Tangam Systems: “Scorecards” for Analytics-Driven Management Decisions

With a myriad of data programs available at the fingertips of casino executives, extracting information is the easy part. Analyzing the data and putting it to practical use is the hard if not impossible part. This is where Tangam Systems plays an invaluable, if not unique, role.

Maulin Gandhi, a co-founder and president of Tangam Systems, summed up his company’s services. “We leverage data that casinos already have and turn that into recommendations in terms of what decisions operators can make to improve their performance, whether it’s their slots or their table games.”

“There is a wealth of data that is available for casino operators to analyze to let them know what changes they can make within the resources they have,” Gandhi added. “The marketing divisions of properties, through no fault of their own, do not have the expertise or the ability to take this data and make something truly meaningful around it the way Tangam Systems is prepared to do it.”

The end result, according to Gandhi, is better customer service and in return, better performance and increased profitability for operators by taking the guesswork out of the equation. Tangam Systems, he believes, recognizes that operators don’t want more analytics. They don’t want more spreadsheets or charts. They want answers.

“What we have succeeded in doing is having the ability to take all the data we collect and convert it into decisions for the operators,” he explained. “As it is now, you could ask 10 different floor managers to analyze data and you would get 10 different answers. Using our products, you get only one answer for the right course of action to take.”

The ultimate goal is to better align player demand to the property’s table games and slots. Tangam Systems takes all the variables into account to come up with a scientific answer as to what decisions an operator should be making to maximize their bottom line.

Gandhi acknowledged that operators aren’t analysts. Their responsibilities include making sure they deliver the right products and good customer service with no security issues of any sort. He said that in the early years of his company, Tangam Systems faced challenges. Operators balked at software designed to “tell them how to do their job.

“In the early days, the question was always, ‘Why do I need this?’” Gandhi recalled. “Nobody had ever used software analytics on the operations side before. But because of our early success with our customers, our product continued to evolve and grow. As I look at our customer base now, the question no longer is, ‘Why should I be doing this?’ Instead, it has become, ‘Why aren’t we already doing this?’

“Software analytics has become more of a standard in operations, because the world has evolved to be more analytical, more data-driven. Casino industry leaders are asking their staff, ‘How are we using data to make better decisions?’ And, ‘Why aren’t we using Tangam Systems?’”

Gandhi is firm in his belief that it is not for lack of ability that operators are unable to efficiently and effectively analyze data to make it work for the property. Rather, it’s a lack of having the right tools to make the decisions.

“That is the big shift we have seen,” he said. “Based upon our feedback, software analytics has become an essential tool for operators. It is in effect a ‘scorecard’ for every manager on the floor that is held accountable for decision making. That accountability and transparency never existed before.”

With the Tangam Systems solution on the table, according to Gandhi, there is complete transparency, accountability, and a full audit trail of all the decisions that are made. This creates more awareness around the data and analytics. More importantly, it creates a pleasing and customer-service-oriented environment.

Tangam Systems showcased a new SODA Marketing module and TYM platforms earlier this year at G2E, serving to reinforce the company’s reputation as the industry’s most trusted partner for gaming optimization.

The SODA Marketing module establishes a significant footprint for Tangam in slot-operations analytics by optimizing marketing spend on key groups such as free-play abusers, advantage players, and high-churn-risk players.

The next-gen TYM modules unveiled by Tangam at G2E demonstrated a reinvention, with new dynamic visualizations and enhanced flexibility for seamless optimization of table games for future planning in real-time.

“About five years ago, we entered the slot space in response to our customers requesting that we solve slots the way we solve table games,” Gandhi said. “With slots, there was a lot of analytics already available. But very little analytics existed that enabled operators to make better decisions.”

Tangam created a complete recommendation engine for slot operators to optimize the product offering, based on the same philosophy the company used for table-game sites — namely, understanding the performance of the machines and customer behavior.

“That was the toughest challenge for operators on the slot side,” Gandhi recalled. “That is, ‘marry’ the customer data with the slot data to truly understand behaviors. We have been very successful with our SODA slot optimization product fundamentally, because we are able to give operators the decisions that help them drive improvements in performance.”

Entire new layers of recommendations for slot operations have been uncovered by Tangam Systems, creating unprecedented awareness for marketing teams, revolving not only around abusers of marketing programs, but also segments of players that are being under-invested.

“I think it has been a home run so far,” Gandhi said. “The amount of opportunity we have been able to uncover for properties has increased by almost four or five-fold by revealing marketing opportunities that were previously hidden. Tangam has gotten very deep into slot analytics as we continue to uncover many new opportunities for casino marketing teams.”

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Originally published by CDC Gaming and can be accessed here or view on PDF.