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Fitness
experts say the best exercise program often is the simplest one, so when Life
Time Fitness needed an ID card printer, its information technology experts
followed the same advice and looked for one that was easy to operate.
Life Time Fitness is a privately held health, fitness and nutrition products and
services company, with 26 multi-purpose sports and fitness centers in Arizona,
Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Virginia. In addition to
offering sports and equipment, Life Time Fitness locations provide group fitness
classes and educational seminars; free child care, lockers and towels;
full-service spas and cafés; and swimming, rock climbing and athletic leagues.
The centers are open 24 hours a day for the convenience of their members.
Identification cards are used for several purposes. In addition to providing
visual distinctions for eight membership categories, including sports, fitness
and corporate, they also are used for access to Life Time Fitness facilities and
to identify members for discounts at participating retailers and service
providers through the Member Advantage program. A bar code on the card verifies
a membership number as the card is swiped through a card reader at the entrance
to a facility. The cards, which are punched with a hole after printing, also can
be inserted into a locker to release an individual key.
Life Time Fitness has used FARGO printers since 1998. Today the company has 20
DTC510s and 14 Persona® C15s, which print more than 250,000 cards per year.
“Each additional club opening means printing 10,000 additional cards,” said
Craig Nicko, Macintosh Technical Support for Life Time Fitness, “and Life Time
Fitness opens three to six clubs every year.”
Life Time Fitness was a beta test site for printing from the Macintosh platform,
according to Patrick Howard, Senior Sales Representative for ID
America™. “The information technology people at Life Time developed an
interface to allow their software to capture the information,” he said.
According to Nicko, the software not only captures images to print on cards, but
also provides those images to the Life Time Fitness nationwide database. Thus, a
comparison can be made between an image on the screen and the actual card and
member when a card is swiped.
“We also track history to tell us how many times, where and when each member
has a card re-issued,” Nicko said. “This helps us identify possible
membership fraud. With this software, we also can assign various backgrounds and
status flags that print on blank card stock to provide an accurate
representation of membership status. We are especially pleased with the color
quality on the cards,” he added. “We don’t stock inventory, so we can
change our background designs quickly and often, which we do. We could not have
done this with our previously preprinted cards produced on a dot matrix
printer.”
“As a result,” said Howard, “Life Time Fitness is getting more power for
less effort and less money.” And isn’t that the goal of a good fitness
program?
Extracted from www.fargo.com