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stefan_wagner1
Explorer

Innovative IT wows sports fans—in the stadium, on the golf course, and at the racecourse.

This not only increases revenue, but leads to improved customer retention, too.

Fan app soars to number 1 in the charts

Since September 2015, fans of successful German ice hockey club Adler Mannheim have their own app. It allows them to access information on their team, collect loyalty points, and more. In addition, they receive personalized offers. In this way, the club increases fan loyalty and creates new revenue streams.

In the first days after its launch, the app reached number 1 in the charts for free sports apps on the German Apple Store with more than 10,000 downloads. Furthermore, over 3,000 users registered in the coupon center – the key feature of the app where fans collect their bonus points.

The app is fully integrated with the SAP Customer Checkout and SAP Event Ticketing solution. This enables the club’s sales representatives to view data on customer purchases and send personalized advertisements and special offers to fans’ smartphones. What’s more, customers can pay for tickets and merchandise at stationary cash registers or via staff members with mobile devices.

Top-flight golf just became even more exciting

The Solheim Cup is one of the world’s most prestigious women’s golf tournaments. In 2015, for the first time ever, the event took place at the St. Leon-Rot Golf Club in Germany. And thanks to SAP technology, spectators were closer to the action than ever before.

The Solheim Cup app, developed on the SAP HANA cloud platform, gave fans access to exciting information on the tournament, such as the live scoring and player locations. There was even an interactive quiz for the golf enthusiasts to take part in.

Spectators could witness entirely new real-time insights on screen. Enhanced graphics showed the flight of the ball, the distance to the hole, and in-depth green analyses.

Transforming fans into judges

With over 470 athletes from 40 nations, 720 horses, and a total audience of around 450,000, the FEI (Fédération Equestre Internationale) European Championships were the largest sporting event in Germany in 2015. Working with SAP, the event organizers gave visitors the feeling of being in the saddle themselves.

The event app had much more to offer than just information on the schedule, show grounds, rules, rankings, and results. The audience could also rate dressage riders live, in parallel to the official judges. This feature was extremely popular, with over 100,000 ratings entered during the tournament.

For the first time, fans become more involved in the action at the four-kilometer-long obstacle course, thanks to helmet cameras and SAP software. They could follow the cross country events on their smartphone, including information on the speed and position of the riders.

“In 2014, only seven German riders used data loggers during the eventing competition; the number jumped to 32 this year,” explains Stephan Daub, project manager at SAP. Winning rider Ingrid Klimke was just one of the users. She sees major potential in these new applications: “SAP Equestrian Analytics helps us to get our fans closer to the sport than has ever been possible.”

The event organizers were also full of praise for the collaboration. “Digitization is becoming more and more important for fans and riders,” says Michael Mronz, Managing Director of Aachener Reitturnier. “Having a strong partner like SAP at our side is an unbeatable advantage in the development of innovative offerings to make the sport more transparent and hands-on for our fans.” Further IT projects are already being planned.