As we enter 2014, business owners and fitness executives want their finger on the pulse of their club's day-to-day activities so they can make snap decisions. This is where two new industry buzzwords, business intelligence and data warehousing, can play a big role.
If you are not familiar with these tools or not taking advantage of what they have to offer, think of how powerful it could be to transform your raw data into meaningful and useful information for your business while increasing your return on investment. This is true business intelligence (BI).
BI can help you organize large amounts of data to help identify and develop new sales opportunities. Making use of these new opportunities and implementing an effective strategy can provide a competitive market advantage in the fitness space along with long-term stability.
You can look at BI as a data visualization tool offering executive dashboards, predictive analytics and complex reporting. To continue digging into BI, we need to better understand the relevance of data warehousing and how it partners with all your business intelligence tools. A data warehouse can be defined simply as a database used for reporting and data analytics. This central repository stores current and past data, allowing you to report on both current and historical information.
Wouldn't you like to analyze data and extract useful member information to track trends on when they visit or which classes they prefer to attend? Wouldn't it be valuable to know which personal trainer is your heavy hitter?
It also is valuable to have the ability to segment data for a specific club or group of clubs that show trends over a selected time period. This is why BI tools such as executive dashboards for key performance indicators and business analytics have become a necessity for club operators and should be a large part of their club management software. And don't underestimate the importance of having all of this business intelligence web-based, which allows for viewing on all browsers and from any mobile device regardless of location.
Keep in mind that without proper, good-quality data, any BI implementation will fail. Before implementation, it is a good idea to do some quick data profiling. This analysis identifies the consistency and structure of the data, and it should be done as early in the process as possible. If the analysis shows that data is lacking, put the project on the shelf temporarily while you figure out how to properly collect the data.
After implementation, some of the immediate benefits your club may see include improved data quality, data integrated from multiple source systems, restructured data that delivers excellent query performance for business analytics and a central view across the business.
As we make resolutions and start fresh this New Year, an important focus should be placed on your data, the way it is reported and the quality of your analytics. Once these three things are in place, you will sleep easier knowing your software tools are handling all of your heavy lifting.
Content sponsored by Jonas Fitness.
Adam Zeitsiff is the president of Jonas Fitness, Houston. He brings more than 18 years of experience in starting, running and successfully growing multiple technology and cloud-based software companies in a variety of niche markets, including health and fitness. Zeitsiff is passionate about expanding the products and services at Jonas Fitness and is charged with helping to grow the company's global footprint in the fitness and sports market segments. His focus includes collaborating with the product development teams, ensuring the delivery of fanatical support to customers, expanding the company's overall marketing presence, working hand-in-hand with customers, and continuing to accelerate Jonas' expansion into these rapidly growing industries via organic and acquisition-based growth opportunities.