Supernova Award Category

Data to Decisions

The Problem

Major League Baseball is not immune to the everyday challenges of profitability – streamlining budgets and lowering expenses.  While the Red Sox are one of the teams leading the AL East, it’s a volatile industry where ticket sales and revenues can change week to week with the team’s standings.

The Red Sox finance team manages budgets and planning year-round, detailing concessions, travel, merchandise sales, players and staff salaries, ticket sales and more.

Before 2011, Excel was the club’s primary tool for collecting expense budgets and developing forecasts. “We had maybe 100 or so different Excel templates that different managers would fill out. Those all linked into a mothership workbook and would ultimately serve as our reporting package when it came to the budget,” says Ryan Scafidi, Senior Director of Financial Planning and Analysis at the Boston Red Sox, noting the process was too labor-intensive to perform more than twice a year. Gathering the data and correcting errors would usually take a couple of weeks each round, at which point the data had gone stale. Lacking real-time insights, managers had no choice but to model for worst-case outcomes.

The Solution

The shift from Excel was partially motivated by the need to get more data to more people faster. The intent? Find a tool that would allow for collaborative planning and analysis. The Red Sox turned to Host Analytics to speed and centralize the budgeting, planning, and reporting process. Host Analytics provides a single, cloud-based system to input data, eliminating manual errors, and ensure each manager always has the most up-to-date data for real-time insights.

The results

“Because we’re able to be more proactive and forecast over the course of a year we saved an additional half-million to $1 million in expenses that otherwise would have been water under the bridge in the old, Excel-driven world,” Scafidi says.

The finance team works more collaboratively with each department for planning and analysis, and reporting time is a fraction of what it was in the past -- minutes versus weeks. The team can develop monthly forecasts and provide on-demand financial reports. In addition, the team has time to work outside the office of finance to dig into the data-driven planning that is the hallmark of the MLB success in the 21st century. For example, finance regularly reviews data from the team's ticketing database and Host Analytics to create projections from historical analysis. For the director of grounds, Host Analytics alleviates the burden of time in the back office punching numbers and gives that time back for them to do what they enjoy - maximizing the fan experience. Like the best coaches, the finance team uses these insights to make smart adjustments that can ultimately make a big impact on the bottom line.

Metrics

According to Scafidi, “Before Host Analytics we would spend an exorbitant amount of hours entering information and chasing formula errors in excel.  We would stay up until 2:00 a.m. because we knew we had a presentation the following day and needed to make sure every number ticked and tied to each other.  With Host Analytics, I can spin a package now in a couple of days, make adjustments to corporate assumptions, a line item in a baseball template, re-spin the cube, and the reporting package is ready instantaneously.”

• Over the course of a year the Red Sox saved an additional half-million to $1 million in expenses that otherwise would have been water under the bridge
• For planning and analysis, reporting time has been reduced to minutes versus weeks.
• Managers across different departments can access and see how their actual budgets compare to projections every month, and they can track their progress year to date and for the full year.

The Technology

Host Analytics Enterprise Performance Platform for Planning, Budgeting, and Reporting

Disruptive Factor

Host Analytics provided the Red Sox a disruptive cloud-based solution best suited for collaborative planning and analysis.

According to Scafidi, “We have 57 users today. Because the solution is cloud-based, they don’t have to be on the network, they can do it from home. They can do it from the beach. They can get their stuff done on their own time within the deadlines that we set. It makes the process a lot more efficient.”  Further, Scafidi jokes that compiling reports now takes “five minutes” rather weeks. “I’m being dramatic a little bit, but it’s not that far off.”

Shining Moment

The challenges and our success with Host Analytics was recently featured in Fortune Magazine in an article titled, Data-Obsessed Baseball Teams Are Turning to the Cloud for Help. The article can be found here: http://fortune.com/2017/04/10/mlb-baseball-data-cloud-software/