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“We might have an idea of what the best game is or what the best attraction is,” said Scene 75 general manager Steve Bain,” but we don’t want to tell them ‘you have to do this.’ We want to know what they want to do so we can provide the best experience.”
The years-worth of numbers are crunched at the Data Analytics and Visualization lab, or D.A.V.E. lab, at Wright State.
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“We came up with courses students could participate in --working with real corporate level data,” said Arijit Sengupta, associate dean of the Raj Soin College of Business.
As for privacy concerns, customer personal information is not included in the data, according to Anand Jeyaraj, professor of information systems at Wright State.
“When we get to analysis, we strip personal identifying information because we are interested more in the profile of the types of customers, the types of locations, and the types games,” Jeyaraj said.
The data has been mapped out to show how much people are spending, where they come from, and why.
"We can tell from the chart that many people have their baby showers at Scene 75 and parties for boys are more popular than parties for girls," said Shu Schiller, associate professor and department chair of information systems and supply chain management at the Raj Soin College of Business.
Students get real world knowledge from the project.
“We were able to get hands-on experience with a real local business and be able to provide them answers that would help them enhance their business. It’s a very interesting project,” said graduate student Justin Langenbach, who added the data showed shooter and arcade games were found to be more popular than sports games.
Scene 75, which had over a million customers in 2017 at its three locations in Dayton, Cincinnati, and Cleveland, will also use the data to create specific deals for customers and determine where to put new locations.
Phase two of the analysis will get deeper into family demographics, and breakdown user age ranges for attractions and games, said Schiller.