Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium optimizes operational efficiency and enhances the customer experience.

1. Media & EntertainmentLet’s build a smarter planet
Like all open-air attractions, zoos live and die by the weather. When
sunny days alternate with rainy ones and daily attendance can fluctuate
wildly, how can zoos avoid the dangers of over- or under-staffing – and
the potentially serious consequences for cost-efficiency and customer
service?
Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium (PDZA) – part of Point Defiance
Park, the largest attraction in Pierce County, Washington – wanted
to counteract the uncertainties of the weather by gaining a better
understanding of its effects on ticket sales and visitor numbers. With
this new insight, the Zoo hoped to be able to manage all aspects of its
business more efficiently.
The first step on this journey was to find a way to unlock the value
of the data that PDZA already possessed. In partnership with IBM
and BrightStar Partners, the Zoo embarked on an analytics initiative
that now promises to transform its entire operation, from sales and
marketing to staffing and facilities management.
At the starting point
Donna Powell, Business & Administrative Services Manager for the
Zoological & Environmental Education Division of Metro Parks
Tacoma, which owns PDZA, explains: “We already had a very robust
point-of-sale [POS] system in place, which was managing most of the
data we needed to assess key metrics on ticket sales and attendance.
However, without the tools to extract that data, analyze it and present
it to our business users in a form that was easy to understand, its value
was limited.”
Powell’s team met with BrightStar Partners, an IBM Business Partner
with extensive experience of helping organizations in the leisure
industry develop innovative business analytics solutions. In particular,
BrightStar’s groundbreaking work at Cincinnati Zoo inspired PDZA to
create a new analytics landscape.
Point Defiance Zoo &
Aquarium
Making the right decisions – whatever the weather
Smart is...
Combining ticket sales and visitor
data with real-time weather
forecasts to optimize operational
efficiency and enhance the
customer experience.
What if your business needed to serve ten
times as many customers tomorrow as it
did today? Would you be able to adjust
quickly enough to meet their needs? And
what if the fluctuation in demand was
caused by something as arbitrary and
changeable as the weather?
For an organization like Point Defiance
Zoo & Aquarium (PDZA), these questions
aren’t a joke: they are issues that need
addressing on a daily basis.
Working with BrightStar Partners, an
Avnet Services company, and IBM,
the PDZA team has developed a new
analytics solution that combines real-
time weather data with ticket sales and
attendance information to help forecast
visitor numbers much more accurately
than ever before.

2. Media & EntertainmentLet’s build a smarter planet
“BrightStar really opened our eyes to the possibilities,” says Powell.
“We realized that analytics could do more than just give us the answers
to our immediate questions about ticket sales and attendance: it could
potentially transform the way we managed almost every aspect of the
Zoo’s operations.”
Gaining executive buy-in for the project was straightforward: Powell’s
expertise and knowledge, combined with BrightStar’s experience, made
a strong business case for the creation of a new analytics platform, and
the executive team was quickly convinced of its merits.
Weather, attendance and labor planning
BrightStar worked with PDZA to develop and deploy an IBM
Business Analytics solution that unites data from the POS system with
weather information from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) website. Web-based dashboards enable users
within the Zoo to compare the current week’s weather forecasts and
attendance figures with similar data from the previous five years.
By bringing the data together in a single view, the solution makes it
possible for Zoo staff to make crucial daily decisions based on hard
evidence, rather than intuition and experience alone.
“It’s impossible to overemphasize the effect that weather has on our
business,” explains Donna Powell. “For people who don’t work in
our industry, the impact is almost shocking. To take a recent example:
during the Spring Break week, we had a beautiful sunny day on the
Wednesday and nearly 5,000 visitors came to the Zoo, which is a record
for that time of year. On the Thursday it rained, and we only had
around 1,200 visitors – a difference of 289 percent in a single day!
Business benefits
• Predicts visitor numbers with much
greater accuracy, guiding more effective
labor planning and optimizing both
customer service and operational
efficiency.
• Reveals new insights into sales: for
example, the introduction of online
ticketing has doubled daily ticket sales.
• Delivers data on demand to marketing
teams, enabling faster execution of
promotions and campaigns.
Smarter Entertainment
Instrumented Data on every ticket sale – whether online or from POS
systems at the Zoo’s box office – is collected and combined with
turnstile information to provide an accurate picture of sales and
attendance.
Interconnected This data, combined with real-time weather information, is
analyzed and made available to decision-makers in the form of
interactive dashboards, which can be accessed via smartphone and
tablet devices.
Intelligent Combining current and historical weather and attendance data
helps predict daily attendance levels and adjust labor plans to
maximize customer service and minimize the risk of over-staffing.

