The NFL: business systems optimisation for growth and expansion planning

A league is a business of ticketing, sponsorship, media rights, venues and clubs, and each of those has a system of its own. When the league plans growth and expansion, the question of what a new market, a new event or a new partner would do to the business is answered by pulling from all of those systems at once, and they rarely agree on what a customer, a venue or a season is.

The engagement for the NFL covered business systems optimisation in support of the league's growth and expansion planning.

The work began with an inventory of the systems behind the commercial operation and the decisions each one supported: where the data came from, whether it was reachable live or only as an export, and where planning depended on somebody re-keying a figure from one system into another.

From there, the systems were optimised around the planning they had to support. Shared definitions were established so that the same term meant the same thing across systems, hand-offs that depended on people were connected, and the figures the league planned on could be traced back to the events they came from.

Growth planning is only as good as the picture it is made from. Systems that agree with each other, and that answer today rather than from last month's export, let a league plan its expansion on what is actually happening in its business. That is the same operational thesis Opsian applies in hotels and hospitals, in a very different operation.