PGIJANFEBMAGAZINE2021a

21 PUBLIC GAMING INTERNATIONAL • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 P. McHugh: Our primary concern was keeping our employees safe and healthy. Secondly, from a business perspective, I was thankful for how well positioned Scientific Games was with planning for disaster-recovery scenarios and supply chain diversity. And we were bullish that the right moves were to not disrupt normal game launch schedules and to keep retail inventory pipelines full to avoid out of stock conditions. We have given special attention over the last few years to the importance of diversify- ing our supply chains, making sure we had in place a variety of methods to maintain inventories in multiple hubs, applying multiple methods of measuring product-specific usage so we know what we need to manufacture, creating multiple ways of inter-facing with the retailer, having multiple options for how we get the product to the retailer, and making sure all the right games are in all the right places at all the right times, and having multiple layers of process to enable disaster recovery for our customers. I am also very thankful to our customers for being flexible to allow us to balance the need for employee safety with the business of keeping the retailers stocked with product. We have operations in China and were alerted to the possibility that the effects of the pandemic may be much more severe than anticipated back in January. We began to prepare for the worst early on, weeks prior to everything shutting down, getting ahead on production and fine-tuning our inventory management and supply-chain logistics. We wanted to make sure we had the inventory and the means of getting it to the stores so our customers would never run out of games. Filling the pipeline was the first phase. Ensuring no disruptions to distribu- tion was phase two. The diverse supply line and excellent relationships with shipping partners was critical as shipments across national borders were severely impacted. Ensuring the stability of ongoing manu- facturing to meet the continuing increase in demand was phase three. We knew that most essential retailers would remain open and hoped that playership would be steady. So while we did not predict the spike in demand, we were prepared and kept our operations running overtime to keep the product flowing. How have your analytics and insights platforms interpreted the impacts of the pandemic on play styles and prefer- ences, and what changes to play style, preferences, and consumer expecta- tions are they projecting for the next twelve months? P. McHugh: Our MAP™ and Game Gallery™ platforms are our tools that capture data that helps guide our game planning and marketing strategies. These platforms house 60,000 instant games and nearly three million data points of weekly sales data. Both platforms are part of our suite of Business In- telligence (BI) tools, which also includes our Infuse™ enterprise platform. Each includes data from multiple sources which is the real benefit of BI: bringing together disparate sources of data and identifying meaningful patterns and interpreting insights. During the pandemic, our analytics and insights teams pored over data that revealed the underlying factors driving trend-lines in games and markets. These tools were being applied long before COVID-19. But their relevance became mission-critical in a global crisis pandemic.