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Oracle Customer Success — Barclaycard Arena Hamburg (Anschutz Entertainment Group Arena Hamburg GmbH)
Barclaycard Arena Hamburg Improves the Spectator Experience with Integrated POS System
ShareImproving customer experience is our foremost goal. Oracle’s highly efficient POS solution for the leisure and entertainment market provides flexibility and resilience and can perform mission-critical operations even in during network failure, which is vital to our business.
The Barclaycard Arena Hamburg, opened in November 2002, is one of the most modern and most successful multi-functional arenas in Europe. Referred to locally as the “Blue Wonder,” it is 150 meters long, 110 meters wide, and 33 meters high, and has an area available for events of 87 meters by 43 meters. The arena houses numerous VIP and business suites and lounges, 4 bars and 4 themed restaurants with 2,000 seats, 17 fast food outlets, and multiple kiosks. Depending on the type of event, it can accommodate from 3,000 to 16,000 spectators.
Barclaycard Arena is owned by US based Anschutz Entertainment Group, a global sporting and entertainment company operating over 125 elite venues in the world’s largest cities across five continents. Anschutz Entertainment Group owns 60 sports teams worldwide and is the world’s second largest concert promoter.
Challenges
- Increase food and beverage sales and improve customer experience across Barclaycard Arena’s bars, restaurants, fast food outlets, and kiosks by replacing an obsolete cash-only point-of-sale (POS) solution, with a powerful hospitality infrastructure capable of speeding up customer checkout and introducing contactless credit card payment
- Enable event-specific offline setups for POS terminals for any kind of event while ensuring that any store can continue selling during internet outages by deploying a POS system capable of operating offline and then synchronizing sales back into the master database
- Gain the ability to measure each store’s sales performance through centralized business management and reporting across multiple outlets and hundreds of POS terminals to ensure that Barclaycard Arena collects adequate rent from store franchises based on location and sales revenue
Results
- Maximized short sales windows—a few hours before the event, during intermissions, and minutes after event—by replacing an obsolete cash-only POS solution with state-of-the-art technology that delivers speedy transactions and a fast and accurate service to customers
- Optimized food and beverage delivery to sports and music fans by using Oracle Hospitality Simphony Point of Sale, contactless card processing, and reporting technology to manage the operations of 17 fast food outlets, 4 themed restaurants, 4 bars, and several kiosks across the arena
- Reduced queues and created a better experience for fans by installing 145 cash registers to cover the entire arena, creating a perfect balance of fixed terminals and hand-held devices to complement various retail concepts—such as intuitive touch screens that guide users through self-service ordering in fast food outlets versus table-mounted tablets for restaurant ordering and payment
- Empowered concessionaires to optimize food and drinks inventory and replenishment by leveraging Oracle Hospitality Simphony’s capability of integrating orders and stock, so that when a customer orders an item, the system locates it in stock and immediately marks it as consumed
- Enabled Barclaycard Arena to run fast food outlets and kiosks offline and reconnect all POS terminals to the network after the event to synchronize sales transactions into the database, preventing revenue loss due to internet outages, while generating extra revenue during the setup of special events such as ice hockey matches
- Enabled concession managers to analyze sales and trends from every POS device before, during, and after an event to provide accurate sales reporting and forecasting; ensure real-time inventory control and cash management; and facilitate calculation of rent payments to the arena owners according to revenues and store location within the arena
- Reduced the cost of hospitality system support and maintenance by replacing a legacy solution that required extensive maintenance efforts, supplied no spare parts, and had high development costs, with a modern and reliable POS system that uses open standards and is backed by an easy-to-reach support team
Oracle Hospitality Simphony is a very competitive product in the arena management space. But what made a difference was the quality of the consulting and support teams who truly focused on helping us meet our goals and delight our customers.
Execution
The Barclaycard Arena Hamburg organizes up to 140 events a year and takes only a few weeks of summer break to perform arena maintenance and ensure regulatory and safety compliance. The management team had planned to use this break to upgrade the POS system, but a delay in the bidding phase left only one month for the entire installation.
“We’re thankful that we found a company willing to take the challenge of such a huge project with so little notice and in the short time we had. The Oracle team was great and found a solution for every bottleneck that arose during installation,” Frommhold said.
About Barclaycard Arena Hamburg (Anschutz Entertainment Group Arena Hamburg GmbH)