The opening of our new £23 million Becontree Health Leisure Centre provided an ideal opportunity to review and upgrade our membership systems across all three of Barking and Dagenham’s leisure centres.
Becontree Health Leisure Centre is a state-of-the-art facility, which has been chosen as the Games Time Training Venue for the Olympic Water Polo teams, so equally modern technology to assist us and our visitors with their on-site experience is a must.
We have been successfully using Gladstone’s systems for more than nine years, but the previous configuration, based on our sites’ requirements from a long time ago, was not conducive to our current needs, as the way we sell and the types of products we offer are now completely different.
Gladstone carried out a full business review to determine how we could streamline our selling process to reduce transaction time and make it simpler for our staff to use. Their software experts discovered a sizeable number of issues significantly slowing our systems – not least 15,000 expired memberships! In addition to this, more than 50 per cent of the products and services on the system were redundant, and we had 66 subscription types, most of which were no longer available.
Richard Grazier, Sales and Marketing Director for Gladstone Health and Leisure said: “The business review started with a system and technical audit, so that we could highlight pitfalls of the current operation and make recommendations to improve their processes. From this, an upgrade to the latest version of Plus2 was made, along with a system rebuild and reconfiguration.
“The key was to ensure the system would remain familiar to the staff, and the simplicity of the new system, which has created an obvious path to follow, means it’s difficult for staff to deviate from the correct way of carrying out transactions.”
Gladstone backed this up with staff training to ensure everyone follows the same procedures, which means we are using more of the 50 available user fields. The archiving software module also means we can closely manage the removal of historic data that we can keep for analysis without slowing our system as time goes on. And at Becontree Health Leisure Centre we opted for a kiosk entry solution with smart card fast track entry for members, which also enables high accuracy activity reporting.
In a nut shell, the rebuild and reconfiguration has provided us with a clean and simple to use system that’s still familiar to the staff.
Andy Knight, London Borough of Barking and Dagenham
