foot networked casino floor to win three world records for “World’s Largest Slot Tournament,” “Most Slot Machines Running the Same Game Simultaneously,” and “Largest Virtual Race.”

Today’s most advanced casino-management systems also offer a host of mobile applications. To provide service operating efficiencies and enhancements, intelligent rule-driven applications can monitor the casino floor and send critical messages to casino staff on their mobile devices and tablets, automating and eliminating the traditional casino dispatch system and other outdated forms of communication. These mobile applications cover common needs that may arise: jackpot processing, player registration, host management, ticket redemption, proactive slot maintenance, and more. While the casino-management system monitors, these tools manage– informing casino employees where they need to go and what they need to do.

On the patron-facing side, today’s most advanced casino-management systems empower land-based casinos to increase engagement with their customers at home, on-the-go, and during each visit to the casino floor through digital customer experiences. Mobile platforms allow players to access their player’s club account; book hotel rooms, spa treatments, dinner reservations, and more; and receive highly targeted, personalized messages and offers from the casino via geo-fencing solutions. When coupled with an online social casino, the apps allow players to play their favorite casino games on their mobile devices and socially interact with other players. And a new in-venue wagering platform turns every player’s personal mobile device into an incremental gaming position on the casino floor, making it possible for players to enjoy their favorite casino games on and off the casino floor; from the comfort of their hotel room; and even at the casino’s night club, sports bar, and poolside cabana. Pre-determined Wi-Fi or BLE areas of the casino resort give players the choice to play slots, table games, and more from their smartphone or tablet, receiving credit for their play through connection to the casino-management system.

There’s no doubt, the casino-management systems of today and tomorrow must continue to go far beyond slot accounting and player tracking to offer powerful marketing, bonus, self-service, and customer service features that connect to a casino’s entire enterprise, including web and mobile applications, social media, and free-play social sites. The Scientific Games interconnected gaming enterprise solution enables casino operators to capitalize on the extensive data generated by all its systems to make better decisions that can lead to greater operational efficiencies, cost reductions, and most importantly, incremental revenue.