Purbeck Council Sports Centre is a busy hub serving a widespread community including the local school. For well over 10 years the Sports Centre has been using a well-known brand of leisure management system that has long been established in the UK market. However with a wide spread community we had three key requirements that included providing our customers with the opportunity to make On-Line bookings, also to take out memberships and join online from home or office and have a mobile booking app. We approached our old leisure system providers and found that we would be faced with the increased costs that would be incurred if we were to take out the online booking, join at home and mobile app modules. In fact the news was even worse as this was not just a one off set up fee, but also included additional annual costs to our already significant licence fees or SLA. The support we were receiving from our old provider was also quite poor and was becoming an issue, particularly with regard to up-grades, I was just not receiving them. So our challenge was to find a sophisticated leisure management system that could cope with a busy centre. The system had to be able to cope with the Councils stringent financial reporting requirements as well as our own comprehensive management reporting needs. In addition to this, the new system would have to address the key customer issues of Online Bookings, Online Joining and Memberships with mobile apps, and not charge us for any up-grades. We knew this would be a tall order. We set in motion a process that eventually entailed site visits and demonstrations from 3 companies. It was finally agreed by the Council General Manager, Sports Centre Manager and IT Manager that a cloud based system was the way forward and that Sports-Bookers annual licence and support fees were very reasonable, coupled with the fact that they had a programme of several scheduled updates each year to add new features and functions without any additional costs. These scheduled updates and new functions are all covered in the annual licence and support fee. It was also good to see that an integrated part of the system was online booking, online memberships and joining plus very comprehensive reporting and a host of other features our old providers system did not have. We knew it would be a challenge to migrate from one heavily embedded old system to a new provider. However the significantly lower licence costs that would save us around £8,000 per year and the free upgrades and extra functionality convinced us that we had to make the change. We drew up an agreed project plan and Implementation was completed through working with the Council IT Department, Sports-Booker and SBS EPOS to install Sharp EPOS technology to provide a fully integrated EPOS and Online Booking, Membership and Management system that fully supported the needs of the service. The hard cash cost of moving from our old system to the fully integrated Sports-Booker/Sharp EPOS system and changing the software and some hardware, as well as getting a fully refurbished kiosk that works, amounted to around the same as the annual support fee we were paying to our old system provider. However the real saving is the on-going annual support fee which will actually save us around £8000 per year. There are also some surprise savings as the new integrated Sports-Booker system has saved administration time with regard to long-term bookings and the invoicing of the bookings. The system can also manage our swimming lesson waiting list better and rolls customers over from month to month. The system has certainly reduced costs and we will wait to see if online bookings and memberships will take off. In all the new Sports-Booker system is excellent for handling the class waiting lists as it directly emails customers who are on a waiting list when cancellations are made. This enables customers to take the cancelled place and keeps our classes full whilst saving staff time with regard to making telephone calls. The switch has not been without a few challenges, which in my opinion will happen when you are completely changing your Leisure management system software. However most of the challenges were resolved very quickly and with very little fuss and we found there were certain things that the system did not do like the old system. But if there was a business requirement, Sports-Booker and SBS EPOS would listen and make the changes and improvements, which in many cases were free of charge. I am pleased that Sports-Booker’s continued support has been excellent and they are always open to new ideas. The strength of Sports-Booker is that they have worked very closely with myself to build a system that is unique to us, my requirements may have been very different from other Leisure Centre’s and Sports-Booker understood this and have built the system around my business needs. I can only believe that the system will go from strength to strength and that Sports-Booker will continue to provide their excellent support service in the years going forward. Michelle Goodman Sports Centre Manager Purbeck Sports Centre Dorset.

Sports Booker Limited