Life Time Fitness

A Web Services Warmup

Application to serve customers could end up generating revenue.

Up until January, when Life Time Fitness's 300,000 members wanted to make an appointment for a personal trainer, book a racquetball court or schedule a massage, they would have to call their individual club. If their favourite masseuse was booked, they had to call another club. Add all of that up and you get lots of hours wasted by members and employees alike.

Enter Web services. Through a portal built on Web services technologies, registered users can now log on to the company Web site to plan workouts, book massages and chart their fitness progress. Life Time employees can also manage their schedules and keep track of clients via the company intranet. This may sound like small potatoes, but the implications for Life Time's business - and for other companies - are broad. And without Web services, the company would not have been able to afford to build its own scheduling system.

The health club chain started working on its Web services approach in 2000, when the IT department was migrating away from its legacy environment and its dependence on a single technology vendor. "The original goal was to reduce the cost of building new applications and to shorten the time it takes to get into production,"says CIO Brent Zempel. Life Time initially set out to build a Java-based member management system for its internal use. Once that project was complete, the company started to experiment with Web services that could move beyond its firewall. Instead of developing all the applications in-house, Life Time partnered with vendors such as California-based Xtime, an ASP that develops time-management and scheduling software.

The result: Life Time is able to integrate its Internet and intranet with the Xtime application using Web services. For example, when a fitness club member starts the Xtime application on Life Time's Web site, that move triggers a hyperlink to an Xtime secure page. The sites exchange certificates to verify each other's identity, and the member's information is transferred from Xtime back to the Life Time site via a SOAP interface. Life Time hasn't yet used UDDI because its services are published only to known client subscribers. But it does plan to start using WSDL within the next six months in order to describe what services it offers and how customers can connect.

Life Time Fitness says it's hard to judge exactly how much money it will save through Web services technology. But Zempel and Wesley Bertch, director of software systems, say the company could never have built the "services automation engine"that it now subscribes to through Xtime. "We would not have been able to afford the $US20 million it would have taken to do this ourselves,"says Bertch.

Despite the broad advantages, Bertch notes that moving to Web services is more complicated than plugging into an ASP. The company's 52-member IT staff had to be retrained in Java technology and in the use of Web services standards such as SOAP. And because Life Time links its Web site to an outside ASP (Xtime) via Web services, the development team had to set up an elaborate system for security. "We've dealt with security using brute force,"Bertch says. By that, he means his developers have manually set up authentication certificates between the two sites. "This kind of manual work can be time-consuming,"he says. "But the benefits of what we're getting out of Web services - such as faster development time and cheaper implementations - outweigh some of the pain associated with it."

And Life Time officials say they expect that the benefits of Web services will only grow as more suppliers and vendors jump onto the bandwagon. Life Time also has its own plans to bring in revenue from its Web services initiatives. According to Zempel, about 80 organisations, including other health club chains and universities, have asked to purchase Life Time's member management system.

SIDEBAR: Life Time Fitness

LOCATION: Eden Prairie, Minnesota.

EMPLOYEES: 4400.

BUSINESS: A chain of 26 "sports resorts"in six states.

WEB SERVICES APPLICATION: Inetgrates Life Time's Web site and intranet with an online scheduling system for ASP Xtime.

THE PAYOFF: Life Time's 300,000 members can use its Web site to book health club facilities and services; customer self-service saves employees' time; employees can use the scheduling app on Life Time's intranet.

SOFTWARE PARTNER: Sun Microsystems.