Will to Win Tennis Centres is a thriving chain of tennis and activity centres situated in the Royal Parks of London. The main reason for choosing SportSoft was the combination of easy online bookings for their customers and the ability to control the increasing variety of goods sold in their cafes and shops every day. The implementation was quiet a big job given that there are 4 centres, and each has a café and a shop for sports goods. Each of the sites would need to have all of the stock items and shop sale items set up with their activities, and membership products, stock quantities and pricing. Most of this work was carried out by SportSoft’s support team, one site at a time. Each site was operational using their new SportSoft Epos systems before the next one was implemented. Whilst the first site was quite difficult for all concerned, mainly due to the new terminology and processes, the last two went live simultaneously without problem within a few weeks of starting the implementation. Once all sites were operational on the ground, as it were, the Bookings Portal was connected to their existing website and at first, customers were limited to just a "View" of the tennis courts at Regents Park. The next step was to allow bookings online, and for this, initially, customers were able to charge up their account at the till in each centre and use that credit to purchase court fees online. Once the front of house requirements, sales and bookings, had been solved by handing most of the job to the customers themselves, the back office systems such as accounts and stock control were targeted for improvement. One of the first tasks was to set-up all the saleable goods and activities with the correct ledger codes. This then allowed for a single monthly CSV report to be exported and emailed to the accountants for a direct input into Sage. As an added bonus the system also reported on the number of hours worked by staff members and thus assisted with the preparation of payroll. The stock valuation reports not only helped increase the control of losses but also reduced the amount of time spent in the preparation of stock asset records.

Of particular importance to the management of Riversmeet Leisure Centre, Gillingham was the control of customers throughout the centre. The location of facilities in the centre meant that the customers needed to be "steered" in the right direction by the system, so that only people who purchased swimming, could enter the pool area, only members of the fitness suite, would enter that area. In addition, Staff Room entry would need to be controlled. SportSoft supplied a door entry system from Axxess ID Systems which controlled access into these areas using a magnetic swipe card. A useful feature of the SportSoft system in these circumstances is its ability to allow access to cardholders based on their purchase, in addition to their membership category. This means that not only can a swim member can be granted automatic access, but a gym-only member can buy a swim ticket and be allowed into the pool area by virtue of their purchase. This solution gave the necessary flexibility required by management in this case.

When Hallmark chose SportSoft as their management system to run their chain of hotel leisure clubs, they had to be sure that the solution would be flexible. One of the sites was to use Fingerprint Recognition to control members’ access, another door-entry system, and perhaps there would be other devices to come as the system rolled out to the remaining clubs. Ordinarily this would not have been a problem, but on this occasion, because the system was being delivered using Citrix, the fingerprint scanners would not be recognised because Citrix does not support USB devices. At this point SportSoft set about writing a program, which captured local fingerprint scans and send them to the Citrix Server for recognition. At the desk, receptionists saw the customer’s details instantaneously on their front desk screens, allowing them to perform their job in the usual manner. Hallmark was pleased with the results, needless to say, and so was SportSoft as this was seen as a first in the programming world!

Mansfield DC had been using SportSoft's LMS for about 18 months in their Watermeadows Leisure Centre and wanted to get the remaining 5 centres similarly up to date with modern tills as well as introduce a leisure card. They wanted a system which could be managed centrally by their IT staff yet one which could provide their leisure managers information wherever they were, in a centre or in the Civic Centre.
The solution recommended by SportSoft was a centrally located Windows Application server with a SQL Server back end, where PC tills and terminals connected using secure internet or WAN connections. This was not a problem for 4 of the sites as they were located where connection lines were economically feasible and secure. The remaining two centres did not have such capability. One of the centres would be moved within 6 months making the installation of a line uneconomical and the other site's simply could not get permanent access to the internet due to its location. It was therefore decided that these two sites would dial-up overnight and synchronise with the main database until access to the network was available. The downside of course for these two centres was that their data would be a day old and they would not be part of the centralised booking system. They would still be able to issue cards, join new members and take bookings for their own sites, however, so it was still a great improvement over the previous situation.
The data was transferred over to the Civic Centre and the system was trialled in the Watermeadows for a few months without problem.