It is common for facilities of an activity center like those in Larry’s Leisure Center to have peak time. When the number of people using a facility exceeds its capacity, there will be peak time. Too many customers using the facility at the same time can ruin activity experience, and the bad experience can lead to customer loss. Therefore, business intelligence can be used to explore the existence of peak time and to find out matching solutions to make customers remain. In this report, the swimming pool and exercise class are taken as examples which are assumed to have peak time. All the numbers in the report are not real and just given as examples to show how to use the data recorded.

In the Pool table, each record means one entry into the swimming pool. Each record includes the exact date and time when the person uses the pool. It needs to count how many customers enter the swimming pool every three hours, and then divide the result by the capacity of the facility to calculate the ratio. When the ratio is far beyond one, it indicates this time period is the peak time and solutions are needed to solve the problem. The figure 1 shows the pool usage on a typical Friday and Saturday. Since the pool capacity is assumed to be 150 people, the 18:00 to 21:00 time period on Friday and 18:00 to 21:00 time period on Saturday are peak time. The ratio of the two time periods are 1.47 and 1.42 respectively, which are far beyond one and show too many people are sharing the crowded pool area at the same time. To convince the customers to relax themselves with the free space in the pool, some solutions have been raised:

(Figure 1)

Solutions to swimming pool peak time

* Limitation of pool usage at the peak time
In general, users can use the pool with no limited time, which causes some customers stay at the pool for too many hours. The problems can be relieved by limiting the using hours, for instance, each user only can use the pool for 2 hours every time on Friday and Saturday.

* Transfer users to other facilities
At the peak time of swimming pool, some other facilities are not fully used, as the Figure 2 shows. Therefore, the center can try to transfer pool users at peak time to other available facilities by some incentives, such as promotion activities, as well as invitations of gym experts. (Figure 2)

* Raise the price of swimming pool at peak time depend on demand-law
This approach can control the number of users, and it may transfer the original users at peak time to ordinary time. Effective as it is, some customers may feel dissatisfactory and leave.

* Build standby swimming pool
This pool does not open at ordinary time, and it is only used by users at peak time to reduce using space intension. This solution will lead to great cost initially, but it can solve the peak time problem for long run.

* Using number searching system
The center can link the database to the Internet. By doing that, any customer can search the current number of people using the swimming pool through their Iphones or computers before they come and then they can decide whether to go.

Moreover, the ExceriseClass table is also used to identify the peak time. Each record in the table indicates a class. The ExerciseClass_UserInformation table shows all the customer names and which class they belong to. Through calculating the number of customers in each class, it can be told which class has a peak time. According to data, there are more customers taking class on Friday Saturday and Sunday than on other days (Figure 3). Forty is assumed to be an ideal number of customers for an instructor to take care of. Moreover, it needs to be underlined that the center only has classes from Wednesday to Sunday and each one of the five instructors is responsible for one day’s class.

(Figure 3)

（Figure 4）

Solutions to Exercise class peak time

* Relate salary with popularity
Figure 4 shows a relationship between popularity of instructor. The degree of popularity an instructor to some degree determines the number of customers taking his class. Therefore, the direct solution is to relate the instructors’ salary with their popularity to motivate instructors. When the performance of all the instructors become competitive, customers will be distributed to other classes.

* Employee more instructors and set more classes
By doing so, the centre will be able to supply more classes for customers to choose at peak time and help to ease the burden on some crowded classes. Furthermore, the more employees, the more competition instructors will face. Competition is an effective threat to motivate instructors to work hard as well as to increase the efficiency of labor capital.

* Price discrimination
Eventually, this problem from the view of customers would be solved by different charge on different version of exercise, such as super-star teaching classes, general-teaching classes. The amount of students in popular classes would be decrease through this way.