Maintenance software for sports centres: pool, changing rooms and courts, each with someone answerable

Three installations inside one site

The pool. It is the most delicate part and the one that least tolerates improvising: filtration plant, circulation pumps, chemical dosing, pool heating, a dehumidifier if it is indoors. When something drifts the lifeguard notices first, from the smell, the cloudy water or the swimmers complaining of cold.

Changing rooms and showers. Hot water that does not arrive, a cylinder or a boiler that cuts out, blocked drains, forced lockers, loose benches, hairdryers. They are used in waves: empty for an hour and with eighty people the next, when the junior teams finish training.

Courts and sports hall. Floodlights that flicker or will not come on, motorised baskets stuck halfway up, goals not anchored, torn nets, the scoreboard, the wooden floor lifting in one corner, artificial turf coming unstitched, the irrigation. And outside, the lighting in the car park and at the entrances, which in winter matters from six in the evening.

Who sees each fault and whose job it is

The table was drawn up with a sports centre with an indoor pool in mind. The column for who repairs changes a great deal depending on whether the council runs it directly, a company holds the concession or it is a private club.

There are morning, afternoon and weekend shifts, instructors who come in for two hours and a caretaker who cannot be at the pool and in the sports hall at once. A report given by word of mouth stays with whoever leaves at three.

The water: what the rules make you check

Here it helps to separate two matters that tend to get mixed up: the sanitary checks on the water and the faults. The first are governed by Spain's national pool regulation. Of a public-use pool, meaning one open to the public or to a defined group of users, it requires a self-monitoring protocol, a routine check at least once a day, in the morning before opening, a laboratory analysis at least once a month and the latest results displayed where users can see them. Operation is the responsibility of the holder, who records the self-monitoring and the incidents. The detail, article by article, is in pool regulations.

The showers have their own. Spain's legionella regulation reaches domestic hot water and sets no minimum size of premises: it asks for a written plan, temperature and disinfectant checks, cleaning and disinfection at least yearly and laboratory analysis, all recorded and kept for five years. We explain it in legionella regulations, and the inspections of similar premises, with showers and public, in regulations for gyms.

None of those records is a fault ticket, and a reporting tool does not replace them. But they touch: the shower running lukewarm or the pump making a new noise is exactly what somebody should report the same day, with a date. Which tools watch the due dates is compared in software for mandatory inspections.

Council-run, concession or club: who has the say on the repair

In a centre the council runs directly, the fault goes up to the sports department and from there to the council's crew or contractor. In a concession, the company operating the centre repairs some things and the council others, according to the contract: the usual arguments are over whose the roof, the boiler or the outdoor lighting is. In a private club everything is the club's, but hardly anything is repaired by its own people.

In all three cases there is a go-between sitting between whoever sees the fault and whoever fixes it, and that go-between is the one who loses reports. And in all three somebody asks for an account in the end: the councillor, the concession's monitoring committee or the club's board. What they ask for is simple to say and hard to have: how many faults there were, how long they took, which are still open.

Six questions to ask in the demo

• Can a lifeguard report without leaving her post? A photo or a ten-second voice note. If there are fields to fill in, she will not do it with swimmers in the water.
• Does it tell pool, changing rooms and courts apart without the reporter choosing? And within each, does it know the turnstile is IT's and the boiler is the maintenance firm's?
• Is there room for the concession holder and for the council? Ask how each side receives its ticket and whether either has to request a login.
• What happens on tournament Sunday at eight in the evening? What rings, for whom, and what is left for Monday without getting lost.
• Does it keep the pool logbook and the legionella plan, or only the faults? Both answers are valid; the bad part is finding out afterwards.
• What can I hand the council or the board at the end of the month? Ask to see the file, not the screen.

When a full CMMS suits

It suits when there is a lot of plant and in-house people to look after it. A complex with several pools, a boiler room, air-handling units and four technicians on the payroll gains from an equipment register, a preventive plan per machine and work orders with their hours. So does a council department running twelve facilities with one crew, or a concession holder whose contract requires a maintenance plan documented unit by unit. That is what the CMMS was invented for, and how recurring work gets planned is covered in preventive maintenance software.

It is too much for a hall with two courts, one caretaker per shift and five outside firms, or for a padel club with eight courts and one changing room. There nobody is available to feed the inventory, and the software ends up empty while faults keep arriving by word of mouth. The full picture is in maintenance software; and if yours is a fitness floor full of machines rather than a sports centre, in maintenance software for gyms.

Bedel's place in a sports facility

Bedel deals with the report: getting it out of the corridor, to the right person and not forgotten. It is not a CMMS and not a sanitary register. The facility has a WhatsApp number and a list of its staff: caretakers, lifeguards, instructors, cleaning, maintenance. The lifeguard sends a photo of the cloudy water; the coach, a voice note saying the basket on court two has stuck halfway. Each message becomes a numbered ticket, with its time.

The pool ticket goes to the pool technician or the water company, and the basket one to whoever looks after the courts; whether that person belongs to the concession holder or to the council makes no difference, because they receive it on their WhatsApp and install nothing. The reporter finds out when someone accepts it and when it is closed. Whatever the facility has defined as urgent rings the on-call phone on a Sunday too, and whatever exceeds its deadline passes to the person above. Each month, besides, the person who runs maintenance receives on WhatsApp the reminder of the inspections that have a date loaded.

For the council or the board there is an Excel file with three times per fault: when it was reported, when it was accepted, when it was resolved. And this is what stays outside:

• It does not test the water, does not do the pool's self-monitoring or the legionella control, and does not keep their records or certificates.
• It does not book courts or lanes, does not know which is available and does not manage memberships.
• It has no inventory of pumps, boilers or floodlights, and no orders with materials, hours and costs.
• It does not connect to the membership system or to access control.
• It does not show several facilities together: each one is an account with its own number.
• Members do not open tickets: they tell the caretaker, and the caretaker writes it.

Data is stored in the European Union. How it looks in operation is in incidents in sports centres, and the general approach, in incident management on WhatsApp.