Flex Fitness

Background

Flex Fitness is an innovative, state of the art fitness facility located in Saugus, Massachusetts. Containing over 10,000 square feet of the latest Life Cycle and Sybex equipment, Flex Fitness is changing the way people live a healthy lifestyle in the North shore area. The club is focused on creating a fun, friendly, non-intimidating workout environment for all of its members. Offerings include Spinning, Circuit training, various aerobic classless, personal training, and much more.

Issue

The owners of Flex Fitness wanted an office management solution that was in-line with their mentality - state of the art, fun and exciting. They wanted the ability to interact with their members, vendors and employees in a seamless and dynamic fashion - including solutions such as Voice-over-IP, wireless access and virtualization of back-office PCs. From day one they stressed the fact that they did not want a generic health club management system. They wanted a solution which was tailored to their unique operating environment and user base.

Solution

Avidity worked with Flex Fitness during the facilities construction phase to oversee and manage all of the telecommunications wiring, software selection, and systems design and procurement. This phase included the selection of all network cabinetry, UPS devices, and cable management systems.

The office management solution incorporates a Cisco UC500 series unified communications appliance which provides LAN, VPN, Firewall, wireless, voice-mail, automated attendant, and call processing services. 8 Cisco 7960 phones were installed throughout the facility - including several public access sets which are regulated with class of service levels. Secured wireless access allows the club's staff members to move around freely during personal training sessions while staying connected to back-end systems used to track member's progress.

The health club management software was installed on an HP ML150 G3 server running Microsoft 2003 Server and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. Six XP Professional virtual instances were created for the staff's virtual workstations. Numerous HP Thin-client PCs were implemented throughout the club, which are utilized to connect the staff members to their virtual workstation instances.

Flex Fitness continues to work with Avidity on implementing the following network solutions:

  • A variety of hosted services including Web, Sharepoint and Exchange.
  • SIP peering with Avidity's back-end SIP product offering for reduced telephony charges.
  • Remote Teleworker VPN for Flex's Fitness owners

Results

With the owner's vision in mind, Avidity delivered a highly robust, secure and cost-effective office management solution for Flex Fitness and their members. The solution provided fits seamlessly within the operating environment and allows the club's staff members to focus on their core competency - providing state of the art health club services.

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