Achieving and Systematizing Operational Efficiency at the 2004 Olympics

The Problem

The Olympics, mother of all international athletic competitions, is also the ultimate challenge in construction planning, execution and event management. The 2004 Olympics, with an $8 billion budget and a workforce of over 130,000 to build some 36 venues and manage 300 athletic competitions, was a tall order for its organizers, the Athens Olympic Organizing Committee (ATHOC).

The Analytics Solution

The committee sought not only to ensure operational success of the event itself, but, through “Process Logistics Advanced Technical Optimization” (PLATO), to develop and capture knowledge modeling and resource management tools that could be transferred to future Olympic organizing committees. PLATO’s particular focus was on competition venues, managing the accreditation process for authorized personnel, transporting athletes and spectators, coordinating volunteers, and managing municipal operations around each of the event venues.

Three guiding principles were fundamental to the PLATO process:

1. A holistic view of venue operations was required because of the high level of interdependence among processes, key personnel and geographic locations;
2. A generic, abstract thinking process was required to analyze requirements for each venue, thus avoiding local constraints that might limit the development of universal solutions; and
3. PLATO had to enable stakeholders in the process to visualize the effects of their operational decisions for each venue prior to actual implementation.

Incorporating those principles, the PLATO process featured three interrelated modeling activities:

• Goals modeling:To grasp stakeholders’ goals for the intended systems, facilitating the identification of key choices to be followed and broad perceptions of costs and benefits;
• Business process modeling:To focus analysis and design on customer groups’ value chains and away from narrow functional thinking; and
• Scenarios modeling:To encourage group brainstorming that would let participants focus on alternative solutions and visualize systems behavior.

PLATO models were translated into user-friendly Windows-based computer applications that enabled stakeholders to state assumptions and generate probability distributions for particular outcomes. For example, PLATO’s scenario modeling application for venue services (e.g., ATMs, food service, ticket booths, bathrooms) allowed users to test different service parameters and project outcomes including attendee traffic patterns. Models were initially constructed using historical patterns and subsequently fine-tuned with data obtained during test events.

The Value

PLATO’s value to the Athens Olympic Organizing Committee included $55 million of estimated savings due to improved resource management and $15 million in savings due to efficiencies achieved in the planning and design process. The portability of the tools generated by PLATO will enable organizers of future Olympic events to achieve similar results. Finally, PLATO demonstrated that small countries like Greece can successfully organize large projects like the Olympics if management takes advantage of sound analytics, O.R. and management theories.