Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
Customer Solution Case Study
Casino Improves Processes and Performance
with Integrated Budgeting Solution
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Entertainment
Customer Profile
Foxwoods Resort Casino includes six
casinos plus restaurants and other
facilities in a complex that covers 4.7
million square feet. Based in Ledyard,
Connecticut, the resort employs 12,000
people.
Business Situation
The resort’s spreadsheet-based budgeting
system hadn’t kept pace with the growth of
the casino. The system relied on manual
copying and pasting, which made data
unreliable, and outdated reporting tools,
which hindered decision makers.
Solution
Strafford Technology developed an
integrated budgeting solution for Foxwoods
using performance management software
from Infor and Microsoft® software,
including Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000.
Benefits
 Consolidates data in hours, not weeks
 Reduces data-input errors
 Provides more detailed reporting
 Facilitates better decision making
“We reduced the time it takes to consolidate our
budget data from 96 hours to 9 hours. I often used to
work on the budget until 1:00 a.m. Now I work a
normal day, and I hardly ever put in overtime.”
Cathy Kellers, Assistant Controller for Budgeting and Reporting, Foxwoods Resort Casino
Foxwoods Resort Casino is the world’s largest casino complex, with
12,000 employees in a Connecticut resort setting that has
340,000 square feet of gaming space. The resort was using
performance management (PM) tools that did not keep pace with
its growth. The finance team spent weeks every year manually
consolidating budget data from hundreds of worksheets and
uploading the data into an accounting application. Department
managers manually updated and printed word-processing
documents as reports. With help from Strafford Technology,
Foxwoods replaced this patchwork of manual tools with a business
performance management solution that uses Infor™ PM Business
Process Applications, Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000, and Microsoft
Office Excel® 2003. Now Foxwoods employees spend less time
entering data and more time reviewing information so they can
make timely business decisions.
Situation
In 1986, the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal
Nation of Connecticut opened a bingo hall
called Foxwoods. By 2005, it had grown into
an entertainment complex covering 4.7
million square feet and entertaining more
than 40,000 guests daily. Foxwoods Resort
Casino employs 12,000 people and has 50
restaurants and retail stores, three hotels
with 1,916 rooms, a 1,400-seat theater, and
340,000 square feet of gaming space.
Despite its spectacular growth, the resort was
using outdated business performance
management systems. The budgeting system
for processing payroll, for example, consisted
of 23 linked worksheets that took two hours
to load on a PC every time the finance team
did the payroll. The entire budgeting process
was cumbersome. At the start of every fiscal
year, the finance department used Microsoft®
Office Excel® spreadsheet software to send
other departments worksheets containing the
previous year’s data. The departments would
review the numbers, make changes, and
return the updated worksheets to finance.
“We have a table games department, a poker
department, a slots department—more than
70 departments in all,” says Cathy Kellers,
Assistant Controller for Budgeting and
Reporting at Foxwoods. “Each department
budgets its costs and revenues at every
conceivable level of detail. With salaries, for
example, we budget regular hours versus
overtime versus employment taxes. We also
budget for items like operating supplies and
repair and maintenance.”
Kellers used a macro to upload all the
complex worksheet data into the resort’s
Oracle PeopleSoft Financials system. Kellers
and her team also compiled revenue data in
worksheets from the resort’s thousands of
gaming tables and slot machines, plus its
dozens of restaurants, bars, and retail
outlets. She says, “We use Microsoft Excel for
revenue because some of our formulas are
very complicated—based on win percentages
and other factors.” Consolidating and
uploading all that data took at least 16 hours,
and Kellers had to repeat that process at
least six times during the annual budgeting
cycle. She habitually put in long days during
budgeting season, often working well past
midnight.
The resort’s internal reporting tools were
equally frustrating because department
managers weren’t in control of creating the
reports they needed. Managers who wanted
to justify their budget or compare their actual
performance against budget projections had
to send a request to the finance department.
Kellers’s team exported the latest data from
the system into a worksheet and sent it to the
manager. Using this manual process,
managers couldn’t create much more than
basic trend-line reports, and they didn’t have
enough information to make timely business
decisions during the year. In addition, datainput errors were common. Even Kellers, the
system’s most experienced user, struggled
with inevitable glitches. “After staying up late
to get everything in and ready for a meeting
with senior management the next day, I’d
walk into the meeting with inaccurate
reports,” she says.
Solution
In February 2005, Foxwoods began looking
for a software solution that would empower
users to conduct detailed planning,
budgeting, and forecasting by line item,
department, and employee. “The sheer effort
involved in preparing budgets every year is
what really motivated us to look for a better
solution,” Kellers says. Foxwoods had an
aggressive implementation deadline to meet.
“Budgeting normally begins here in April, and
we didn’t select the vendor until March,” she
says. “Rapid implementation was important
because Foxwoods has a September 30 yearend, and we must provide the budget to the
owners—the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal
Nation—by October 1. That budget sets
spending and revenue guidelines for
everyone, so it must be both timely and
comprehensive.”
The finance team narrowed the field of
software vendors to three and invited them to
present their solutions at Foxwoods. After
reviewing product features and licensing
details, Foxwoods selected Infor, a Microsoft
Gold Certified Partner, to lead the
implementation of a new solution.
“We have a system that
our people accepted
right away and really
enjoy using. The
accuracy of our reports
also makes everyone
happier.”