3. Media & EntertainmentLet’s build a smarter planet
“For the first time, analytics gives us the ability to understand
these dramatic fluctuations and respond quickly enough to make a
difference. 65 percent of our costs are payroll related – it’s our biggest
variable cost. Most of our employees work flexible hours, so we can
scale staffing levels up or down on a daily basis to meet the predicted
level of demand. With our new analytics capabilities, we can make
those predictions much more accurately, which means we can almost
completely avoid the problems of over- or under-staffing.”
In the near future, Powell envisions the possibility of intra-day
adjustments: “If it’s going to rain in the morning and clear up in the
afternoon, why have all our personnel on-site from 7 a.m. till 4 p.m.?
We want to start looking at optimizing staffing levels within the day,
so that we always have the right people in the right places at the right
time to give our visitors the best possible experience while they’re at
the Zoo.”
A better understanding of when visitors arrive and what routes they
take through the Zoo can also help PDZA to manage its animal
collection more effectively.
“If visitors are coming into the Zoo at 10 a.m., it’s likely to take them
an hour or more before they reach some of the exhibits that are furthest
from the entrance,” explains Powell. “So, for example, our Zoological
Curator could schedule the enrichment times for the animals in those
exhibits for 11 a.m., when most visitors will be in the right area. If we
can align the times when the animals are most active with the times of
peak attendance, we’ll be able to create a much richer experience for
our visitors.”
Going mobile
To make sure key decision-makers have all the information they need
at their fingertips, PDZA and BrightStar have made use of the IBM
solution’s mobile capabilities. Users can access the latest reports and
dashboards via their iPads, whether they are out in the grounds of the
Zoo, or working off-site.
“Recently our Visitor Services Supervisor went out of town, but he
took his iPad with him,” says Powell. “He saw that the day’s attendance
figures had been higher than expected, and that the weather for the
following afternoon was going to be even better, and realized that we
wouldn’t have enough staff.
“He was able to get on the phone immediately, speak to his team, and
put some plans in place to make sure our visitors wouldn’t have to
wait in line for too long. It’s this ability to recognize problems quickly
and respond rapidly that helps us to maintain a high level of customer
service at all times.”
Solution components
Software
• IBM® Cognos® Business Intelligence
v10.2
IBM Business Partner
• BrightStar Partners, an Avnet services
company

