by Alex Woodie
Las Vegas Sands, a $6 billion collection of casino resorts around the world, has selected business intelligence (BI) software vendor SAS to help it gain more insight into the behavior and spending patterns of its patrons, and to ultimately boost profits. The company says the new SAS solution easily handles volumes of data that challenged its previous BI tools.
The Las Vegas Sands Corp. (LVSC) owns three properties in Las Vegas, including The Venetian, The Palazzo, and the Sands Expo and Convention Center; three in Southeast Asia, including The Sands Macao, The Venetian Macao, and The Marina Bay Sands in Singapore; and the Sands Casino Resort in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. LVSC is a longtime user of the IBM i server, and sources its core property management application from Agilysys.
Like all casinos, LVSC is continually looking for an edge against competitors. Besides making sure that its amenities and its staff meet the expectations of its customers, one of the best ways to gain an edge is to utilize the vast amounts of customer-related data that it collects.
The holy grail in this respect is aligning its marketing and promotional activities with its demand forecast. In the casino business, supply, demand, and pricing often interact in non-linear ways, and this phenomenon has driven a need for sophisticated BI solutions that can generate clear paths of actions for maximizing revenue, profits, or occupancy (perhaps not all at the same time).
LVSC decided to implement a SAS solution called Patron Value Optimization, which uses SAS analytics, as well as a hotel revenue optimization software from SAS subsidiary IDeaS. The combination of predictive analytics, data mining, and graphical campaign management gives LVSC the capability to create the most profitable pricing strategies for each type of customer and season.
While SAS's Java-based software doesn't run on the IBM i server, it utilizes data collected in LVSC's operational systems. Data collected from different parts of operation--including the casino, convention center, hotel, stores, restaurants, nightclubs, and museums--are combined to present a 360-degree view of the customer. By predicting how much a customer is liable to spend on a trip to an LVSC property, it can align its demand-generating activities (advertising and discounts) with the actual prices it charges.
Rom Hendler, LVSC's senior vice president and chief marketing officer, is impressed with the software's capability so far. "SAS enables us to access, aggregate, sort and view any available data point at any time," Hendler says in a press release. "Other analytics software collapsed under this heavy load of campaign management records, but SAS handles it with ease, digging deeply into the data to predict future customer needs so we can tailor offers."
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This article was corrected. Las Vegas Sands does not use revenue management software from Agilysys, as the story originally stated. IT Jungle regrets the error.
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