Carlos Hyde of the San Francisco 49ers celebrates in the stands with fans at Levi’s Stadium. (Photo by Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images)
The San Francisco 49ers have opened a new data war room in an executive suite near the 40-yard-line.
Known as SAP Executive Huddle, the analytics platform pulls in real-time data from nine different sources, allowing the 49ers to keep tabs on important business metrics such as attendance, parking, food and beverage, retail, ticketing, and social media.
For Moon Javaid, the 49ers’ vice president of business strategy and analytics, the adoption of this SAP technology gives the franchise greater power in terms of being able to use analytics to improve the guest experience in real time at Levi’s Stadium.
The Niners already boasted the largest analytics team in the NFL, if not in all of American professional sports. And now they can monitor operational metrics as they occur to optimize the experience on gameday, and not after the fact.
“It’s a fundamental shift in how we can operate,” Javaid said. “It helps us to operate on a holistically different level than we were before.”
The walls of the suite are covered with monitors showing graphical feeds, such as heat maps of seating sections or parking lots, and charts of concession sales. This past Sunday, Javaid invited both Rams CTO Skarpi Hedinsson and Oakland A’s Chief Operating Officer Chris Giles to the suite during the 49ers game against the Rams. The Rams ended up beating the Niners 39-10.
“I can tell you right off bat with the first two games that interest from my peers has been significant,” Javaid said.
(Courtesy of the San Francisco 49ers)
Since the opening of Levi’s Stadium and hiring of Javaid in 2014, the Niners analytics team has been implementing real-time and post-game surveys to get feedback from fans on their experiences. The surveys have been helpful, leading to a whopping 150 different enhancements to the stadium and gameday experience.
Last year, the team took those efforts a step forward, adopting a real-time HappyOrNot survey system, which urges attendees to press buttons on kiosks depicting faces of their various moods. If a wave of unhappy data poured from a bathroom or concession stand, the 49ers would dispatch an employee in real time to figure out what was going on and fix the problem.
After the success of HappyOrNot, 49ers President Al Guido, whose ambitious plans to reinvigorate the franchise include turning the Niners into a media and entertainment company, said at the end of last season that he wanted more gameday analytics in real time. The team has just eight regular season home games, so every event is valuable, especially when taking into consideration high-spending season ticket holders.
“If a customer has a bad experience on a game they’re missing out on one eighth of their season ticket value,” Javaid said. “We need to be able to solve our customers’ problems in real time.”
The HappyOrNot survey proved the 49ers could efficiently react in real time. When Javaid heard about a real-time data analytics platform being used by SAP—already a partner—to power the German National soccer team, he realized they could actually fulfill Guido’s request. Over an eight-month period in the offseason, the football team worked closely with SAP to adopt Executive Huddle and build the data war room before the start of the 2018-19 season.
In addition to the suite, 49ers employees can access the platform from their mobile devices to get a temperature read on operations in the form of easy-to-understand data visualizations no matter where they are. Unique to the 49ers, SAP also built-in a benchmark against past gameday performance metrics, so that they can make real-time decisions with an appropriate amount of perspective.
(Courtesy of the 49ers)
So far, the team is using Executive Huddle to do things such as ensure parking lots or gates don’t have unnecessarily long lines, or that concessions don’t run out of food. Coordinating the operation of a 1.85 million square foot building that employs 3,500 individuals, many of whom are temporary part-time or seasonal workers, each game day is not easy. Levi’s Stadium sees as much many as 15,000 cars each game, and as many as 70,000 fans visiting 600-plus points of sale.
Javaid said he’s already excited about the possibilities of what they’ll be able to do with all this real-time data in the future, such as making predictions about fan flows and operations.
“This puts us on a whole new trajectory from where we were at and opens up a whole new set of possibilities on what we can do in real time,” he said. “Even though we’ve achieved a lot right now and no one else is really doing this, we’re still at the starting line.”
