Fitness First
Fitness First
Fighting information flab. Fitness First Australia had a problem. Unlike the waistlines of its regular patrons, the company's paper-based filing system was expanding almost to bursting point.
Something had to be done. With the Australian Fitness First being the third largest operation of the 25 countries they inhabit worldwide (behind the UK and Germany), with 28 sites across the country, storing all their members' information on paper files at the clubs they joined was no longer a viable option. Paul Fitzpatrick, IT manager at Fitness First Australia, explained why.
"We do a lot of administration at the clubs we run across the country, and as we signed more and more members, the contracts they signed were starting to pile up. With space being at a premium at our facilities, we wanted to eliminate that build up at the club level so we decided to look for a piece of software that could do that."
What Fitness First wanted was to find a company with an international reputation who also had an understanding of the Australian market. A company who could install a system that would allow them to store all information on their members electronically and allow them to access that information from anywhere in their organisation. What they didn't expect was to find such a company right on their doorstep.
Based in Bondi Junction in Sydney's Eastern Suburbs, just around the corner from Fitness First's Australian head office, document archival, retrieval and distribution specialists Speedscan proved to be the answer to Fitness First's burgeoning information problem.
"Having worked at various health clubs in the States, I was familiar with some of the contract scanning facilities and imaging systems available out there, and I had a feeling that technically that's what I wanted to do out here," said Fitzpatrick.
"We looked at various companies before choosing Speedscan. One of the reasons we chose them was their Web browser interface, which is a bit ahead of its time in the document scanning industry, because a lot of products that are given to health facilities are proprietary, but we wanted something that was a bit more open source. The simplicity of being able to look up a membership contract and the responsiveness of the system were also key highlights of what they were able to do for us."
Another aspect of Fitness First's operation that necessitated the removal of the paper-based system was the company's passport membership service.
"All of our admin staff from our various locations can now access information on members, not only from their own facility, but from outlets across the country, so whether a member signs up in Brisbane or Perth or wherever, our staff can access all the information we hold on that member simply by keying in their membership number on their PC.
"This is very helpful to us as one of the services we provide is passport membership which allows access to any of our facilities worldwide. We have quite a number of business travellers among our membership who may visit one of our gyms in Melbourne in the morning and then another in Sydney in the evening." Now Fitness First staff can have their details at their fingertips, rather than having to call the club where the member joined to verify their membership.
Mark Josman, CEO of Speedscan outlined what the company did to cure Fitness First's information ills.
"Fitness First incorporates a couple of Speedscan solutions. Firstly, we provide them with a range of outsource services, including scanning, indexing and document capture. Secondly, we combine that with an in-house Web retrieval system using Speedview technology which allows them to access customer contracts from all their branches."We combine these two solutions by scanning and indexing documents on our premises before uploading them to the Speedview server running the Fitness First infrastructure to give a complete solution for the management of customer contracts."
The transformation to the new electronic system was also very swift and painless, according to Fitzpatrick.
"A few good discussions took place between ourselves and Speedscan (prior to implementation). We knew what we wanted and they knew what we wanted too. I guess our overall objectives were pretty crisp and clear.
"The system only took two days to implement. They came out, did the initial install, got everything working and copied contracts over on day one, then day two was spent testing and that was it."
While the system itself was implemented in just a couple of days, Speedscan's Josman was keen to stress that the on site work is but a small fraction of the whole changeover process.
"Our team does a lot of preparation in advance of actually doing the conversion, so two days is what the client sees but there is a lot of preparation that goes on behind the scenes. But we are able to use existing databases, convert them over to Speedscan format databases and then match images against those so that the client only sees a very small proportion of what's happening. The fact that Speedscan works on standard Windows 2000 server technologies means that we don't have to do a lot of customisation."
Indeed based on standard technologies, Speedscan offerings can be tailored to suit the particular needs of the client. Like most of Speedscan's client's, Fitness First had certain requisites that had to be incorporated into the system.
"There were some membership management requirements specific to their industry around the kinds of documents that they receive and how they are managed as well as the matching against their membership database to what is keyed in and how we run that matching process.
"There is always some uniqueness about every single job - no two jobs are the same. Fitness First had a few specific areas that they needed addressed and we designed the processes for that."
Josman added that the paper-based system employed by Fitness First prior to the changeover was fairly typical of systems used by a lot of companies in the past, but remarked that the situation has changed at a great rate in recent years towards electronic data capture.
"Over the last few years, business has been moving rapidly towards electronically managing their documentation, especially where they have remote sites that need access to that information. Paper was fine if you had one-to-one types of relationships, but where you have multiple people at various sites requiring access to documents, paper can no longer do the job."
Since the system has been so successful, Fitness First has been in discussion with Speedscan to discuss other areas of the business where their expertise can be put to good use.
"One area is the accounts payable area of the finance department which has tons of invoices and no storage space to archive them. At present, all paperwork goes to a warehouse, so when a person calls to query an invoice we have to retrieve it from the warehouse, which can be a laborious process. A better option we feel would be to have Speedscan scan those documents for us too so we can access them instantly via our intranet."
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