DePaul Athletics Ticketing

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DePaul Athletics Ticketing

• Presented By
• Rich Crothers Igor Kanevskiy

April 14th, 2005
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About DePaul University

• Established in 1898
• Urban, Catholic, Vincentian
• 23,500 students
• Approximately 75 commuter students
• 4,500 faculty and staff
• Sports
• Mens and Womens basketball and soccer
• Womens softball and volleyball

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DePauls IS division

• PeopleSoft shop
• 120 people
• Running Windows 2003 and Unix systems
• Blackboard School
• Unix Transaction System
• Blackboard Learning System

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DePaul Universitys Athletic Ticketing Solution

• Session Objectives
• Why did we want a new athletic ticketing system?
• Choice of solution
• Solution design
• Lessons learned
• Innovation
• Build a working web-based ticketing solution
  within existing system architecture
• Results of Design

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Why do we want a new athletic ticketing system?

• DePaul University recently instituted an
  athletics fee
• Provide free or discounted event admission
• Handle expected increase in attendance with the
  move to the Big East Conference
• Automated system to address event registration
  and payment for extended benefits
• Ability to sign-up for an Athletics event at any
  of DePaul University venues Wish Field, Athletic
  Center and Allstate Arena

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Solution Options

• Two possible solutions
• Buy TicketMasters Archtics solution
• Build internal DePaul solution
• Solutions evaluated with Even Swaps methodology

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Even Swaps Analysis
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Decision

• DePauls internal solution
• fit best with the Athletic Department functional
  and overall requirements
• High visibility to students
• Integrates into the Student Experience
• Exclusively DePaul branded
• Use the DePaul ID as the Ticket

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Results

• Solution has been live and largely successful for
  the athletics fall and winter seasons
• 35 Total events
• Total attendees 8904 with 1338 guests
• Total parking passes sold 1030
• Total bus requests 3348
• Students and fans commented that the system was
  cool, easy and advanced

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PeopleSoft / Blackboard Interface
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Sequoia Wireless Reader

• 10 readers
• Project required online use

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Solution Design

• Blackboard Transaction System Unix Edition
• Count Privilege/Account
• 1 tick for student
• 1 tick for guest (limit 1guest)
• Daily reset
• AP-NP Bug with Daily Count reset

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Solution Design

• Peoplesoft interface with Blackboard Transaction
  System Unix Edition
• PeopleSoft script (SQR) runs to import patrons
  into BTSUE
• PS Auto Schedule to update adds to the events
• Automated Import Script on BTSUE
• Run morning of the event
• Updated every 30 minutes until event start time

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Solution Design

• Blackboard and Informatica
• Script to run log recall for Sequoia readers to
  file
• Informatica pulls file from /tmp
• Analyze Swipe used data vs. Sign Up

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Student Experience Flow
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Solution Design

• PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal

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Event Reservation

• Check student eligibility
• Athletics fee charged?
• Web service call to PeopleSoft Student
  Administration System
• Check availability
• Seats still available?
• Registration still open?
• Log beginning of session

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Reserve Tickets

• Tickets are reserved for three minutes
• Update session with purchase options and
  expiration time
• Additional availability checks

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Collect Billing Information

• Payment
• Credit card number
• Number verified by algorithm
• CVV2
• Name and address

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Charge Credit Card

• Web service call to a DePaul eCommerce Service
• .NET Web Service
• Wrapper for a COM DLL
• Synchronous call across the Internet

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Credit Card Vendor - Nova

• Contact the vendor with required information
• Process response
• Log the transaction to a separate database
• Return code from Nova sent back to reservation
  application
• Reservation application determines whether to
  continue, give user another chance, or to stop
  the purchase
• Allow only three attempts

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Confirmation Screen

• Update session to reflect a purchase
• Past attempts are marked as invalid
• Parking Pass displayed if purchased

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Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

• 314,854 emails
• 22 campaigns in 4 ½ months
• Three types of communications
• Reminders to Students with Reservations
• Student Attendee Drive
• General Awareness of New Student Athletics
  Tickets Benefit
• A variety of offline marketing support drove
  students to Athletics website

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Reporting

• Event and registration data moved to a data
  warehouse
• Analyzed and displayed with Informaticas
  PowerAnalyzer
• Tool is entirely Web-Based

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Lessons Learned

• Scalability of solution
• Quick, efficient processing of transactions
• Linking multiple systems together requires a
  bullet-proof design and superb coding
• DePaul had 4 out of 35 event failures
• Two first test events and two first live events
• AP-NP bug in BTSUE (3 failures)
• PeopleSoft interface to BTSUE (1 failure)

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Conclusion

• Innovating Together in 05
• Built a working ticketing solution from scratch
  in 3 months with 7 people
• Solution has been live for the athletics fall and
  winter seasons, with our largest event comprising
  around 2,000 students
• Partnership with Blackboard and Sequoia
• Contact Info
• ikanevsk_at_depaul.edu
• rcrother_at_depaul.edu

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Question?