Spring cleaning at Perth and Kinross Leisure

Maintaining the best possible customer experience at leisure centre receptions is of vital importance. At Perth & Kinross Leisure, an oversized database was hampering system performance and leaving customerfacing staff struggling to deliver good service. But since working with Gladstone's product and technical consultants, transaction speed has increased, customer service has improved, the database size reduced by 80%, and archived data has been safely retained for analysis.

Perth & Kinross Leisure is a not-for-profit organisation providing a range of services for Perth & Kinross Council. The organisation owns and operates leisure facilities throughout Perthshire including Perth Leisure Pool, Bell's Sports Centre, The Community School of Auchterarder Sports Facilities, Loch Leven Leisure and several community halls.

For Property and Systems Manager Dave Thompson, Gladstone's Plus2 leisure management solution was the natural choice when he was looking for a new system in 2001.

"We wanted a product that would act as a fast, effective 'tilling' in front, would gather management information in the background, and provide us with a real-time booking solution." says Mr Thompson. "It also had to be networked across all our sites with a single database that updated immediately as the transactions took place. Gladstone was the only company that could provide the complete leisure management product and the services to back us up."

Plus2 delivers "thin client" technology to the leisure centres using the Gladstone SQL database and applications held on a server in Perth. Originally, the nine locations had a distinct identity in terms of products, price levels, and membership packages until common pricing was introduced in 2005.

Growing database

By 2008, the single database had dramatically increased in size which was having a significant impact on system performance. For example, when reception staff scanned a customer membership card, the system regularly took over two minutes to respond.

"We were having problems with our reception desks and customers were coming in saying 'Is that computer working today?", says Mr Thompson. "Customers waiting at the till became the norm."

None of the locations were spared, and matters came to a head at Perth's Rodney Fitness Centre in late 2007. This superbly equipped 80 station fitness gym offers supervised aerobics classes for up to 60 customers.

Faced with dozens of people queuing at reception, staff were forced to write down their details for entering into the system later. "The system was grinding to a pretty dramatic halt," says Mr Thompson. The database bottleneck was exacerbated by confusion from redundant prices, old membership schemes, and superceded products.

"We were definitely at the stage when we needed a big data clearout," says Mr Thompson. "We realised that holding all that old information in a single database was causing us major problems."

Mr Thompson has nothing but praise for the Gladstone system in terms of functionality, ease of use, and flexibility; "the management information we get is fabulous." He discussed the operational issues with Gladstone, seeking advice and a practical solution.

"Our specification to Gladstone was really an outcome brief," says Mr Thompson. "We just wanted a fast database with one year's historical data plus the current year going forward."

Gladstone had already designed an innovative housekeeping solution to alleviate the problems of growing databases. The solution is designed to remove any unwanted historical data from the "live" system (such as sales, bookings, attendance, correspondence, and questionnaires) and archive it for analysis or audit. As a managed service, it also ensured total data integrity with no user disruption.

In April 2008 the process was tested by Gladstone consultants on a copy of the database and then run overnight on the live database. The outcome was a new, slimmed-down live database of only 2Gb and a second historical database, which could be accessed by just three selected management users.

Instant Results

The results were felt almost immediately. A Rodney Fitness Centre receptionist sent Mr Thompson the following e-mail: 'I just have to comment on how fast the system was last night. There was no paperwork involved, just the MRM system. It was a breeze.' Mr Thompson has since purged the new database of redundant products, prices, and membership schemes to end confusion.

All the reception desks now have a fast and responsive system for handling customer enquiries and transactions. Even Mr Thompson was taken by surprise: "It was instantly so much faster."

When managers used to run a report on the old database, it sometimes had a system-wide effect. The new database offers fast current and previous year reporting with no detriment to other users. And information from earlier years is only a few keystrokes away in the archive database.

Mr Thompson plans to ask Gladstone to repeat the housekeeping work next year, helping to keep the Plus2 system very responsive.

"The archiving of the Plus2 database was probably the smoothest piece of work Gladstone has ever done for me," said Thompson. "We effectively archived seven years worth of data all at once with no problems whatsoever."

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28 January 2009