Tangam Systems, the global leader in recommendations-driven optimization software, can move the financial needle on the gaming floor for the casino industry, according to company President Maulin Gandhi.
The Toronto-area-based company with an office in Las Vegas has grown its business from table-game analytics to feature a new product called Slot Optimization & Data Analytics (SODA). It recently installed the software at the Sycuan Casino Resort in San Diego, which has 2,300 slot machines and 54 table games.
Sycuan is now the first resort-casino in North America to deploy Tangam’s complete suite of table-games yield management (TYM) and slot optimization (SODA) software across the gaming floor. That’s just the start, with more announcements coming, Gandhi said.
Forward-thinking casinos are turning to Tangam’s analytics products to unlock the full potential of their data and improve operational efficiency and the guest experience and maximize financial performance, he said.
Sycaun executives said they were amazed during their trial how quickly they got answers from their data through the lens in SODA and the roadmap it will provide in the future.
“Top-performing organizations like Sycuan are paving the way for the future of the industry by combining deep operational expertise, a data-driven culture, and the right software tools,” Gandhi said.
TYM turns data into actions to optimize spread planning, game mix, and dynamic management for table games. The SODA delivers unique insights to optimize slot floor mix and placement.
Tangam, which launched in 2004 by doing video analysis for casino table games, was a decade ahead of its time in “doing video analytics before video analytics were cool,” Gandhi said. It automated data collection on table games and determined dealer speed and mistakes, the number of hands, the player disadvantage, and game protection.
At that time, Gandhi said, they realized they were giving casino operators exponentially more data than they collected, but lacked software to use that data to make better decisions. They saw an opportunity on the business intelligence side about how to leverage the data they already collected to improve decision making on the gaming floor. That’s where its first business-intelligence product was born, the table-games yield management software or TYM.
“We were making sure operators aligned their table-game mix, open hours, and pricing to both real-time and forecasted player demand,” Gandhi said. “We brought intelligence to operators to help them decide the right number of tables for the right players at the right time and make sure the players had the games that they were there to play, enabling operators to be as efficient as possible with their staff.”
Tangam got their first customer in Canada in 2008-2009 and by 2021 had their technology installed in more than 8,000 tables in over 80 properties across nine countries, Gandhi said.
“In North America, we installed some of the largest chain operators like Caesars and MGM and tribal groups like the Seminoles and Mohegan Sun,” Gandhi said. “And we’re in some of the bigger chains in the Asia-Pacific region, like Galaxy Entertainment Group, Crown Resorts, Star Entertainment, and the SKYCITY group.”
When the pandemic hit in 2020, Gandhi said they were focused on what clients had asked them to do over the years: solve their slot-optimization problems in a similar way they solved them for table games.
“The problem with table games is that operators are relying on manually collected data, which can sometimes be unreliable,” Gandhi said. “TYM enables instant feedback with real-time recommendations and the data quality improves overnight, making the downstream decisions more reliable. With slots, operators already have accurate data, but just don’t have the right tools to help them find opportunities or recommendations that help drive performance improvements on the floor.”
In 2020, Gandhi said they accelerated their research and development for SODA to help operators maximize performance of their slots, whether it’s changing settings, adding titles, taking out underperforming titles, or moving the product based on financial performance trending and player loyalty.
“The operators are hungry for answers, not fancier reports,” Gandhi said. “We like to differentiate ourselves from reporting to next-generation recommendation-driven analytics. Our software tools, whether the table-game side or the slot side, start with the answers and specific recommendations to make a change to the floor, backed by intuitive visuals.”
Tangam follows up with an unbiased view of how the changes worked and whether they would help improve financial performance or cannibalize revenue from other machines, Gandhi said. They work with those on the team who understand both analytics and operations and operators that have the right culture is important, he said.
“We view our business as more of a partnership than a vendor-client relationship,” Gandhi said. “We align ourselves to the success of the partner. It’s hard to get analytics right and we have found the right formula by having the right products with the answers married to the right individuals to relay that message back to our clients.”
Gandhi said they call that “data democracy,” enabling organizations, regardless of their technological knowhow, to be confident about making the right decisions. And by combining slot and table-game optimization, he said, they can take a “holistic view of the entire floor” and give operators deeper insight into what makes the most sense based on their business volumes and player behavior and loyalty.
It’s about seeing the floor and how to allocate resources and decide on a strategy, Gandhi said. A lot of properties focus more on reporting and where Tangam comes in is allocating bandwidth to focus more on analytics. It’s easy for properties to get it wrong.
“The data tells the story and we can relay that story to the senior-most executives and force action,” Gandhi said. “We present data in a certain way to quantify what a floor change can do for the business and that’s when their eyes light up. It’s important to know last year and last quarter and year to date, but what change do they need to make now to improve their financial performance for the next quarter and next six months or year? That’s where we come in. Reporting is looking in hindsight. For us, it’s about foresight and how we can make it happen. That’s where we find the formula that has really worked for operators that have adopted analytics in the casino gaming space.”
It’s a large market with a lot of opportunities with operators in North America who don’t have individuals who come more from an analytics background, Gandhi said. That helps the process along, he added.
“We’re in a unique position when it comes to optimizing and having credibility in the space, because we’ve been on the table-game side for a little more than a decade and the last few years we’ve spent more time on the slot side. We have insight not just for one property, but into the best practices across different properties, and we’re able to cross-pollinate them. We take ideas from Asia-Pacific and bring them to North America and vice versa.”
Tangam posts videos and blogs to its website to help push out information to clients and non-clients alike.
