Introduction
In a time when many industries are facing plateaus or declines, one industry that often rises above global economy trends is the hospitality industry. Governments are fully aware of the draw and commercial promise of this industry. Gaming and entertainment licenses issued are at an all-time high, both at the east and west corners of the globe. It is also one of the most adaptable and dynamic industries, with new trends emerging regularly across the globe. Amongst these trends is to have integration of several complimentary channels to hospitality e.g. Gaming, Sport, Entertainment, Culture and so on. This covers a spectrum that would cater to the young and old,
overcome seasonal shortcomings and provide stickiness to the captive consumers. Children may enjoy theme park activities, adults may go for gaming, and there also show events that can be enjoyed by both ends of the spectrum. Consumers are also expecting greater empowerment to their hospitality experience. This include the ability to explore and consume greater amount of services, and expecting those services to integrate seamlessly. All this to be done at the fingertips of their smart devices. Further sophisticated touches such as personalisation and recall of history creates that touch to retain consumer loyalty to the brand and offering. E.g. a well-timed and targeted discount offer for a similar room during a similar booking season, bundled with event tickets that were purchased by the consumer in a past year. Business purpose usage of entertainment and hospitality facilities are a key component to a steady revenue.
MICE (Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, and Exhibitions) requirements are getting increasingly sophisticated. Besides this, many seek a one stop solution, non-traditional venues and to combine business and leisure. There is now the trend to provide “experience tourism” in the MICE.
The Predicament
It’s a Hot Mess. A key challenge in this industry is the plethora of services that integrate together to deliver the service to the customer and managing operators. Typical end to end flow would have begun with researching
deals, booking travel, reserving accommodation, and securing entertainment. Along the way, complimentary services such as F&B, safety and insurance, mass and targeted marketing media etc. also come into play. Majority of systems are silos, with archaic integration mechanisms, but always expected to work in serial or even parallel fashion.
For the industry operators and managers, an uphill challenge awaits to not only collect information from the services, but to draw insight and conclusions of how the information affect each other. How would you detect and address alerts quicker, draw lessons learnt, plan smoother services delivery?
It’s a Long Wait to your turn. After the consumer’s long battle to finally arrive at the heart of the entertainment medium of choice, there is the inevitable wait time to get to his turn. The number one turn off to the consumer, is the perceived unproductive wait time to reach the service. This could include, being granted entry to the event venue, being granted exit from the event venue, no alternative entertainment options during waits, no come back later options, and the list goes on.
How would you identify bottlenecks, design for crowd control, and design for adaptable crowd experiences? Do you track and understand your patron behaviour and possible future behaviours?
It’s a fight for the consumer’s attention. However, this means bigger competition for those in the industry. Consumers spend an estimated 18 hours per day surrounded by content channels. How would we entice and generate interest into our offerings, capture successfully the bigger slice of the market share pie, and most crucially, retain our captures to produce recurring business in the future? Considering the fluidity of human sentiment, what if you had to ask different questions at different times to find the specific insight you need to
be competitive?
The Solution
True insights need to draw from all data sources to provide a holistic view of the service offerings. Patterns, more often than not, need to be correlated together to uncover insight. Structured and unstructured data
should not be segregated or analysed separately due to format or complexity.
This obstacle is multi-faceted, beginning with storage, then integration, finally accessibility for analysis. Fusionex Analytics GIANT orchestrates a data lake, pooling together the disparate data storages or streams, so that it may be processed as a whole. Original data formats are preserved, ensuring complete fidelity with original source systems. This ensures complete compatibility to existing systems, reduce testing complexity and avoid need for retrofits for future consumption of the data sources and streams.
To tackle the number crunching, GIANT is based on the Hadoop architecture. This design enables distributed processing of data, to have massively parallel data crunching ability on multiple data storages. This liberates IT from over or under provisioning hardware and network resources, and gives the business lower cost to maximise data and IT value. GIANT’s real time querying capability ensures latest and most up to date view of the data states. This renders point in time batch processing data warehouses obsolete. As this is real time, the information is piping hot and fresh, allowing decision makers and operations team the maximum lead time to take action on the insight.
GIANT avoids any pre-designed query or dashboarding to be hardcoded into the solution. As data is an ever evolving beast, it is impractical to only use a fixed set of query or paradigms to analyse the data. GIANT is able to
create insights using new queries entered in real time. This places the power of analysis back to the business and operations team, without lead time for system change request, development, testing and deployment.
With the compelling technology benefits, this opens up the operations and the business to a world of possibilities.
Internet Of Things (IOT)
The most advanced crowd management techniques are often pioneered and refined by the hospitality industry e.g. hotel MICE, theme parks, and replicated later for use at sporting events, music concerts and the like.
Custom sensors to observe patron behaviour in the field. These can be used in conjunction with data collection systems to interpret measurements like patron quantity, patron wait time, patron visits in a calendar year, most
popular and least popular visited area and so on. This can be fed back to GIANT to further derive insights from patron behaviour.
IoT can also be used to transmit targeted marketing information based patron location. This can encourage patron visits, gamify visit wait time, and incentivise patron loyalty.
The Roadmap To Get It Done
Conventional analytics storyboarding for the lifecycle requires a time consuming process of understanding and documenting the design of existing data structures before any pooling or data warehousing task can begin. Fusionex Analytics GIANT and our proven methodology turns this convention around on its head. Fusionex Analytics GIANT is used to construct the data lake by extracting the raw data sources quickly into the Hadoop Distributed File Systems HDFS. This can be speedily done without the traditional and lengthy process of lead time to transform and cleanse data prior to this process.
What about those items without clearly defined data structures e.g. streams from IoT?
Fusionex Analytics GIANT is fully integrated with capabilities to ingest fast machine data and sensor feeds. This can be sourced from traditional sensor devices, beacons data, social media feeds and the like. Do not build another bridging middleware to get these items into the HDFS.
Complexity reduced, time saved, precious resources conserved. Let’s get cracking on the next bit of
meat.
Many face a hurdle thinking that analytics and big data is strain on the IT portion of the business. Governance and compliance to security concerns, the need for ongoing maintenance to ensure system is performing up to par, and how to ensure the systems work well and recover easily when things go wrong.
Security is of paramount concern when so much precious data is being collected into store. Fusionex Analytics GIANT has a federated architecture to exert the authorization for the right identity with only the needed access rights. This not only govern access to the components of the system, but to the data accessibility itself. The Fusionex framework, industry proven over years of enterprise experience in production scenarios, gives the solution a solid base. This framework handles all the optimization such as caching and compression to ensure speedy performance and robust high availability for the system.
A well-defined and well-designed storyboard or dashboard is great for decision making and executive discussions. A flexible and evolving dashboard is even better. Fusionex Analytics GIANT Smart Query places the power back into the hands of the business and operations user. Use natural language to ask questions directly to the GIANT engine, users can type the question which they wish to find the answers for and GIANT will intelligently pull the data out for the user to be displayed in a graphical format.
Figures and facts, charts and graphs are only useful when it leads the readers to ask further and more specific questions. This specialty of GIANT will encourage the user to keep exploring and brainstorming, keeping the queries dynamic and fresh.
No data analysis requirement study, no business or technical design document, no development or deployment, no fuss. Just business.
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