With 34 German national soccer league championship wins in its 125-year history, FC Bayern Munich is one of the largest and most successful sports clubs in the world. It has built a massive global audience, with more than 200 million social media followers, up to 75,000 spectators in attendance at every men’s league home match, and a growing fan base for its other teams, including women’s soccer and men’s basketball.

Keeping FC Bayern at the top is no mean feat, and the action on the pitch is supported by a global administrative team of over 1,200, in addition to the thousands of operational staff who work to deliver a seamless experience to the fans who fill the Allianz Arena for each home match. The focus on match-day operations encompasses everything from security to ticketing to retail, as well as managing one of the largest parking garages in Europe, which accommodates up to 12,000 cars that must enter and exit within a few hours.

FC Bayern’s match-day operations generate a staggering volume of data, but capturing and making sense of every fan interaction—both in the stadium and among the hundreds of millions tuning in worldwide—was becoming a herculean undertaking. Fan data was siloed in more than 50 legacy systems, creating a fragmented information landscape that hindered FC Bayern’s ability to understand and serve its legions of fans.

Learn how one of the most successful sports clubs is delivering an elevated experience for its fans Watch the video

Thankfully, a club that has been in the business of winning for over a century is no stranger to innovation.

Game plan: data

Dominik Winter, head of Development and Process for FC Bayern Munich, captured the club’s challenge in a nutshell: “Everything needs data.” Everyone from the firefighters and police who supported match days to the IT teams and retail staff “needed data, and everyone needed the same perspective on the data,” Winter explained.

But the club’s data was sprawled across dozens of siloed systems, each tied to different vendors and service providers. And when it came time to make crucial match-day decisions, team members had to rely on analog, piecemeal methods of sharing information—often through SMS and radio. As a result, no one ever had the same information at the same time.

FC Bayern needed to harness its vast amount of information with a single, integrated system that provided a unified, 360-degree view.

From silos to a streamlined system

The storied sports club has enjoyed a partnership with SAP dating back more than a quarter of a century. Therefore, SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) was a natural fit for the next step in the club’s digital journey. The platform includes SAP Integration Suite to help capture and combine data from disparate sources and systems, including both SAP and non-SAP systems. This newly integrated data landscape provides a single source of truth across the organization, enabling real-time data analytics that not only streamline match-day operations and optimize the fan experience on-site but also provide invaluable insights to fuel long-term strategic planning.

For example, Winter explained, the club now has access to an up-to-the-minute, “high-level” overview of FC Bayern fans—”how they behave, what they’re interested in, how old they are, whether they buy jerseys, whether they only go to soccer matches, whether they are already interested in basketball,” and more—that has facilitated a much deeper understanding of fans, not only on the individual level but also across the entire fan base.

Forecasting the future

With a solid, integrated data foundation established, FC Bayern is looking ahead and will be adding AI to its technology line-up to maximize the value of its data across the organization, from amplifying process efficiency to developing robust, data-informed predictive capabilities.

For organizations looking to undertake their own digital transformations, Winter advised to not put the cart before the horse: “To use AI, you need to have good data.” And while Winter cautioned that every organization’s process is unique, he recommended listening as a good first step for everyone: “Talk to your users. What are their problems? What do they need to know? What processes are they trying to optimize?”

While the journey is not always easy, FC Bayern knows that winning is always worth the effort.

For the full FC Bayern Munich episode and the on-demand Better Together: Customer Conversations series, visit sap.com/btp.

The full episode

Learn more about how FC Bayern Munich has transformed match-day operations:

  • Thought leadership podcast: Dominik Winter, head of development and process at FC Bayern München, talks with Thulium CEO Tamara McCleary about why it was mission-critical to enhance the fan experience by integrating their data to deliver a more personalized and targeted omnichannel experience, catering to individual preferences, from parking to purchases.
  • Practitioners’ video: Dominik Winter talks with Timo Elliott, vice president and global innovation evangelist at SAP, about the herculean undertaking to capture and make sense of the staggering volume of fan data siloed in more than 50 legacy systems. And then, with an eye on AI, they discuss what’s next.

To access the full on-demand Better Together: Customer Conversations series, visit here.

Do you have ideas for topics or technologies we should cover, or would you like to be a guest on the show? We’d love to hear from you. E-mail us.

Timo Elliott is the vice president and global innovation advocate for SAP BTP at SAP.

Top photo courtesy of FC Bayern München AG

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