Cathy Kellers, Assistant Controller for
Budgeting and Reporting, Foxwoods Resort
Casino
Foxwoods was impressed that the Infor
Performance Management (PM) Business
Process Applications (BPAs) they saw
included all the performance management
tools they needed in one package. Infor PM
BPAs also worked well with the data
consolidation, analysis, and reporting tools
that Foxwoods already used—Microsoft Office
Access™ 2003 database software, Excel
2003, and Word 2003. In addition, Foxwoods
appreciated the positive attitude of Infor and
its technology partner, Strafford Technology.
“We asked each vendor if it could do the
implementation in our timeframe,” she says.
“Most of them said there was no way they
could do it that fast. But Infor and Strafford
Technology had no issues with our deadline.”
Strafford brought in two staffers to deploy the
new solution. One worked with the Foxwoods
IT team to load Infor PM BPAs on a server
computer running the Windows Server® 2003
R2 operating system. The other worked with
the Foxwoods team to customize the software
for its needs. For example, Strafford used
Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 database
software and SQL Server Reporting Services
to create state-of-the-art reporting tools that
work with Infor PM BPAs. Strafford also used
an Infor PM BPAs feature called Excel
Services, which makes it easy to import and
export data to and from Excel worksheets.
By the end of May 2005, less than two
months after the implementation began,
Foxwoods was using the new system. “We
didn’t have time to do a lot of testing, so we
jumped right into production,” Kellers says.
“We would have had to fix any problems right
then and there, but there really weren’t any.”
Implementation, including training and
support, came in under the projected budget.
Strafford trained seven Foxwoods power
users to use Infor PM BPAs, and Microsoft
provided a few hours of training on SQL
Server Reporting Services. Other Foxwoods
employees didn’t need training because the
solution featured an intuitive Web-based
reporting dashboard and otherwise relied on
the Microsoft Office System programs they
already used.
Benefits
The new solution simplifies Foxwoods’
financial tasks by streamlining the budgeting
and forecasting processes, reducing data
errors, and providing on-demand reports.
Now managers have the information they
need to make better decisions. “We have a
system that our people accepted right away
and really enjoy using,” Kellers says. “The
accuracy of our reports also makes everyone
happier.”
Consolidates Data in Hours, not Weeks
With the new solution, Kellers no longer
works late into the night at the start of every
fiscal year. She can now consolidate and
upload departmental data in hours instead of
weeks, and she can consolidate the annual
budget numbers in about 10 percent of the
time that it took before. “We reduced the
time it takes to consolidate our budget data
from 96 hours to 9 hours,” she says. “I often
used to work on the budget until 1:00 a.m.
Now I work a normal day, and I hardly ever
put in overtime.” Also, because the new
solution streamlined the functions of the old
payroll system, it displays payroll data
instantly. The finance team no longer has to
spend two hours waiting for 23 linked
worksheets to open on a computer every time
it does payroll.
Kellers also likes the fact that her team has
the independence to manage data security
without having to wait for someone from the
Foxwoods IT team. What’s more, if an
employee needs answers about how to use a
feature of Infor PM BPAs, the user can query
the Infor AnswerLink site and receive an
answer within an hour.
“On-demand reporting
gives our department
managers the
information they need to
make the right
decisions. Now they can
see when to make
course corrections—
before small problems
turn into big ones.”
Cathy Kellers, Assistant Controller for
Budgeting and Reporting, Foxwoods Resort
Casino
Reduces Data-Input Errors
Because the new solution is fully automated,
it practically eliminated errors formerly
caused by manually entering and moving
data from one file or system to another.
Kellers learned an important lesson from this.
“If you’re doing a financial task manually with
software, there’s probably a quicker and
better way to do it,” she says. She is
impressed by new features in the solution
such as “worksheet details,” which
automatically update Excel data. Because of
error-reducing features like these that run
transparently in the background, Kellers no
longer worries as much about the accuracy of
her data. “When I go into a meeting now, I
know that what I carry and show is accurate.”
Provides More Detailed Reporting
The new solution makes budgets easier to
analyze than before by helping managers and
finance people drill down to see how lowerlevel data impacts top-line numbers. Kellers
says, “Infor PM BPAs offer worksheet
attachments that allow us to actually see all
the assumptions that justify the budget. The
attachments look like Excel worksheets,
which we financial people love. They break
the budget down into greater detail—by
month or by vendor, if that’s what we need. If
there’s some new cost that had not been
factored into the budget, the department can
go to senior management and say, ‘See,
we’ve got this new thing we have to deal with
now.’”
Facilitates Better Decision Making
With the new solution, department managers
no longer have to rely on the finance team to
create key reports. SQL Server Reporting
Services provides intuitive tools such as a
Web-based dashboard that makes it possible
for managers to create their own reports.
“Department heads are in a much better
position than we are to know when
something might be impacting performance
and therefore when something should be
investigated further,” Kellers says. “Ondemand reporting gives our department
managers the information they need to make
the right decisions. Now they can see when to
make course corrections—before small
problems turn into big ones.”
For More Information
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
For more information about Microsoft
products and services, call the Microsoft
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Microsoft subsidiary. To access information
using the World Wide Web, go to:
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For more information about the Microsoft
server product portfolio, go to:
www.microsoft.com/servers/default.mspx
For more information about Microsoft SQL
Server, go to:
www.microsoft.com/sqlserver
For more information about Infor products
and services, call (800) 260-2640 or visit
the Web site at:
www.infor.com
For more information about Foxwoods
Resort Casino, call (800) FOXWOODS or
visit the Web site at:
www.foxwoods.com
Software and Services
Hardware
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
− Windows Server 2003 R2
− Microsoft SQL Server 2000
 Technologies
− SQL Server Reporting Services
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
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT
MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS
SUMMARY.
Document published May 2007
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