Cricket is one of the most popular sports in the world and is by far the most popular bat-and-ball game played internationally. Developed in England in the 16th century, the modern game of cricket expanded with the British Empire, becoming widely popular across the globe, particularly in India, Pakistan, Australia, South Africa, and the West Indies.

Melbourne Cricket Club (MCC), an iconic sports and entertainment organization founded in 1838, is one of the oldest sports clubs in Australia. MCC is responsible for managing the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) which houses events for the Australian Football League (AFL), local and international cricket, and other large-scale events.

Cumbersome manual data collection and reporting

The popularity of cricket has always drawn large crowds, but prior to the evolution of the knowledge economy and advances driven by digital transformation, it was difficult to harness the massive data set those crowds could represent. Managing real-time data for crowds of upwards of 100,000 across a network of vendors during half-time poses its own logistical challenges.

Recognizing an opportunity, MCC knew that it needed to update how it collected, processed, and leveraged this data in order to transform it into an asset that could serve its business, support better organizational decision making, and provide new experiences for customers and fans.

MCC piloted a number of data-centric initiatives to enhance strategic and operational decision making. A new requirement came into focus – a comprehensive architectural roadmap to assess their data assets, software, and current-state architecture would act as a critical stepping-stone toward supporting their planned initiatives. What’s more, MCC knew that it needed help in order to achieve its goals.

MCC required a comprehensive strategic and architectural roadmap that spanned their existing and planned data assets, software, and architecture and created alignment between their strategy, data initiatives, and company vision.

Beginning its transformation into a data-driven organization that captures business value from its data assets, MCC narrowed its focus to a single use case – using attendance and sales data to improve catering experience for attendees during events.

MCC’s objectives for this initiative included:

1. Mitigating key-person dependency risk by digitizing reporting logic
2. Eliminating manual effort by automating data sourcing
3. Supporting business decision-making with timely, accurate and relevant information
4. Providing a detailed view across Food and Beverage, and Attendance to support its in-ground partners

Using Power BI to build a scalable and cost-effective solution

MCC reached out to Microsoft partner Revenite for help. Revenite is an Australian consultancy that provides advisory and delivery services across data and analytics space. Revenite works with organizations investing in impacting their business performance by harnessing data supported insights.

Revenite has been a Microsoft exclusive partner since its founding three years ago and is continuing to lead delivery across the latest advanced data and analytics services in the Microsoft Azure suite.

Revenite carried out an in-depth assessment of MCC’s current and future requirements to build a real-time data integration and business intelligence platform in May 2018. The assessment included a review of its existing and planned data sources, volumetrics, and available ‘out-of-the-box’ solutions to support the requirements.

Once the assessment was completed, Revenite designed a Lambda data architecture to enable a flexible, scalable, and cost-effective platform that met the needs of MCC.

Leveraging MCC’s existing licenses and investment into the Microsoft data ecosystem, an Azure Cloud and Power BI solution was designed in partnership with the Microsoft team. Revenite and Microsoft architects worked together to ensure best practices were followed in the building of MCC’s new real-time business intelligence platform.

Microsoft has worked in close partnership with Revenite to help MCC achieve its data platform vision. Microsoft staff made themselves available for planning workshops and developing numerous viable technical options for MCC’s specific use cases alongside Revenite. Microsoft also delivered a demonstration to MCC, highlighting items relevant to the MCC’s future use cases.

Streamlining data collection and providing real-time reporting

MCC is still uncovering benefits and distilling future use cases from this initial effort. The solution has already been widely adopted and is adding business value.

In particular, the delivery of in-event reporting on key performance indicators (KPIs) via a mobile experience has allowed MCC to provide real-time reporting while reducing the effort needed to collect and collate data.

Reducing costs and food wastage with live catering dashboards

Epicure Management had previously received sales metrics during the game every 15 minutes via email—a report collated manually by a staff member during the hours leading up to the event and updated throughout the event.

The release of the MCC catering dashboard provides real-time sales metrics (including actuals versus forecast), updated every 30 seconds. The integration and delivery of updated information is fully automated which reduces the need for the manual production of the Epicure reports. The new MCC Power BI solution also provides updates over the full course of the event, while the prior solution provided updates only for the first two hours.

As a result of the new Power BI application, Epicure is now making impactful pre-planning and in-game business decisions. David Mercer, former head of Epicure, stated “These BI projects will lead to potential cost savings of 1.5 percent in labor ($450,000 AUD per year) and 1 percent COGs via reduced wastage ($300,000 AUD per year)”.

Deriving new insights into crowd dynamics with live attendance dashboards

Previously, MCC management and executives received SMS text messages every 30 minutes providing updates on attendance numbers. The new attendance dashboard, delivered via a mobile experience, provides updated attendance information every 30 seconds. The information, beyond simply being more current, enables insights not previously available.

For example, insights about attendee movement during event intervals, such as quarter-time or half-time, can show details such as how many patrons exit the grounds for a break; on Anzac day, the data showed that 3,000 MCC members came to the ground early to get seats. Understanding how crowds move throughout the grounds, MCC now positions itself to provide better experiences for its customers—optimizing how staff are deployed and how attendees interface with key services.

Revenite’s solution has given MCC the ability to make informed, impactful and timely decisions and provided insights into customer behavior during events – neither or which were possible before engaging with Revenite. Reduction in costs for MCC and their catering vendors is one of the many realized and ongoing benefits enabled by data for the tenured and prestigious club.