By Acadia, Director of Client Solutions at CCT
The worst time to discover an unusual casino process is the first day a new system goes live.
At Viejas, we wanted to find those surprises first.
Viejas was one of the first projects I led with my own team. The property had built an internal system to handle some of its cage transactions and had already taken meaningful steps toward automation. But the system still required their team to maintain it, and it did not connect the work all the way from the cage through audit.
As we prepared for the transition to Casino Insight, Viejas was willing to work closely with us on a different approach.
We used a process called dual processing. In the weeks leading up to go-live, the Viejas cage team completed its real work in Casino Insight alongside its existing process. When employees opened a shift, completed a transaction or closed out for the day, they practiced those same actions in the new system.
In many ways, this was the go-live before go-live.
The team could experience Casino Insight through the actual rhythm of its work while the existing process was still in place. We could see how the software responded to a full shift, catch questions as they came up and work through the details before the official transition.
Viejas brought deep knowledge of its operation. We brought our experience with casino financial workflows and Casino Insight. Working side by side, we moved through different scenarios, refined the process and made sure the system supported the way the property needed to operate.
What stood out to me was how quickly the Viejas team started building muscle memory.
By the time the official go-live arrived, employees had already opened shifts, entered transactions and balanced using Casino Insight. They had encountered questions while there was still time to work through them. They knew what the system would ask of them because they had already used it to perform their real work.
Going live became a much smaller transition. The team could stop completing the old process and continue doing what it had already practiced.
CCT was still on-site and ready to help. Viejas handed us phones so its cage employees could call whenever they needed support. At go-live, those calls can come quickly because employees are processing live transactions, balancing real money and answering for the accuracy of their shifts.
I expected questions.
But the phones barely rang.
The Viejas team kept working, balancing and moving through its shifts. Most of the questions that could have surfaced under the pressure of go-live had already come up during dual processing.
That was the payoff of all the preparation. The team was not learning the system for the first time while also trying to do its job. It had already done the work, asked the questions and figured out how Casino Insight fit into its operation.
Viejas became an important project for me and for CCT because it showed us how effective dual processing could be when carried through from beginning to end.
The work we did together helped formalize an approach we have continued to refine with other casinos since.
Viejas helped us prove that a successful go-live begins long before launch.
