Executive Summary
In the luxury gym industry, organisations endeavour to adopt all possible operations performance interventions to ensure that they attract and secure their loyal customers. Some gym organisations have memberships where one can routinely exercise upon paying a certain fee for a specific period.
According to Sodhi and Tang (2014, p. 29), operations performance refers to “performance measured against standards or prescribed indicators of effectiveness, efficiency, and environmental responsibility such as cycle time, productivity, waste reduction, and regulatory performance.” These concerns require organisations to have healthy operations. An analysis of the operations performance of any organisation, irrespective of its size, services, or products it offers for sale, is important in the effort to ensure that it remains competitive and compliant with the stipulated health requirements in its line of business. The current study analyses the status of a luxury gym facility. The goal is to find out whether the business is healthy or not. The findings will inform some recommendations towards improving the operations management approaches adopted at the luxury gym facility.
Introduction and Gym Context
The hotel’s gym facility shown in the Appendix section operates in the luxury market segment in New York. In particular, the luxury gym market is highly competitive in New York. For example, in the last one year alone, Equinox opened 10 more luxury gym clubs bringing its total number of such clubs to 86 (Steverman 2017). About 75% of these clubs are situated in New York. Monthly membership subscription to the clubs costs up to the tunes of USD 200. The main target customers are urban young people. Other gym organisations focus on low-end clients. For example, Planet Fitness has1200 clubs located in 47 states. It has plans to expand this number to 4000 clubs (Steverman 2017). Hence, such a highly competitive market segment requires the luxury gym facility to demonstrate attitudes and behaviours that are consistent with customers’ expected service and health quality levels to guarantee long-term success. As the paper reveals, the hotel I visited has a luxury fitness centre where the management pays incredible attention to ensuring that the facility complies with the operations management approaches such as waste reduction and client-focused outcomes as the primary determinants of operations excellence. Hence, the business abides by the stipulated health requirements.
Methodology
The study involved visiting a luxury gym facility in a hotel based in New York. To help in the analysis of the business, questions concerning the operations management of the facility were presented to some of the gym’s clients and attendants. The questions sought to find out whether the hotel’s gym management had adopted innovative operations approaches organised around waste reduction. They also sought to investigate whether the gym had tailored its practices to guarantee consistency with the clients’ set health outcomes. Answers to such problems would help to identify any operations management problems the gym would be encountering, hence informing the conclusions and recommendations made hereafter. To develop the conclusions and/or test the recommendations, the analysed feedback was measured against the existing operations management practices, including waste reduction strategies and the sustainability of operations cost.
Analysis of the Strategic and Operational Issues
From the results, it is apparent that the organisation has ensured that the facility’s building is green, hence abiding by the established environmental conservation practices. For instance, as shown in Figure 1 below, the facility has revamped treadmills and rolling bicycles that produce electrical energy to power some components in the gym environment.
Such operations management initiatives require the establishment of a balance between short-term and long-terms health needs and costs. For example, the question of whether it is necessary to pay a high initial amount of money in the development of the green facility to cut long-term costs such as paying fines for engaging in an unhealthy business or paying a higher cost of running the luxury gym facility has influenced the operations management decision-making process in the luxury facility.
Tailoring operations practices to guarantee clients’ unique anticipated outcomes aims at ensuring that the gym facility attracts and retains customers. As shown in Figure 2 below, the facility has water management mechanisms, including solar-powered water recycling and heating frameworks.
This way, the management believes that the organisation can reduce operations costs in the long-term. The gym offers private sessions designed to meet the specific strengths, imbalances, objectives, goals, and weakness of the diverse clients (males, females, adults, and kids). The two-floor training facility with an area of 3100 square feet has tools that help clients to meet almost all their workout needs. They can tumble, jump, and lift-up weights, or squat. All instructors are approved conditioning specialists. Besides, the facility has first-class salt-water cleaning tools in its swimming pool, a strategy that cuts the use of chorine, which has poisonous contents. The whole plan reduces the harm posed to the clients’ health. The fact that the luxury gym facility conducts private training implies that classified instructors work towards achieving one’s unique health goals, whether they entail gaining muscle mass or losing weight by a certain predetermined amount. Clients can also choose specific workout demands aimed at acquiring certain muscle groups. The utmost goal of the gym is to remain the most luxurious and desired facility that helps clients to develop the desired self-image while operating in a healthy business environment.
