How ITC Revolutionized Pachinko Management and Data Reporting with Yellowfin BI and Compass
Background
Established in January 2009, ITC’s motto is to ‘Create a strong pachinko parlor and contribute to the evolution and development of the game industry by creating an environment where players can enjoy games with peace of mind’. This leads ITC forward to continuously provide and support systems that are essential to the operation of their customers.
To create a mechanism to solve the problems of pachinko parlor owners, ITC developed Compass, a core management system for pachinko parlor management companies delivered through cloud services.
“The characteristics of Compass is that the data, such as the monetary information of the result of the player’s game, the in-and-out flow of balls, the expenses incurred for the operation of the parlor itself, the budget and daily sales, can be consolidated and managed centrally on the cloud,” said Noriyuki Nagamine, Executive Officer of System Department, ITC.
“The key factor was the ability to customize the license to match our services. Adopting Yellowfin feels like hiring one dedicated developer.”
Noriyuki Nagamine, Executive Officer of System Department, ITC
Challenge
The pachinko (Japanese pinball machine) and pachislot (Japanese slot machine) industry has gained many fans in Japan as leisure entertainment for the masses. However, the number of pachinko and pachislot players is on the decline due to economic instability, demographic changes caused by the declining birthrate and aging population, and diversification of hobbies. On the other hand, the number of machines installed per parlor is on the increase, and the size of parlors is increasing.
Revenues at pachinko parlors vary in gross margin, according to the results of players’ games (i.e., the amount of prizes redeemed by players), and the revenue structure is different from that of general merchandise sales. Compass was thus developed by ITC to support parlor management, address the current complexities of the industry, and help its customers meet their objectives of increasing the enjoyment of players while also increasing overall business.
ITC’s Compass first launched in the pachinko management market 15 years ago, but ITC has continued to expand its solution to meet evolving customer needs. One such planned expansion was the implementation of business intelligence (BI) features in 2023, which was prompted by a customer (hereinafter, Company A) asking ITC if they could integrate BI tools they had been using into Compass.
At Company A, the owner of the parlor checked their business performance from the previous day and gave instructions on the management policy to the parlor at the following meeting every morning. They were leveraging BI tools to create those reports. As it stands, however, both Compass and BI tools incurred costs, which Company A wanted to integrate into their use of Compass. “This request was a direct trigger for the implementation of BI features, but we had been considering deploying BI tools for several years before consulting with Company A,” Nagamine recalled.
Compass originally offered features to help users make data-driven decisions, such as market analysis and sales analysis. However, in order to provide full-fledged data analysis and utilization functions like Company A was using, it was essential to have BI features implemented. While ITC developed every single system of Compass in-house, ITC had decided that using existing BI tools, rather than developing them in-house, was their path forward.
“Compass is not good at graphs, charts, and other data visualizations, so if we want to develop our own BI features, it would be a lot of work. That would take a lot of development cost and construction time. However, if existing BI tools can be integrated into Compass, development costs and time can be reduced. So, we decided to find a tool that would match Compass,” Nagamine said.
The company talked to a couple of BI tool vendors, but they decided against it. The reason for this, Nagamine said, was that the licensing system did not match with their needs. Instead of selling BI licenses as a distributor, ITC wanted to make a contract for the license and offer BI capabilities to customers as their services.
Solution
ITC sought to find a BI partner with the license system it desired while meeting the needs of Company A and other customers, and eventually found Yellowfin, whose Japanese office is on the fifth floor of the same building as ITC’s. In the elevator, the door happened to open, and at the entrance of the fifth floor, Nagamine saw a banner with a copy of ‘Business Intelligence Made Easier!’
Apart from other vendors, Nagamine soon discovered Yellowfin had a flexible licensing arrangement for embedded users (ISV). “Yellowfin offers customized server licensing for our company. Moreover, the cost has been reduced compared with the past studies. That’s the main reason we chose Yellowfin as the embedded BI in Compass,” said Nagamine.
Can Yellowfin really replace what Company A has been doing with other BI tools? “At first, we felt our way through the process,” Nagamine said. The replacement went smoothly, and was completed a couple of months later. Currently, Yellowfin’s built-in BI features contribute to daily decision making at Company A. “With the satisfactory results of the Compass integration, we have received requests from our customers to do more with Yellowfin,” said Nagamine.
Results
Other unique use cases have appeared. In both cases, two companies using Compass analyze and share data on game machines using Compass’s BI features.
Traditionally, it has been difficult to share information about each other in a timely manner, such as how they are using and how long they are operating game machines. Therefore, both companies wanted to share information in order to increase the operating rate of game machines.
“A button called ‘game machine performance’ was added on Compass, which allowed them to view a ranking of data from all the parlors of both companies related to their game machines,” said Nagamine.
Currently, the daily results of game machines at both companies are visible the next day, and the manual tabulation that had been done by staff in the past has been automated, which has greatly improved operational efficiency.
In addition to their customers, ITC is also using Yellowfin to analyze Compass usage. “We analyze which services are used by whom and how much, and would like to use it as a reference for future service provision,” said Nagamine.
Adopting Yellowfin feels like hiring one dedicated developer. It used to take 1-2 weeks to create an Excel report, but with Yellowfin, once created, the report will be automatically generated the next day. Another benefit of using Yellowfin is that they can make minor changes themselves without asking developers.
According to the National Police Agency’s Security Division, there were 7,083 parlors nationwide in Japan as of the end of 2023. “About 1,000 of them have been implemented in Compass,” said Nagamine. “There were competitors for each feature and system, but only a few of them could provide an all inclusive package like we do. So we were able to increase our market share,” said Nagamine.
Future
“We would like to increase the contents using Yellowfin considering the requests of our customers,” said Nagamine. One is to analyze trends from national data and provide reports that can lead to suggestions for parlor management. “I would love to use Yellowfin’s automated insights and trending features,” said Nagamine.
At a time when entertainment is becoming more diverse, it is essential to utilize data from parlor management companies in order for the pachinko and pachislot industry to continue. Compass, with its enhanced BI capabilities, is expected to attract even more attention as a tool to help parlor management companies use data and make decisions.
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