Chumash Casino Resort
The Chumash Casino Resort is a popular and successful gaming and hospitality establishment in Santa Ynez, California that offers 24-hour gaming, live entertainment, fine dining, and an AAA Four Diamond-rated hotel and spa. Business users at the organization have high expectations for access to information about operations across the multi-faceted enterprise. To meet these needs, company leaders engaged Visus LLC to design and deploy a custom data warehouse solution that would provide better ownership and control over enterprise data and support business intelligence (BI) initiatives.
Visus created a metadata-driven data warehouse and extract-transform-load (ETL) system that extracts data from various in-house information systems and loads it into a data warehouse designed for query and analysis. IT professionals at the resort can generate internal reports from this repository to provide executives and business users with a detailed and accurate view of business performance.
Visus provided an extensible and flexible data warehouse and ETL foundation for us that is easily understood and easily managed.
"We were looking for a trusted partner with the skill, technical knowledge, and experience to develop a data warehouse that we could own and extend," says Kenneth Esparza, relationship manager at Chumash Casino Resort. "Visus provided an extensible and flexible data warehouse and ETL foundation for us that is easily understood and easily managed. It gives us the ability to provide our business users and senior leadership with the operational information and business intelligence that they need across all areas."
Easy-to-Manage System Extends BI Across the Enterprise
Business analysts, managers, and other users at Chumash Casino Resort need information about how many patrons come through the doors, what hours are busiest, parking capacities, food service, guest room occupancy, and a myriad of other details about the business. Many users at the company have experience with business intelligence. For years the casino resort used an off-the-shelf BI solution. But it was limited to only accessing data about certain areas of the business.
"Our business is growing fast and we onboard new applications very quickly," Esparza says. "Users increasingly ask to see data from more systems. As these users matured in their business process and expectations for information, their requirements increased. We couldn’t extend our previous BI platform because we didn’t own it. Bringing in data from new applications was impossible."
Visus experts architected a data warehouse solution from the ground up that the Chumash Casino Resort now fully owns and can extend to grow with the business. The Visus team custom-built the system for the specific requirements of the business using Microsoft SQL Server Business Intelligence tools including SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS).
Components of the new data warehouse solution include a schema that represents the business, back-end dimension tables, and an ETL system to pull data from various sources such as gaming, reservations, point of sale, and financial systems. Metadata is extracted along with primary data to give the data warehouse a rich data set that simplifies management and maintenance. This foundation enables IT professionals at the resort to easily extend the system and onboard new applications to meet ongoing business needs.
The partnership with Visus allows us to focus on building and executing our strategic technology plan while alleviating resource availability concerns. By integrating the Visus team into our resource pool, we are able scale our efforts to meet the needs of the enterprise. The additional capabilities as well as the additional capacity are crucial in helping us to reach our business goals.
"The partnership with Visus allows us to focus on building and executing our strategic technology plan while alleviating resource availability concerns," says John Ormond, executive director of technology services at Chumash Casino Resort. "By integrating the Visus team into our resource pool, we are able scale our efforts to meet the needs of the enterprise. The additional capabilities as well as the additional capacity are crucial in helping us to reach our business goals."
Visus added operational financial reporting capabilities to the data warehouse foundation. Previously if data analysts at the resort wanted to do basic financial reporting, they had to access the company's financial systems, copy the data they needed, and manually enter it into spreadsheets to compile a report. Numerous time-consuming manual steps were required. The Visus solution automates this process by combining data from two pre-existing financial systems to provide a unified view so analysts can do the operational financial reporting they need for the business.
A Trusted Long-Term Technology Partner
Visus and The Chumash Casino Resort have enjoyed a productive relationship for many years. Visus LLC previously created a public-facing web portal that allows customers of the resort to easily purchase tickets to concerts and events. The system also allows the Chumash Casino team to easily manage ticket prices and holds, create and manage new seating configurations for concerts, bingo tournaments, poker tournaments, and boxing matches. Based on the success of that project, company leaders at the resort were confident that Visus had the expertise to help them with their needs for a data warehouse.
The Visus team was very adept at turning our ideas into a workable solution.
"The Visus team was very adept at turning our ideas into a workable solution," Esparza says. "We described what we hoped to be able to do with a data warehouse. They came back with the metadata-driven framework that perfectly met our needs. They are very good at listening to requirements and understanding the vision, and very good at implementing it."
Visus team members met with personnel at the casino multiple times in the early discovery and planning stages to review the vision for the project in depth. "They listened to the expectations of our business users and helped us adjust our vision for what the structure of the solution should be," Esparza continues. "They also helped us understand best-practices and advised us about what kinds of data access we should provide to our users."
With the Visus solution, the Chumash Casino Resort can now keep pace with business needs for data access. The flexible and extensible data warehouse and ETL system enables the resort to expand its data architecture as needed for reporting and analysis across the enterprise.
"Our analysts can easily access views in the data warehouse and put data into a presentable form for analysis," Esparza says. "This enables us to more clearly understand every aspect of our business. Users can quickly spot high-level trends and make forecasts. We implicitly trust the numbers that come out of this system. The solution Visus delivered is everything we hoped it would be."
The solution Visus delivered is everything we hoped it would be.”