David Lloyd Clubs are Europe’s leading health, sport and leisure group, with 122 clubs - 99 clubs in the UK (including 3 Harbour Clubs), a further 23 across the Republic of Ireland and mainland Europe. It was established in 1982 and provides a family orientated, high quality fitness and leisure facility. Their clubs provide members with a wide range of facilities and services, delivering an overall health and wellness experience which offers much more than just a first-rate gym.
In 2018 David Lloyd Clubs approached Hitachi Solutions with several business problems. They had a mix of different internal systems for reporting on business performance which all provided different numbers and made it extremely difficult for any management decisions to be made. Their reporting was largely static and there was a big demand for ad hoc data extracts from the business intelligence team so that users could create their own reporting in Microsoft Excel. As with many businesses, this “off-system” analysis created multiple versions of the truth and often with different logic used to calculate KPIs.
They wanted all their data in one place, with one set of data owners, so they could have confidence their data was accurate and could be trusted. This would liberate the business, especially the club managers to make smarter, quicker and more accurate business decisions about their individual clubs’ performance.
Looking to the future David Lloyd Clubs also wanted to get more value from their data, establishing a data science team to find solutions for some of the more complex analyses needed by the business.
With Hitachi Solutions, David Lloyds Clubs have been able to build a data culture across the organisation through a set of reliable and easy to use data-driven solutions. Hitachi Solutions ran an initial analytics assessment project to recommend a data strategy and roadmap that would help them address their business challenges.
This approach looked at aspects of their governance processes, organisational structure and technologies in the context of data and information to give a holistic view of where enhancements could be made. By baselining, and then regularly measuring organisational data maturity, Hitachi Solutions created a roadmap that would provide both tactical and more strategic benefits to implement the following transforming the way David Lloyd Clubs use their data.
A comprehensive strategy covering their processes, organisational structure and technology. Designed initially to establish control over their data and mange data risks, before looking at delivering value from data.
Taking an iterative approach to building a data culture required working on a prioritised list of business needs. Focusing on delivering quick wins to bring the business on a journey of using data better.
Building a single version of the truth, “Golden Data” that is trusted, understood and accepted across the business. This was delivered iteratively one domain at a time.
An easy to use and interactive set of KPI dashboards, allowing the business to self-serve their reporting needs. Freeing up the team at David Lloyd Clubs from providing data on request to focusing on innovative analysis.
Enable more forensic analysis and reporting across the business giving insights on their member count, revenue, food & beverage, mobile app engagement and club bookings with a Modern Data Platform in Azure.
Giving the data science team access to a data lake to solve complex problems with their choice of tools. This provided an opportunity to experiment and innovate with data rapidly, and focus on delivering business value.
We've liberated the data and we've allowed the decision makers in our business to make good decisions using data. It's enabled us to be much more focused on KPIs. We're now able to look at much more refined levels of membership and make much more precise and detailed decisions as a result.
Patrick Burrows
Chief Financial Officer, David Lloyd Clubs
A second phase of work for David Lloyd Clubs started in July 2021 and will extend the capability of their Modern Data Platform to provide analytics on huge volumes of group exercise, personal trainer bookings and swimming class data using Azure and Power BI Premium. The Data Platform will enable David Lloyd’s data scientists to continue finding new ways of providing a better experience for their members.
