Summary

In this episode, ReelMetrics CEO, Nick Hogan, and VP of Professional Services, Don Retzlaff, continue their discussion of Demand Driven Inventory Management (DDIM), the company's updated best practices model for building and maintaining world class slot mixes.

Transcript

Nick Hogan:

At ReelMetrics, we collect and analyze a ton of slot data. And, we’re hit up frequently for insights, tips, and tricks. So, we decided to do a webcast in which we present, discuss an otherwise nerd out on our work. Coming to you from our offices in lovely Leiden, The Netherlands, welcome to ReelCast.

Good morning, Don. How are things near (and this is a St. Louis nickname I picked up over the weekend), the Chess Capitol of the World.

Don Retzlaff:

<Laugh>. It’s very true. It’s, it’s a beautiful late winter day, little breezy today. We had winds like 50 miles an hour today, but we are definitely the chess city of the world. The Chess Hall of Fame is located in St. Louis, and there’s a lot of major tournaments that are held in St. Louis, and the collegiate champions have been from St. Louis for years, so it is definitely a big chess town.

Nick Hogan:

Yeah. What I was, I was reading that there’s a Missouri billionaire in his seventies. He goes by the name of Tyrannosaurus Rex. Have you ever heard of this dude?

Don Retzlaff:

<Laugh> Oh, yeah.

Nick Hogan:

Ok. So he’s apparently obsessed with the game, and has poured tens of millions of dollars into the sport locally. So there, there are three local universities now that offer full ride chess scholarships. Webster even has an institute that’s headed by a grandmaster, and they’re now afterschool chess programs at more than 100 local schools. So quite a <laugh>, quite a factoid to to pick up. And, and here’s the kicker, Don: I checked this morning, and you can bet on chess. So,

Don Retzlaff:

Really?

Nick Hogan:

Yeah. Yeah. So if you’re looking for a new hobby, you won’t have to drive far to handicap the next generation of chess Champions.

Don Retzlaff:

I guess. <Laugh>. Ok. I’ve bet on a lot of things in my life, but never chess.

Nick Hogan:

Okay. Yeah. My, my kids played it for a while, then they got bored. So, I guess I kind of went the same, same direction as a kid. Oh, well.

Don Retzlaff:

My dad taught me how to play chess when I was six years old.

Nick Hogan:

Oh, wow. Okay. So you’ve been at it for a long time. But, the bug never really, truly bit you?

Don Retzlaff:

Yeah, I, I go for years without playing a game, but thankfully in the age of computers, you can now play games online versus, back in the day I was playing games by mail.

Nick Hogan:

Oh, wow. Okay.

Don Retzlaff:

<Laugh>. Yeah, you have a postcard and you change, you’d make your moves via postcard.

Nick Hogan:

Oh, wow. Okay. So like, you’d make a move every five days or something like that?

Don Retzlaff:

Pretty much.

Nick Hogan:

Okay. <laugh>. Alright. Well, I thought today, Don and let’s see, this is our second episode of the, the second season. So I thought we could just kind of dive right in during the intro this morning and address a couple of listener questions. We had quite a few interesting queries float in during the last month. So I thought it’d be nice to touch upon two of them. So the first comes from a listener in the American Northeast who says, “Hi, guys. Loved the best practices episode. During the setup, Nick stated that Marketing should have a seat at the table as, as it pertains to, to inventory management. But, I don’t believe you guys expanded upon this. So, can you provide a bit more detail? So first many thanks for the, the question.s

It’s a, it’s a great one. Now, in addressing it what I’d say is it’s, it’s first important to explore a little bit Marketing’s traditional role within gaming organizations. And I’m not saying that this is, is universal, but it’s, it’s certainly quite widespread. And it’s this notion that Marketing’s job is to bring people into the venue and its Operations’ job to give them reason to come back. And so as such, Marketing traditionally within gaming has, has focused more on the Marketing Communications side of the equation. So these are ad buys email marketing, snail mail, promotions et cetera. While operations has been the organization really focused on the Product Marketing, so the selection, pricing, placement promotion of whatever we place on our “shelves”. Now we call our best practices stacked Demand Driven Inventory Management or DDIM for a reason.s

And that is that everything, so all critical slot decisions are based on evidentiary demand, and you get to that evidentiary demand by analyzing player data in exhaustive detail. And the department that typically manages these data sets and is most experienced in with mining them is Marketing. Yet, when we look at soft polls, when we, we go out and we’re, we’re talking to gaming organizations, what we see is that Marketing almost never has a role in the inventory management within gaming organizations. And in fact, in a disturbingly large number of organizations, there are actually policies in place which prohibit Marketing from sharing player data with other departments. And as we’ve discussed you know, we’re not aware of any other retail-oriented industry where Marketing is, you know, so isolated from the inventory side of the equation. And when we look at the waste levels in, in slot product, trust me : It shows . Now, a question is, you know, do, do we get pushback from Operations on, on Marketing’s involvement?s

Initially, yeah, we can. However, when the nuance of what Marketing contributions bring to the table start entering the fray, this is when we see that…

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