Club Fit, a health and fitness club with two locations in upstate New York, is something of a second home for many of its members – a place where they can enjoy a glass of wine after a yoga class, play a friendly game of mahjong, and choose between a wide variety of workout options that run from A (ab blast) to Z (Zumba).
It’s an approach to fitness and customer service that has kept Club Fit in business for 50 years with an ever-growing membership roster.
But not long ago, the organization found that decades of helping its members stay healthy and trim had left its record-keeping processes with a few extra pounds…
So, they went looking for a leaner method of document management that would keep their records in reach without all the paper.
The Challenges: An Unhealthy Document Management System, Manual Work & Wasted Time
As James Stropoli, Executive Director of Business Systems at Club Fit, explained, for decades, the business kept its membership information in big red binders that grew fatter with every membership addition, renewal, or upgrade.
“We didn’t throw out anything,” Stropoli said. “We had binders and binders. We had walls of binders.”
The wall of binders at each club eventually grew to dimensions that Stropoli estimated at 9 feet high and 12 feet long.
Every time something had to be added to a binder, someone had to find the right one, locate the hole punch, and try to squeeze another stack of pages between the bulging red covers. And with more and more memberships coming in, the red binder system proved to be more and more problematic.
“We needed a solution – our memberships were organized by number, not alphabetically, and it required manual indexing,” said Stropoli. “We had thousands and thousands of accounts to manage.”
Uncountable hours went into the cumbersome task of managing these contracts, which were often multiple pages long and had to be punched and sorted into the appropriate location. And on top of all this, Club Fit longed for a better system for securing sensitive member information.
Finally, around 2008, the company decided the binder walls had to go and they began a search for a digital solution that ultimately led them to MetaSource.
The Solution: Scanning, Document Management & Workflow Automation
MetaSource provided a solution that was a combination of document scanning services, document management software, and workflow automation technology. It enabled Club Fit to transition to a digital database of memberships, along with other business documents, and retire the big red binders once and for all.
“It was a huge homerun for us,” Stropoli said. “Hiring the shredder truck was a big day.”
In the years since, MetaSource has helped Club Fit expand the solution, migrating accounts payable and construction management to the platform, along with some human resource functions. In the summer of 2022, Club Fit elevated its digital solution once again, migrating to MetaSource’s cloud-based enterprise content management system, MetaStor®, which combines document management and workflow automation.
Download the complete case study to learn more about how Club Fit streamlined its day-to-day operations and realized its desired results with an enterprise document management solution.
Club Fit streamlined day-to-day operations with a leaner method of document management!
