Standardize a CMS Rationalization Strategy

Drive greater value for your operations when you decouple your applications

Analyst Perspective

Casino management system (CMS) technology has come a long way. No longer focused just on slots, a CMS today is meant to help make more intelligent casino operations decisions and is a key component for both employee and guest experience. However, dissatisfaction with CMS vendors persists due to their struggle in keeping up with the needs of the industry. Although a bundled/single-vendor approach is not considered a viable long-term option, operators still need to take the time to understand the full potential of a CMS and either rationalize what capabilities need to be decoupled or face application sprawl.

Standardize a CMS rationalization strategy that assesses your CMS, analyzes decoupling inflection points and dispositions, scopes application categorization, and prioritizes relationship management.

Use this time to assess whether you must sustain or replace your casino management system

Monica Pagtalunan

Research Analyst, Industry
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Info-Tech Insight

Decoupling is inevitable; appropriate decoupling is essential. Rationalizing a decoupled module is necessary to fully understand the complexity of your technical architecture and business operations and maximize the module’s value and return on investment.

CMS dissatisfaction is evident

As the industry innovates, CMS vendors claim they innovate too.

Outside pressures and requirements of innovative casinos have encouraged CMS vendors to keep up with emerging trends.

“Our Las Vegas-based SYNKROS R&D team is continually engineering new improvements, tools, features and product offerings to meet and anticipate [industry] changes.”
– Tom Soukup, SVP & Chief Systems Product Office, Konami, quoted in Gaming America

“IGT embraces opportunities to collaborate with our customers in the development, and prioritization, of our next-generation system upgrades and advancements.”
– Ryan Reddy, SVP Product Marketing & Payments, IGT, quoted in Gaming America

… But casino operators still express dissatisfaction with the system.

• Casino management systems are not system-agnostic. It’s not as simple as a plug and play. Adding third-party capabilities becomes challenging for operators to implement and interface.
• Vendor lock-in causes feelings of being trapped by long contractual obligations. The cost of switching matters – it can be a multimillion-dollar decision. Operators must consider slot hardware, game mix, APIs, and interfaces.
• Unfairness due to vendor oligarchies. There is protest across the industry that big powerhouse casinos “own” CMS vendors, with more say in the system configuration roadmap. This explains the dissatisfaction smaller operators feel with CMS.

6.7

54%

The CMS is viewed as a support function rather than an enabler of growth

33% of surveyed marketing stakeholders gave their CMS a Net Promoter Score of 6/10 or below (SoftwareReviews, 2023).

The CMS was not made to be a marketing system. Historically, casino management systems started as accounting systems, with marketing capabilities as an afterthought. Marketing departments have been stuck and limited to the type of marketing within the system, which accounts for the traditional mass direct mailing methods that casinos are still primarily using.

The CMS can’t be all things to all operators

Nobody shops in one store anymore.

Over time, operators are typically more inclined to selectively source best-of-breed modules from different vendors that are integrated with the CMS rather than adhering to the initial purchase of the full bundled suite of modules. Reasons are:

• Major CMS vendors offer very little differentiation between each system. Levels of variety are driven by the marketplace. Selling and negotiation power is highly sought after as a strategic benefit when selecting a CMS provider. The more you drive systems to commodities, the less expensive selection and maintenance can be.
• A vendor’s prerogative limits innovative capabilities and integrations. Operators that rely on a CMS for all configurations will be disappointed by the time taken to configure, quality of features, and interface constraints that are placed on an operator.

Regardless, satisfaction with your CMS is important as the system dictates the future decisions around your application portfolio.

Rationalization is compulsory to avoid application sprawl

Decoupling is inevitable.

Application sprawl: inefficiencies with your application portfolio are created by the gradual and non-strategic accumulation of applications.

Although a bundled approach could provide a decreased level of application complexity and simplified vendor management, a best-of-breed approach is almost inescapable.

Adding applications is a necessary evil. Ideally, a decoupled approach would offer maximized business value and solution functionality. But consider the various obstacles to actualization when it comes to application sprawl:

• Challenge maintaining and upgrading systems which leads to difficulties in testing and prioritizing staffing support.
• Redundancy of features caused by inefficient spending and poor roadmap strategy.
• Disparate applications and data. This creates issues when it comes to having a single version of truth/source of record. Application architecture becomes extra challenging when databases are inherited and kept in its place.

Every operator experiences some degree of CMS application sprawl

Standardize a CMS rationalization strategy

Decoupling is inevitable; appropriate decoupling is essential. Rationalizing a decoupled module is necessary to fully understand the complexity of your technical architecture and business operations and maximize the module’s value and return on investment.

Components of a CMS rationalization strategy:

• Current-state CMS assessment
• Inflection point analysis
• Disposition decision points
• App category scope: build vs. buy
• Relationship management: vendor and end users
• Sustain or replace CMS system decision point

Benefits of a CMS rationalization strategy:

• Reduce application sprawl.
• Build for better decision making.
• Gain focus on business priorities and eliminate silos.
• Improve stakeholder communication.

Not every decoupling reason is a good one

Avoid the following inflection points:

• Turnover and lack of knowledge transfer. This is where the complaint that “it doesn’t do what I want” can be refuted. For many operators, decoupling happens when a module is considered too difficult to navigate or process gaps are found. CMS training and vendor confirmation can solve this issue most of the time. Many operators end up decoupling right away without considering a conversation with their system vendor first for configuration opportunities.
• “Bright shiny new object syndrome” promotes surface-level satisfaction over deep satisfaction. It’s common for operators to purchase a new system just to have it. Consider technologies like server-based games that were implemented because of hype but did not gain a lot of traction or work as advertised.
• Vendor relations built within the industry leads to informal evaluation and selection of a solution. It is common in the industry to select a system that has been used in a previous job for familiarity's sake. Selection is often driven by relationships rather than the business value the system provides.
• Time sensitive configurations. If an operator finds the changes needed to be urgent, operators look to decouple. Consider the vendor’s timeline and roadmap as a longer period may be beneficial to ensure you’re not jumping or rushing into an initiative.
• Modernize a legacy app that the vendor is not maintaining. Vendor management becomes crucial in this instance. Understand whether these upgrades have a place in the product roadmap ahead.

43%

of surveyed operators used informal evaluation and selection methodology for CMS (SoftwareReviews, 2023).