Dennis Schneider- Senior Director of IT at Universal Studios

Universal Studios- Hollywood

On Friday, October 3rd, I had the pleasure of meeting Dennis Schneider, the Senior Director of IT at Universal Studios. He has a fascinating job, and is involved with many new IT initiatives.  Dennis’ team is fairly unique when comparing it to other IT departments at NBC Universal. He strictly focuses on activities within the park. This includes managing a dashboard system that shows daily forecasts for attendance, food, retail, and soon to be parking. His team and rolled all the way up to the president, are all about metrics. Every day is measured to the previous year and is plotted on a dashboard, so everyone from IT to leadership can understand what is going on.

An initiative in the works is implementing radio frequency identification (RFID) in employee uniform handling. Within the parks right now, every ride employee has their own unique uniform. Tracking the uniforms right now is a laborious, erroneous, manual process.  This is where RFID steps in. Dennis is currently investigating how casinos deal with employee uniforms using RFID, and is making plans to go to a casino to see how such a thing can be managed easily by RFID.

The systems that Dennis’ team supports include all of the point of sale (POS) registers throughout the park, stroller rental system (a future RFID project), and  ticketing system. They are currently experimenting with do it yourself technology within Doc Brown’s (from Back to the Future) food area, putting power in the hands of the consumer as I like to call it. Users are able to order food and pay by credit card, all via kiosk. This technology was put in place to see if users will adopt such form of payment in the future. If its successful, similar systems will be rolled out to help ease congestion in the food lines.

Another system that his team supports is ticketing/attendance. They have 6 ticketing booths staffed, in addition, 4 automated ticketing systems on site. The automated ticketing system is similar to the food ordering kiosk. Last summer they implemented a biometrics scanner to register guests that purchased an annual pass. Instead of employing folks to staff the booth to take the annual pass holders photo and create a badge, they simply scan their finger at the entry point to get access to the park. This saves the park a lot in labor and material expenses!

Many thanks to Dennis for sharing his time in showing me around the park and pointing out the systems his team supports.