When it was time to reopen their doors after four months of COVID lockdown, the YMCA of Greater Toronto knew they needed to work quickly to deliver a solution that would make their membership happy and meet strict government guidelines. They needed to be nimble and agile, leveraging existing data to optimize build times. Speed was essential; they needed to be ready to facilitate a safe return for their members by the time the government-mandated reopening date arrived.
The YMCA planned to provide a single interface for members to reserve facilities ahead of time, starting with their health and fitness facilities as a pilot program and eventually rolling out to all of their other services. They also wanted to provide members with a way to see a room’s capacity at any given time and to include predictive modelling for no-shows in order to allow for walk-ins. Rapid digital transformation would be the driving force in all of this.
Speed was of the essence. Not only were YMCA of Greater Toronto members eager to get back to the facilities, but the YMCA was spending significant resources to manually monitor entries. They required a staff member to be on hand from open till close, checking IDs and cross-referencing reservations to make sure visitors were entering and exiting at their reserved times. These necessary operations took staff away from their regular roles and strained operations.
The YMCA of Greater Toronto wanted to connect their membership database, their mobile app (VirtuaGym), and their swipe-card entry system in order to give members a contactless method for reserving and entering facilities.
To those outside of the IT department, like the YMCA employee who suggested the solution to management, linking these different systems probably didn’t seem too difficult. They all use variations of the same member data, right? So why can’t they talk to one another?
Unfortunately, this is exactly the sort of complex integration project that traditionally takes months to implement—the complete opposite of what a business needs when opening its doors after COVID. Fortunately, YMCA of Greater Toronto wasn’t taking a traditional approach. They were using Cinchy.
Instead of point-to-point integration, the YMCA simply had to connect each of their applications to Cinchy’s Autonomous Data Fabric. Each one-time integration takes only hours, and once the systems are connected to the Fabric it becomes easy for them to share data. This let the YMCA quickly create a solution by adding new functionality to their legacy systems, instead of building something from scratch. Using this approach, the YMCA was able to create their new, contactless reservation and entry system in just three weeks.
Their members can now reserve a facility at their desired time using the mobile app and enter the facility 15 minutes before their reservation by swiping their ID card at the door. It’s worth noting that this interval was originally set for five minutes, and that the YMCA was able to easily make the change to 15 when they found their returning customers needed a little more time to prepare for their workouts.
There’s one simple reason Cinchy’s Autonomous Data Fabric was the perfect solution for YMCA’s: network effects. Network effects are a phenomenon where systems become more effective and efficient as they grow, and that’s exactly what happens with Cinchy. Thanks to the ability of schema evolution, YMCA's fabric will continue to grow and evolve over time to satisfy new use cases, using the already connected data. The more data sources they connect to Cinchy, the faster they’ll be able to build outcomes.
This is the exact opposite of the old IT paradigm, where connecting more data adds complexity in regards to its control. With a Data Fabric, controls are set at the data level and universally enforced without having to modify them for new projects.
They’re also able to generate a 360 view of their reopening process, including new sales and renewals, which they weren’t able to do previously. Again, all of the heavy lifting for this project has already been done, because they can leverage the data that has already been connected to the Cinchy Data Fabric.
As the YMCA of Greater Toronto evaluates their backlog of requests and use cases, they are quickly finding many more use cases for Cinchy. For instance, having built a better view of their membership base they’re now exploring ways to identify hot leads and those most likely to return. These advanced analytics will be enhanced by using Cinchy to build 360-degree views of members, allowing innovative approaches for both building new membership and encouraging inactive members to return. The key components of this solution are already in place thanks to the added membership insight they’ve gained from using Cinchy.
The solutions created by the YMCA of Greater Toronto are the perfect example of technology that “should be easy,” but rarely is. The initial scope of the project, connecting three data systems to automate entry, actually came from the staff who were manually monitoring the doors, and it’s highly unlikely they knew that a traditional approach to this solution would require months of IT work. They simply saw they had the capabilities if they could just get those different systems to work together.
With Cinchy, the stuff that should be easy actually becomes easy. The automated entry solution has been incredibly well received, and the staff feels excited about what they’re now able to do. There’s a general positivity around the direction they’re heading, which is no small feat in the age of COVID-19. And in this excitement, new ideas are already starting to germinate, such as restricting parking lot access based on reservation times, similar to what they’ve just accomplished with their entry system.
