Panathinaikos B.C. turns digitalDigital Transformation
Panathinaikos B.C. (Basketball Club) is the most successful basketball club in Greek basketball’s history, and one of the most successful in European basketball, creating its own dynasty. They have won six EuroLeague Championships, thirty-nine Greek Basket League Championships, twenty Greek Cups, one Intercontinental Cup, one Greek Super Cup and two Triple Crowns. They also hold the record for most consecutive Greek League titles, as they are the only team to have won nine consecutive championships (2003–2011).
Amonsgt the numerous top athletes that have played for the club, we can found Dominique Wilkins, Byron Scott, Nick Galis, Dejan Bodiroga, Sarunas Jasikevicius and the list goes on.
Euroleague is the European professional basketball club competition, coming second to populatity, after the NBA. The management of the organisation, initiated a large project of Digital Transformation for each club, focusing on 8 main categories:
- Ticket Management & Pricing
- Arena Management
- Merchandising
- Website & Mobile app
- CRM
- Analytics & BI
- Operations & Productivity
- Innovation
Each club was assessed on the above, and was asked to improve their marks, using for benchmark the NBA standards.
So the huge challenge for the whole organisation was to digital transform all its operations, to not only match the standards set, but to also reflect its heavy history of success.
Along with the front office of Panathinaikos B.C., we develop a detailed development plan, that started by breakind down the 8 main categories to 176 specific criteria, that had to be met, in order to have a proper result.
For example, in merchandising, apart from the selling channels, we also introduced to the project more criteria, such as licensing, distribution, data gathering and syncronisation with other databases (Academies, Ticketing, Retail, etc.)
We added extended technology to all fan contact points, we centralised shared resources, we upgraded the venue and last but not least, we redesigned the whole organisation structure to be more agile and efficient, introducing a new role, the Chief Digital Officer of the club, reporting directly to the owners and the BoD.
When the initial assessment was produced by Euroleague, Panathinaikos was placed on the 10th position (out of 16 teams) on its Digital Readiness, with quite low grades on all main categories.
After the project was delivered, Panathinaikos went on to 4th position (behind clubs such as Real Madrid or Barcelona, with 100x the available budget).
The best improvement was accomplished in the merchandising category, where Panathinaikos was graded as the second-best performing club.
Apart from that, though, Panathinaikos managed to boost its club’ revevue capabilities, to achieve a much more healthier financial stability and to provide a much better experience to the fans.
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