Kansas City Chiefs Champion Digital Transformation in Business and Operations

Introduction

The Kansas City Chiefs have demonstrated impressive success on the field in recent years, with a dedicated fan base. As 2019, 2022, and 2023 Super Bowl champions, the Chiefs have been the highest-performing team in the American Football Conference (AFC) West division for several years and boast one of the largest home attendance rates in the National Football League (NFL). Behind the scenes, their Finance, Strategy, and Analytics team works hard to capitalize on the robust fan base and optimize the game-day experience at one of the NFL’s largest stadiums. Achieving this success requires smooth operations on and off the field. That’s where Dash Enterprise comes into play.

Challenge

Digital transformation across any organization is no mean feat. Needs can vary by department, requiring specialized platforms to address them. The Kansas City Chiefs front office, typically including ticket sales agents and general managers, identified several use cases that would benefit from access to real-time analytics on live data streams:

• Live game day and event scanning data to make stadium operations smoother, by providing concise information regarding ticket sales, crowd flows, entry and parking logistics, traffic backups, stadium staffing, and incident reporting. Traditional solutions were costly and limited in scope, including data not refreshing in real time.
• Dynamic pricing to adjust ticket costs in real-time based on factors like demand. This process required current views into the market, where the velocity of real-time sales could be contextualized against historical sales data.

Solution

Dash Enterprise enabled the Analytics team to quickly build, style, deploy, and manage multiple Dash apps tailored to their distinct use cases. The platform’s App Studio feature allowed the team’s data scientists to write Dash apps in Python in a familiar Jupyter Notebook environment and preview them live, all in the browser. Moreover, Plotly’s open-source core meant many of the team had been familiar with the framework since college.

To analyze live stadium data, the team built the GameDay Scans app. At the back end, the application connects to the required third-party sources, the data is processed with Postgres, and callbacks from Dash trigger the output, input, and states. The front end utilizes Dash Core Components for layout and general structure, and open-source Dash Mantine Components for badges, chips, and icons, optimizing the look, feel, and branding. Dash Enterprise Design Kit is used for customized styling like graphs.

The intuitive and interactive GameDay Scans app has many features, including:

• Graphs and compares ticket and parking scans on a 10-minute rolling average
• Shows real-time total tickets distributed, sold, and scanned
• Displays countdowns for club and stadium opening times
• Offers ticket and parking details by level/lot
• Leverages CrowdIQ, a third-party AI vendor, for age/demographic data
• Highlights alarm rates at gates via an API at the security scanners
• Provides auxiliary scan metrics, enabling comparison against KPIs
• Graphs staffing analytics, with data accessible to permitted email addresses only
• Integrates with a weather API, showing data like temperature via icons

For example, the easy filtering and drill-down information help the Staffing team identify which areas might be understaffed and allocate the appropriate resources to these areas.

The team also developed Dash apps for gameday scans and ticket sales.

Results

By investing in Dash Enterprise, the Chiefs gained a unified platform that puts analytics at the center of business and game day stadium operations. The flexibility and customization Dash Enterprise offers means teams can generate interactive data apps that not only wow but increase efficiency. For example:

• The GameDay Scans app has 50+ internal users, and since its creation, operations and coordination have streamlined significantly, with 32 person-hours per week saved by the Analytics team alone. Additionally, a meaningful amount of time is saved from better staffing at games.
• The Dynamic Pricing app reduces the hours required to collect and analyze relevant data for the Sales team.
• By leveraging Dash to replicate the functions of other software platforms used in the past, the Finance, Strategy, and Analytics team saves on annual software licensing costs, avoiding expensive ticketing data solutions.

The Analytics team continues to use Dash Enterprise, with exciting initiatives on the horizon, including harnessing computer vision and revamping the dynamic ticket pricing model and executive dashboards.

Want to see more? Check out Michael Ragsdale and Andrew Schutte at ODSC East 2024, discussing how the Kansas City Chiefs champion digital transformation with Python analytics.