4. Media & EntertainmentLet’s build a smarter planet
New insight into ticket sales
Sales and marketing at PDZA are gaining as much from the solution
as the operations teams. One of the Zoo’s first analytics projects was to
assess the importance of online sales.
“We launched our online ticketing services in 2006 and since that time
our sales grew annually, but nothing impressive,” says Powell. “In
2012 we started managing the membership program utilizing the same
system as daily ticket sales, and saw that total revenue had increased
dramatically – but there were different theories about what had actually
happened. Some people thought that the increase was solely due to the
income from memberships, but we were able to prove that in fact, we
had more than doubled our ticket sales.”
Surprisingly, the analysis also revealed new insights into visitors’ online
purchasing habits: there was a significant peak in sales between 6 p.m.
and 2 a.m. for next-day tickets.
“Without an online ticketing system that is open for business 24/7, we
would probably be missing out on most of these spur-of-the-moment
purchases,” comments Powell. “So our analysis really vindicated the
value of the online system. It also gave our marketing team new ideas
about sending email promotions out to members towards the late
afternoon and evening, to encourage more traffic to the site.”
PDZA has also been able to analyze the relationship between ticket
sales and other spending. Visitors who purchase tickets online tend
to spend more on retail, gifts and food while they are at the Zoo than
those who buy their tickets on the day – another reason for PDZA to
focus its efforts on encouraging online sales.
Email and social media marketing
The creation of email marketing campaigns has also been dramatically
simplified by the analytics solution. Instead of needing support from
the IT team to extract membership information from the POS system
and create a mailing list, the marketing team can obtain the data
themselves with a few mouse-clicks.
The solution also makes it quicker and easier to monitor the success
of social media marketing: one recent promotion, where members
were given discounts if they “checked in” to the Zoo on Facebook,
saw nearly 1,000 people take up the offer. “We saw the results in our
analytics solution the very next day,” says Powell.
“Our work with IBM
and BrightStar shows
the potential of analytics
technologies for public
sector organizations to
reduce costs and increase
efficiencies, not only in our
specific area, but across
the whole of government.”
— Donna Powell, Business & Administrative
Services Manager - Zoological & Environmental
Education Division, Metro Parks Tacoma

5. Media & EntertainmentLet’s build a smarter planet
Intuitive interface
PDZA has recently upgraded to the latest version of IBM® Cognos®
Business Intelligence, which supports tabbed dashboards – a simple way
to link different operational dashboards together and navigate quickly
between them.
“Our users really love the tabbed dashboards, because they can flick
between different aspects of the business in seconds,” says Powell.
“Whether you want to look at financial information, attendance,
staffing, facilities or zoological information, it’s all at your fingertips.
And from our perspective in the analytics team, tabbed dashboards
make it easy to build reports that combine different visuals depending
on what’s most important to the audience. For example, in our
dashboard for online sales we use crosstabs that allow users to compare
members with non-members and act as a springboard for further
discussion.”
Looking to the future
A major next step for PDZA is the introduction of a mobile ticketing
solution for its visitors, which can subsequently be extended to
utilize the near-field communication (NFC) capabilities of modern
smartphones. Visitors will be able to “tap” to check in at different
areas within the Zoo – and analyzing this location information will
give PDZA valuable insight into how visitors move around the site and
where they spend most of their time.
“We’re currently doing a feasibility study for a new aquarium, so
if we can we can get a better understanding of how people interact
with different attractions, we can feed it into the design process,”
says Powell. “There’s also a lot of potential for optimizing our use
of electricity: like most zoos, we’re very focused on environmental
sustainability, so if we can adjust our heating, ventilation and air-
conditioning systems to visitor patterns and weather conditions, we
could potentially make big savings.”
John Lucas, Director of Solution Delivery at BrightStar Partners,
agrees: “Current research suggests that if you can analyze your peak
energy usage accurately and manage it efficiently, you can save between
eight and 14 percent on electricity costs. We’d be excited to explore the
possibilities with PDZA.”
Powell concludes: “As a mid-sized government organization, we’re
focused on efficiency at all levels. In an economic climate where
even basic services are under pressure, we need to play our part by
maximizing revenues and reducing the strain on the public purse.
Our work with IBM and BrightStar shows the potential of analytics
technologies for public sector organizations to reduce costs and
increase efficiencies, not only in our specific area, but across the whole
of government.”
“BrightStar really opened
our eyes to the possibilities.
We realized that analytics
could do more than just
give us the answers to
our immediate questions
about ticket sales and
attendance: it could
potentially transform the
way we managed almost
every aspect of the Zoo’s
operations.”
— Donna Powell, Business & Administrative
Services Manager - Zoological & Environmental
Education Division, Metro Parks Tacoma

6. YTC03604-USEN-00
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© Copyright IBM Corporation 2013
IBM Corporation
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Produced in the United States
May 2013
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About BrightStar Partners
BrightStar Partners, an Avnet services company, is a technology-based,
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investment in technology and processes to drive better information
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For more information about BrightStar Partners, please visit
www.brightstarpartners.com
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