Fitness Center

BACKGROUND
Founded in 1983, this Fitness Center is the World’s largest privately owned and operated fitness center chain. It operates 400 clubs in 14 US states and offers aerobic, cardiovascular, and weight lifting activities to the company's more than 3 million members.

CHALLENGE
The Fitness Center had multiple telephony platforms that were experiencing high failure rates throughout their locations and needed a single enterprise-wide telephony platform that would provide them with increased bandwidth and advanced management capabilities. The Fitness Center made the decision to implement a Cisco Unified Communications solution to each of its fitness clubs. To complete this 400 site upgrade, the Fitness Center needed a partner that was capable of handling a large, multi-site deployment and already understood its business needs.

The Fitness Center turned to Comm-Works, its long-time partner for voice and data installations.
 
COLLABORATION
The Fitness Center planned to complete the 400 site upgrade in 6 months at the average rate of 20 locations per week. In order to complete the project in the timeline dictated by the customer, site surveys were conducted at each of the locations and Comm-Works dedicated an experienced Project Manager to be located at the Fitness Center’s corporate office. The Comm-Works Project Manager worked with the Fitness Center to develop a project plan and completed the scheduling of all sites and field resources.

Comm-Works also worked with the circuit provider to schedule the installation of the circuits. Careful scheduling was especially important in California and Texas where the Fitness Center has a very dense presence.

SCOPE OF WORK
After the completion of site surveys and a few pilot upgrades, the Comm-Works Project Manager collaborated with the Fitness Center’s IT department to develop a streamlined installation process. As a result, each installation was cut from a typical 6-8 hours down to 4 hours. 

At each of the 400 sites, Comm-Works’ field resources de-installed and packaged the old voice and data equipment for shipment back to the customer, installed the new Cisco router and switch along with 16 Cisco VoIP phones, and connected to the circuit to complete testing with the Fitness Center’s corporate office.

RESULTS AND VALUE
The Fitness Center now has the ability to remotely manage the system and is taking a look at additional IVR solutions and video overlays to improve internal communications and allow for customer self-service. They estimate their ROI for the project to be just 18 months.

According to the Fitness Center’s Manager of Network Engineering and Telecom, leveraging their relationship with Comm-Works was extremely important. As a leader in the industry, Comm-Works’ technical aptitude and proven ability to complete rapid deployments were key to the success of the project. “I can’t say enough about how important that was to have a strong project manager that could help lead our aggressive pace,” said the Fitness Center’s Manager of Network Engineering and Telecom.