About Gearbox Entertainment
Gearbox Entertainment is a prominent interactive and independent game entertainment industry player. Launched by a group of renowned game veterans and developers, it entered the global gaming landscape in 1999. It innovated the best-selling video game Brothers in Arms and Borderlands series.
Based in Dallas, Texas, Gearbox Entertainment has carved its niche in crafting games that people love. With a mission to entertain the world, these are globally acclaimed game makers, producing original, inspiring, and record-breaking gaming and media content for the most famous brands.
Epic Games, the Game Developer launched its Currency Card program for Physical Gift cards in October 2019. BluEnt is the database developer for reconciliation and reporting of activators and platform activity. The client also intended to get a microsite for real-time reporting, data integrity, and secured infrastructure.
Our project priorities based on the client’s requirements were:
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To streamline data management between the partners and the currency gift card activators. That included data consolidation, validation scripts, data preparation, and transaction report updates for admin and users.
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Improving data integrity to track, monitor, and organize real-time gift card transactions and reports. That covered monthly statements for activators and platforms, reconciliation with remittance reports and payments, sales and redemption graphs and comparisons, data compliance reports, and more.
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Launching a microsite to record, visualize, and analyze gift card redemption data from different sources needing data visualization expertise. That compiled interactive business and client dashboards for easy access to reports and with secure user access controls.
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Automated gift card data management and reporting for audit transactions outlining activators’ invoices. Transactions reconciliation with remittance reports and invoice statements. Prepare redemption reports, tax and accounting reports, and business compliance reports.
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Custom platform portal for reporting with seamless and secure access to monthly platform statements and daily transactions reports of different regions or sources in one comprehensive view.
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Complex data cleanups across location-based merchant reports, including geo-tagging, data integration for multiple sources on one card, accurate and sequenced transaction records, etc.
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Identification of test transaction including unpaid individual cards by reconciliation of the remittance statements, tagging of influencer and trial cards and prevention of platform fees loss due to redemption of unpaid/test cards.
manageable chunks
to decide better.
We will give you
optimized data
visualizations for
each layer.
BluEnt’s Solutions
Gift Card Reporting & Management Pain Points
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Reconciliation of daily sales transactions with activator portal
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Inaccurate sequencing of transactions on each card
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Missing information or short payments from multiple sources
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Business compliance and security concerns
Since the client was concerned about inaccurate and inconsistent methods of gift card reporting, we delved into high-level data flow automation and reporting at the initial stage.
Based on the critical pain points of the client, we came up with value-engineered and custom gift card management solutions, including:
Custom Gift Card Reporting Dashboard
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Total activation and redemption reports by distributors, retailers, platform and geography derived from advanced ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) process.
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Database design optimization to draw location-wise daily statement reports by region, city, and ZIP.
Daily Statement Automation & Reconciliation Features
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Data validation and integrity for reconciliation on tax calculations, activator statements, invoices, transactions adjustments marked as void or test transactions, and missing or hidden activation.
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Data sync for daily, weekly, and monthly remittance details from primary sources (inComm IRIS, EPAY, BLACKHAWK, and Fortnite).
All-in-one Microsite for Sales Tracking and Analysis
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Reporting partner portal using AWS QuickSight/Tableau for a holistic view of detailed reports and statements from varied regions. Advanced latitude and longitude mapping extract exact location information for each gift card transaction.
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Managed user access and roles featuring advanced authentication and authorization for multi-layered security and protected environment.
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Unified, cloud-driven, and interactive dashboard to build with managed user access and roles. Robust data governance and implementation for security, quality, and precise data analytics.
Our data engineers planned to obtain the best possible results for Gearbox Entertainment.
We foremost coordinated with the client to understand their requirements. That helped us understand their pain points and recommend the most practical solutions.
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For gift card reporting, we began with a complete data syncing process, from data importing to data validation, cleansing, optimizing, and modeling. The core database encompassed daily activator data from primary and other sources, including inComm IRIS, BHN Reporting Portal, activator invoices, and bank statements.
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For the microsite, we used BI tools for custom data visualization (designing reports and dashboards) and AWS cloud services (user access and roles).
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Our data teams integrated user authentication and authorization for admin, reader, and author portals to improve security.
Explore more success stories for data analytics and management.
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Final
Outcomes
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The microsite combining separate dashboards for admin and end users dissolved the reporting errors, user access controls, and security lags in the gift card system.
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Core Features for Admin Portal
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User Login
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Manage Users
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Manage Dashboard
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Manage Dashboard Permissions
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Core Features for End Users/Partners/Vendors
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User Login
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Dashboard Categorization List
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View Dashboard Filter
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With interactive dashboards, customizable reports, both sales data analysis and net revenue calculations are now more streamlined and precise than earlier. It’s also easier for admins and vendors to track and interpret daily activators, gift card redemption, reconciliation, and business compliance reports all in one place.
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Multi-user access controls and advanced authentication for the partner portal mitigated significant security concerns of the client.
Conclusion
The client was impressed with how we harnessed our data integration and management expertise to achieve the proposed outcomes.
Epic games database administrator aptly guided BluEnt in developing their in-house data site and acknowledged our result-yielding competencies and value-engineered solutions in addressing the major pain points that weren’t overtly visible for the nascent card program
Words from the Client
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