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Chapter 3 • Data Warehousing 109

3.1 Opening Vignette: isle of Capri Casinos is Winning
with enterprise Data Warehouse

Isle of Capri is a unique and innovative player in the gaming industry. After entering the
market in Biloxi, Mississippi, in 1992, Isle has grown into one of the country’s largest
publicly traded gaming companies, mostly by establishing properties in the southeastern
United States and in the country’s heartland. Isle of Capri Casinos, Inc., is currently operat-
ing 18 casinos in seven states, serving nearly 2 million visitors each year.

chaLLenge
Even though they seem to have a differentiating edge, compared to others in the highly
competitive gaming industry, Isle is not entirely unique. Like any gaming company, Isle’s
success depends largely on its relationship with its customers—its ability to create a gaming,
entertainment, and hospitality atmosphere that anticipates customers’ needs and exceeds
their expectations. Meeting such a goal is impossible without two important components:
a company culture that is laser-focused on making the customer experience an enjoyable
one, and a data and technology architecture that enables Isle to constantly deepen its under-
standing of its customers, as well as the various ways customer needs can be efficiently met.

sOLutiOn
After an initial data warehouse implementation was derailed in 2005, in part by Hurricane
Katrina, Isle decided to reboot the project with entirely new components and Teradata
as the core solution and key partner, along with IBM Cognos for Business Intelligence.
Shortly after that choice was made, Isle brought on a management team that clearly
understood how the Teradata and Cognos solution could enable key decision makers
throughout the operation to easily frame their own initial queries, as well as timely follow-
up questions, thus opening up a wealth of possibilities to enhance the business.

resuLts
Thanks to its successful implementation of a comprehensive data warehousing and busi-
ness intelligence solution, Isle has achieved some deeply satisfying results. The company
has dramatically accelerated and expanded the process of information gathering and
dispersal, producing about 150 reports on a daily basis, 100 weekly, and 50 monthly, in
addition to ad hoc queries, completed within minutes, all day every day. Prior to an enter-
prise data warehouse (EDW) from Teradata, Isle produced about 5 monthly reports per
property, but because they took a week or more to produce, properties could not begin to
analyze monthly activity until the second week of the following month. Moreover, none
of the reports analyzed anything less than an entire month at a time; today, reports using
up-to-the minute data on specific customer segments at particular properties are available,
often the same day, enabling the company to react much more quickly to a wide range
of customer needs.
Isle has cut the time in half needed to construct its core monthly direct-mail cam-
paigns and can generate less involved campaigns practically on the spot. In addition to
moving faster, Isle has honed the process of segmentation and now can cross-reference
a wide range of attributes, such as overall customer value, gaming behaviors, and hotel
preferences. This enables them to produce more targeted campaigns aimed at particular
customer segments and particular behaviors.
Isle also has enabled its management and employees to further deepen their under-
standing of customer behaviors by connecting data from its hotel systems and data from

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