Delivering real-time fan insights for the Chicago Bulls

The Bulls brought OneSix in as both a strategic advisor and a hands-on extension of the team. From day one, OneSix worked shoulder-to-shoulder with the Bulls' data engineers, not advising from across the table but executing daily on the actual work.

Domain fluency in the Bulls' stack (Snowflake, dbt, Fivetran, and Hightouch) meant zero ramp-up on the tools the team was already running. That allowed OneSix to start delivering immediately on the highest-leverage problems. The work focused on four things:

• Building a unified data foundation. OneSix built new pipelines into the ticketing system and pulled in third-party data sources that had long been accessible to the Bulls but were sitting in silos. Once consolidated in Snowflake, the data was modeled in a way that let the Bulls' analysts and strategists more effectively use it, fueling better decisions across pricing, inventory, and marketing.
• Automating fan enrichment. A process that had previously required manually uploading spreadsheets was rebuilt as a real-time pipeline. Now, every time a ticket is purchased, the Bulls automatically enrich that customer record with deeper demographic and lifestyle context, giving the business an up-to-the-minute view of who's actually in the United Center on any given night.
• Going beyond the engineering work. OneSix delivered an unscoped Tableau dashboard so leadership could see in real time whether nightly jobs ran successfully, the kind of visibility executives need when the data warehouse powers ticketing decisions. When a complex ticketing data project turned out tougher than expected, OneSix pushed past the original timeline to make sure the data was right to the penny and to the ticket, because anything less than that doesn't earn trust inside the business.
• Exploring the power of AI. OneSix worked with the Bulls to pilot Snowflake Intelligence, powered by Cortex, giving ticketing and business stakeholders the ability to ask questions about sales data in plain English and get immediate, actionable insights. Rather than waiting on the data team to pull a report, the people closest to the business can now get answers themselves, directly from the same trusted data foundation powering their day-to-day operations. The result: faster, more confident decisions at exactly the moments that matter most.