Envibe saves time, boosts group fitness numbers at Tasmanian leisure centre

Switching to Envibe leisure management at City of Launceston’s Leisure and Aquatic Centre has already led to a 25% reduction in administration time, with potential for more dramatic results when the software’s full capabilities are unleashed in 2025.

The centre’s Admin and Customer Service Coordinator Mark Jeffrey said there was some trepidation when the change to Envibe’s leisure management software occurred in April because the old system had been in place for 15 years and staff were very familiar with it. However, once the system was rolled out, it quickly won his team over.

“It’s been phenomenal. I couldn’t be happier – it’s what I hoped for and more,” Jeffrey said.

“The team at Jonas have been brilliant, I can’t speak highly enough of them. The personalised approach they’ve got certainly allayed any fears that I had and made it a lot easier for me to sell to our higher ups at council – the ones who signed the cheques.”

He said although Envibe’s full functionality is still being implemented, it has already made a huge impact.

“We’re slowly but surely turning on more and more features. The staff rave about it and most of our members rave about it too.

“We’ve done a systematic rollout of the things we need and now we’re fully exploring Envibe’s online capabilities plus what it can deliver in terms of reporting and trigger messaging, which is making everyone’s jobs a lot easier.”

Jeffrey said Envibe’s biggest impact has been on the time it took to train a new staff member to use their systems. It used to require ten buddy-system shifts to train staff on the old system, whereas training new staff to use Envibe requires just three sessions with a buddy, plus the standard induction training.

“Because it’s an intuitive common-sense system, new staff are good to go without a worry in the world.”

Envibe has cut down administration time by up to 25% compared to the centre’s old system, which has been “massive”, he said.

“We have one permanent staff member to handle all the bookings who used to struggle to get her job done on the old system over her workday. Now she finds herself with an hour of free time and I’ve got to give her some other things to do.

“Our guys at the front counter are quite often complaining to me now that they don’t have enough to do, because memberships and things that used to take them longer to do, they can do very quickly, very simply, and it’ll get even simpler when we go to paperless.”

Jeffrey said some of the centre’s older client base had been resistant to changing from using the previous system, but the ease of online access to the centre’s 80 group-fitness classes had changed their minds.

“Now they can see the whole range of classes available, whereas our previous system would only show the class they choose to look at.”

This, coupled with Envibe’s ability to allow the centre’s group fitness classes to be booked up to 23 hours in advance rather than just two hours, had delivered an immediate boost in attendance numbers, he said.

“We’ve gone from an average of 70% occupancy in our group fitness classes to 94%.”

Jeffrey said managing the centre’s aquatic and gym equipment shop using the old system was clunky and unwieldy, but Envibe had made it easy. Previously stocktake figures were inaccurate – it was impossible to delete stock items and staff had to create a new stock order for every new barcode so the inventory list became a ‘huge beast”.

“When we do our stocktakes now, we get a very clear understanding of pilferage or returns and things like that. That in itself has created a 10% improvement in our profitability across the shop.”

Whereas it used to take two-and-a-half days to upload a delivery of fresh stock items it now only takes half a day with Envibe, he said.

“It really is brilliant. My shop supervisor absolutely loves the system – she says it is so easy to use.”

The Launceston Leisure and Aquatic Centre is the largest community facility in the City of Launceston, hosting more than 500,000 visitors per year and boasting eight pools and multiple areas for other sport and recreation activities.

With refurbishment projects on the horizon and a $150,000 upgrade of gym equipment due in 2025, Envibe’s ability to save time and money and generate helpful reports to provide insights and measure progress was valuable, Jeffrey said.

“The reporting that we can get back to council is a lot more detailed than we’re used to, which satisfies their need for knowledge – including granular details about attendance demographics – which is extremely helpful.

“We could get some of that out of the old system, but it was like pulling teeth.”

Jeffrey said he “cannot wait” to use Envibe to go completely paperless in the new year, once he has had time to create some well-crafted communications to support the rollout.

The centre also plans to harness data from Envibe’s reports to tweak its class programming to best meet the needs of the various demographics it welcomes, he said.

“I’m really keen for us to use the reporting capabilities of the system a lot more moving forward because we’ve just scraped the surface and I know the system can do a whole heap more.”