Securing the Future of Venues Report Highlights the Need for Action in the Current Market

The Venue Management Association (VMA) insights engaged the Venue consulting firm Gemba to develop this data partner report that set out to understand how sport and entertainment venues can secure their future through diversification and active management of revenue streams, underpinned by real productivity improvements across people, operations, technology, data and asset utilisation

Gemba / VMA Article

Issues Identified in the Survey – The Problems

The survey was across Stadiums, Arenas, Performing Arts Centres and community venues in Australia and New Zealand

The key is capturing and using integrated data to drive the service and productivity improvements needed for the venue’s sustainable future in difficult times. Issues Identified by the Survey

Partners with venue and event clients to address several of the requirements identified in the survey to help management achieve sustainable operations.

The survey uncovered the challenges the businesses are facing in the market, facing cost-of-living pressure, with customers already being stretched, where maximising yield becomes crucial

Government funding is tight due to the state and federal government budget positions

Venues with the assets need better models to commercialise underutilised event and non-event days revenue streams available within their venues that are competitive to market capabilities.

Venues also need to optimise their returns from the tighter revenues, with a key focus on labour costs through better planning to meet customer needs for each event

Venues with these assets can exploit competitive advantages by generating marginal returns from additional activities through value-adding facilities and services that are in markets where cost-of-living is reduced, spending

A Shorter Term Opportunity

The most variable costs in venues are staff costs.

Most other costs are more fixed, like facility developments, back office administration – event planning & management, facility management and marketing and sales

The highest variable and most perishable costs, after the facilities themselves, are securing and scheduling team members at the lowest overall event cost possible. This can be achievable through efficient and available access to a pool of direct team members that are scheduled in the numbers and only at the times required to deliver the services; efficient scheduling of the service to be delivered by each department.

Available Tools to Help Venue Management’s Productivity and Margin Improvements

The focus will need to be on the quality of the revenue source and labour cost management

Onbaording of New Employees

Data will flow directly into Inzenius from onboarding, facilitating employee file creation via their own device

The process from recruitment to approved onboarding can be seamless, with management approval, and all data will flow directly to facilitate the approved employee for roster and payroll once all data is available.

If data is missing, the Payroll team would be advised of the missing requirements before payroll is committed to rectify, including missing authorised timesheets

What Labour Efficiency Management Tools should be Available?

Demand Built Rosters

The ability to create the event roster using the intelligence of the employee Roster Demand Builder.

The 5-step process will create the roster for costing to budget review and approval process as a publishable document for employee acceptance and

The steps are:

Select event type – to reference the requirement by role for each shift for the event
Select the date of the event
Select the start and end time of the event – like Gate opening and closing, function start/end
Select to create unfilled or include employees – based on their skills and availability
Cost $ roster to compare to budget labour and

The selected team members to fill each position will be posted to the team memebrs devices for their acceptance.

The team mebers roister should be tagged as accepted and used to compare to their timekeeping

Employee self-serve from onboarding & rostering to payroll

Team member self-serve communication workflow will add to the efficiency and reduce complexity in communication

The employee portal will be accessible to the employees on any web-connected device, including Android and Apple tablets or computers

The system can facilitate Timekeeping on the device, with GPS location tracking available.

Team Bulk Timekeeping

Many event-based businesses have teams scheduled for groups of timekeeping that the Group Timekeeping option can support, rather than individual employee clocking. These team members usually arrive for a briefing at the start of their shifts.

Time records are required for analysis, and the system monitors each employee’s attendance against their roster. When time worked matches the roster, the system automatically creates the timesheet. Non-matching records will be presented to the manager for approval as timekeeping or roster as amended if required

The employee is prompted to sign the timesheet on the device.

The approved Timesheet is the record for automated payroll processing.

Build Your Pool of Available Employees

An all-year-round event schedule that keeps the venue’s willing team as deep as possible will help build member loyalty and increase acceptance of your roster invites. This will reduce the need for a proportion of the venue’s agency staff requirements. A strong onboarding and retention system is central to this outcome.

An all-year-round event schedule that keeps the venue’s willing team as deep as possible will help build member loyalty and increase acceptance of your roster invites. This will reduce the need for a proportion of the venue’s agency staff requirements. Creating a good onboarding and retention system is core to this outcome

Build your own available team and, if necessary, share team members with other businesses to support their employment opportunities. If you are predominantly a weekend or evening event business, you may wish to link your available team to weekday casual staff employees that you will not be competing with

Building your team available list is critical to reduce costs and build your own committed team for your events.

Efficient rosters for the demand of the event

The ability to manage the rostering of the required staff for each event can be achieved through a demand-built roster or using a previous schedule as the template for a like event, using the same staff that worked on it, delivering competent, experienced team members that are available and then being able to post unfilled shifts to competent available employees from your list.

Unfilled shifts created can be filled efficiently

Rosters built, including the staff selected for each role, should be posted well in advance to each competent and approved employee to bid for the shifts

The process can be automated from the roster itself, with the employee filling the shifts selected from those who bid for them, or it can be auto-filled by the first-to-bid process.

This is key to a successful process in the maintenance of an active pool of available staff

The combination of these processes delivers the ability to ensure consistency for each event, so that customers have the same staff on each occasion they attend the event

An all-in-one rostering, Timekeeping, Timesheet-compliant automated Award Interpreter for Rosters and Payroll in one system that can integrate with the venue’s HRM and ERP IT stack is the answer to improving back-office and service productivity and cost structures needed for today’s venues in the tight markets identified in the report.

Data from previous profitable events will support creating similar activities for future event budgeting and planning, including labour allocation and department costs.

Reporting and Analysis

Reporting as needed for good decision-making

Reports need to be configurable to meet business needs using report tools like MS Power BI. This Power BI platform enables direct data from all the venue systems to be in one report without the need for complex APIs

The ability to design and capture data for integrated reporting is critical to the venues’ future. Government financial support is shrinking at a time when customers are holding back on their spending.

The built structure and assets are there, and the most variable component of venue profitability is new revenue, followed closely by efficient labour cost management.

Adopting venue- and event-specific software options is the critical pathway to venue service delivery, efficiency and profitability

Dashboards for every system user can be configured to each department’s needs.