JCM’s engineers are pioneering automation solutions for casinos to help the industry in the modern era.
Whether you’re facing labor shortages, budget limitations, processing constraints, or a combination, automation is the answer you’ve been waiting for, and JCM Global has leading automation solutions for the modern casino industry, according to Cliff Buckley, director of sales and business development.
“That’s especially true in today’s environment where there are labor shortages in count rooms across the country,” Buckley said.
Automation also frees up the count team to focus on other needs in the casino that enhance the guest experiences.
At the Global Gaming Expo this October in Las Vegas, JCM will host an automation pavilion filled with leading solutions for the count room from JCM’s partner CPS, a world leader in count-sort equipment.
JCM will be showing three of CPS’s different models of count-sort equipment. One is for smaller casinos and larger casino cage operations to count down currency. They have a high-speed desktop model in the V Series that can also have strappers available for it and go into 20 pockets. There’s the 7000i that’s comparable to a G&D model for very large casino operations.
“We have all three facets that can fit into different size casinos or different operations within the casino,” Buckley said. “They are all geared to help speed up the count room and all tied in with their ECM software, which ties into any slot accounting system and provides all the reporting. That is also tied with our ICB system. They are getting additional information, so if you have variances in the count room, you have a third independent device you can look at as well.”
ICB ASAP is a robotics system for cash counts that was introduced three years ago. This helps deal with any problems with variances, shortages, and mistakes along the way, Buckley shared. This helps with the shortage of labor and speeds up the process.
“Watching the count process over and over again across our casino environment, there was always discussion in the industry that there had to be a better way,” Buckley said. “JCM figured it out. By the time the cart comes into the count room until the trays go to the count equipment, it’s fully automated. We have taken all of the labor out of that and one person can run the entire machine by putting cash boxes onto a conveyor and taking cash boxes off. Nowhere in the middle does anybody touch anything. The robot opens the door, removes the cash, stacks it and puts it in a plastic tray – and when the tray is full turns it so the operator can take it to the machine. This whole process is what JCM built their reputation on.”
The XM Range is a new product for the market and provides flexible fitness sorting with an expandable modular stacker design and three rapid-select speed options. It processes up to 60,000 banknotes per hour, has a large feeder capacity of up to 1,000 notes, and pocket allocation to deliver a variety of cash handling processes, said Buckley.
“It’s for smaller casinos or for a casino cage that you are looking to count down,” he added. “It’s a fast processor. It doesn’t use any belts, so it’s all rollers. It’s new technology that CPS has picked up that we are proud to offer.”
A new product that will be at G2E is iVERIFY. When currency is spread on a gaming table, the equipment can identify the notes and number of notes or TITO tickets on the table through a camera. It also can identify the number of chips in a tray that are being passed to a patron, Buckley noted.
“It eliminates errors and has a second verification of how much currency is in the box for every table,” he said. “It uses visual technology and AI to identify the notes and how many notes are there, and this will be the first time we are showing it at G2E.”
Buckley explained that they work with casino partners to come up with creative ways to solve some of their problems and what they are seeking.
“That’s where we get a lot of our ideas by sitting down with our casino customers and feeling out where their pain threshold is and what we can do to help solve that with technology,” he said.
