Sodankylä residents enter the gym with mobile authentication
The sports services of the municipality of Sodankylä have gone digital with access control. Mobile identifier-based access rights were introduced in January 2022 and have been well received by both users of the Kitisenranta gym and sports instructors.
Previously, you could get a pass from the office for a fee. Sanna Aho and Jani Uusitalo, sports instructors in Sodankylä municipality, regret that the service was not introduced earlier, as it has freed up time for other work.
User numbers on the rise
After a month and a half of use, the Kitisenranta gym already has 60 users. In 2021, the total number of users was 110, so the number of users is expected to increase significantly this year.
Heli Illikainen is one of the people who bought access to the gym using the mobile app. The quick-to-use mobile app has made going to the gym much easier. Signing up was easy and the pictorial instructions were clear. ”I bought a gym card from the online shop of the sports services for an annual fee of €30, and at the same time I got a gym membership on my phone. I paid the bill at the same time. The mobile key is on my phone, and by showing it to the card reader on the door I can access the gym whenever I want from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m.,” Illikainen says. – It has made life easier when I don’t have to go to the office to get a key to the gym and remember that I have it with me. I rarely forget my phone when I travel,” says Illikainen.
Illikainen also encouraged her family to get up from the sofa and go to the gym: her husband and nephew bought gym cards from an online shop.
Your own online shop on the e-Spaces platform
In leisure services, Aho and Uusitalo had been looking for a digital solution for key management of sports facilities and fee collection for some time. Granting access rights to users was laborious, as it required handling cash and users had to come in person. ”Previously, we made a separate access card for each user and handled cash payments. Now, users log on to the online sports shop from our website at any time, buy a one-year season ticket and pay for their access right away using the banking application. We are still considering an automation solution for vouchers,” says Aho. Mr Aho and Mr Uusitalo, who were involved in the implementation, were the system’s testers. They also supported the pilot customers in December 2021.
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For us, the service is the easiest solution for Kitisenranta. It took two months to implement the system. We only make changes to the content, such as pricing, guidance and customer information,” says Uusitalo. We are going through the equipment and facilities in our various gyms more carefully, correcting shortcomings and preparing our own exercise instructions. The hockey drill, which used to take up a lot of working time at the turn of the year, is now done by the clients themselves. No longer do we have to send a bag of money to the municipal treasury,” says Uusitalo. Less than ten customers have contacted him about the system not working. These have mainly concerned Bluetooth connections and NFC technology, which some customers are new to. The problems have been quickly solved with guidance. The instructors believe that the service will bring more users. Sodankylä’s sports services are not completely digitalised, however, and residents are still served in the traditional way. ”We want all ages in Sodankylä to be mobile citizens,” says Aho. According to Uusitalo, the biggest challenge for customers is getting a smartphone, as the service cannot be used without a smartphone. For those who don’t have a smartphone, the sports instructors will make a pass. All those who want to use the system will receive guidance on how to use it, so that the threshold for adopting the new service is as low as possible.
Low-cost investment makes work more efficient
Seniortek has been a partner of Sodankylä municipality for over 25 years. The integrated systems for access control and alarm systems as well as working time monitoring are familiar from the past. The SenioriTurva system, for its part, monitors and safeguards the daily lives of residents in real time in three service homes and supports and facilitates the work of carers.
The turnkey services are user-friendly and worry-free. The customer purchases a monthly service for €200 and Seniortek takes care of the maintenance, servicing and user support of the equipment. We integrate them into the desired systems as part of the e-commerce. The customer can update his data, monitor the user register and payment transactions.
and take reports from the system,” says Sami Nurmela, Technical Director at Seniortek. Manually managed passes were taking up an inordinate amount of working time, and processing small amounts in the municipality is a multi-step process. The process itself eats up the fee. The other cost benefits will become clearer during the year,” says Pekka Sipola, Director of the Real Estate Department of Sodankylä Municipality.