Findings and Conclusions from the Analysis
Cost-cutting strategies are important operations’ management strategies that reduce financial wastes. Under the waste reduction philosophy, the gym focuses on reducing inventory levels. Any unplanned accumulation of inventory at the luxury gym is wasteful as it creates the necessity for incurring extra costs in its management and controls (Gallien & Graves 2016). Indeed, this strategy stands out as a healthy practice for any organisation with its strategic management approaches organised around cost reduction to enhance its competitive advantage. Although maintaining green facilities requires a heavy commitment of financial resources, the long-term outcome is that the strategy effectively reduces wastes of financial resources in the payment of high operations costs associated with facilities that consume a substantial amount of fuels. Hence, the luxury gym facility has adopted a healthy operations management practice.
Organisations that operate in the luxury gym sector have to not only deliver healthy operations but also ensure that they have the best trainers to attract new customers while retaining the existing ones. The gym in the hotel that I visited has developed an operations plan that allows people attending the gym sessions to be attached to the workouts in a manner that the facility ultimately becomes the client’s lifestyle. Such a level of attachment happens when people develop a personal image that one wants to achieve. For example, the gym’s trainers help clients to develop a workout plan that helps them to achieve their preset targets, say weight loss by 10 kilograms after six months. Hence, a client develops a mentality that he or she is not fit with the extra 10 kilos. Therefore, one attends workouts tirelessly to achieve the desired look and self-image. Individuals have to consistently attend one class for four, five, or six times every week while complying with the recommended diet and eating habits to avoid regaining any lost weight. Consequently, they have to sacrifice their wellbeing to the luxury gym, giving it all their passion and energy. Is this strategy a healthy operations approach?
Considering the primary objective of losing weight, a “yes” response to the question raised above is satisfactory. People are now obsessed with losing weight akin to the health risk associated with being overweight (Oregon Health Authority 2015). Therefore, an intervention or operational management framework in a luxury gym that focuses on ensuring clients’ loss of weight encourages living healthy lives consistently with objectives of the gym market.
In case they do not acquire the desired fitness levels or fail to meet the weight loss target, chances are that they will maintain a negative self-image that informed their initial need for participating in luxury gym activities. Hence, failure to achieve the set targets with a trainer is associated with unhealthy outcomes in terms of the construction of one’s personality. Behavioural theories suggest that people’s personality emanates from their interaction with the environment. In advancing their arguments, behaviourists study various measurable and observable conducts of people to explain the nature of personality they portray (Aeger & Mykletun 2013). This important aspect can shape personality traits such as self-confidence. Where one is likely to enhance self-confidence by achieving certain fitness levels, the operations approach of the gym can either have healthy or unhealthy outcomes. Healthy outcomes occur when the actual set targets have been achieved after prescribed timeframe. In the current gym facility, the responses obtained from clients implied that they were achieving their health goals and that the business was operating in line with the laid down health requirement.
Recommendations for Improving Operations
The waste reduction strategy should be maintained. The gym facility needs to keep up its efforts of maintaining zero inventories. Currently, the gym facility has a waiting area where people linger as they patiently look forward to their turn. People in the waiting queues constitute wastes, which are unhealthy for the facility, especially in the promotion of its waste reduction operations management philosophy. To overcome this challenge and improve the healthiness of the waste reduction strategy, the facility can procure a gym management application, which can run on a smartphone. This change has the impact of ensuring that customers (gym members) have real-time information on gym utilisation at any time. The application also supplies data on the frequency of the gym facility, which can help in establishing the capability of the organisation to create customer loyalty.
In situations where customers do not meet their anticipated goals in weight reduction or muscle mass increment, the paper argued that they are likely to develop poor self-image, which affects their personality, specifically their self-confidence. Rather than preoccupying clients with targets and anticipated outcomes, the luxury gym facility can adopt a different approach to attracting new clients while maintaining the current ones. Hence, a gym management application comes in handy. The management can use it to personalise clients’ brand experience while gaining loyalty and enhancing their engagement. The facility will maintain its customers and attract new ones while the clients will have their self-image and confidence unshaken even if targets are not met after attending gym sessions over a given period.
Reference List
Aeger, K & Mykletun, R 2013, ‘Festivals, identities, and belonging’, Journal of Event Management, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 213-226.
Gallien, J & Graves, S 2016, ‘Practice-based research in operations management: what it is, why do it: related challenges, and how to overcome them’, Manufacturing service Operations Management, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 5-14.
Oregon Health Authority 2015, Recommended strategies to address childhood obesity, Oregon Health Authority, Salem.
Sodhi, M & Tang, S 2014, ‘Guiding the next generation of doctoral students in operations management’, International Journal of Production Engineering, vol. 150, no. 2, pp. 28-36.
Steverman, B 2017, Why you are paying so much to exercise, Web.
Appendix
