Virgin Active Gets into Shape with PROACTIS
When Virgin Active, one of the world's leading operators of
health and fitness clubs, decided to overhaul its financial systems
platform to support ambitious growth plans, it used a PROACTIS
solution to manage its cost base.
Profile
Virgin Active, part of Richard Branson's group of companies, is
one of the most respected brands in the United Kingdom and South
Africa and has growing operations in Spain, Portugal and Italy.
Since it opened its first club at Preston in the United Kingdom in
1999, Virgin Active has pursued an aggressive growth plan and today
operates 180 clubs worldwide and a membership base of 0.9 million
people.
Challenge
When Virgin Active began to review its critical business
systems, it realised that firm financial foundations would be
required to support the company's ambitious expansion plans.
Virgin Active's UK Finance Manager, Nicola Urquhart: "We set out
to ensure that our financial management platform was capable of
providing the agility needed to support a growing business like
Virgin Active. For us, this meant not only implementing a system
that was capable of recording and analysing the numbers, but the
ability to manage the numbers, and particularly our costs, would be
critical."
Results
So as well as implementing a new financial accounting system in
the company's UK operations, Virgin Active turned to PROACTIS for
assistance with its spend management. After a four month roll-out
across the company's UK head office and chain of clubs, Virgin
Active went live with its new PROACTIS spend control platform,
transforming the way goods and services are purchased by staff
right across the business.
For Virgin Active in the UK, PROACTIS has delivered some
important advantages:-
- A quick and easy way for staff to purchase from approved
suppliers, with pre-purchase approvals and budget checking
- A streamlined Accounts Payable process, with automated invoice
matching and troubleshooting
- Visibility of spend and committed expenditure for management,
budget holders, regional managers, club managers and maintenance
managers across Virgin Active
- A controlled CAPEX purchase process
Nicola Urquhart goes on to explain how her team has made
PROACTIS part of the culture of Virgin Active UK: "By branding our
PROACTIS system as VA Buy and by using it to offer really useful
information to our club managers and staff, we have been able to
put the issue of spend control at the heart of the way we operate.
Everybody is now conscious of our cost base and we are all
accountable for our own budgets, which is a positive step towards
controlling costs."
Following the success of Virgin Active's PROACTIS initiative in
the UK, the company has now extended its commitment to the spend
control platform with a new project that has seen PROACTIS become
the de-facto spend control platform across its Spanish and
Portuguese operations.
The decision to implement PROACTIS to support these growing
European operations was taken after the successful UK project,
which has seen the software deployed to streamline buying processes
across Virgin's head office and some 70+ health and fitness
clubs.
