Bespoke Cycling

Bespoke Cycling was founded 10 years ago to fit bikes to suit their customer’s individual needs and desires.  Industry leaders in this high-end sporting goods market, Bespoke Cycling has two shops in London.  They also enable customers to build their dream bike through Bike Builder, their online sales and marketing platform.

Key to Bespoke Cycling’s success is their customer relationships, service at all levels is a top priority. Bespoke Cycling use cloud services from Salesforce and Vend to manage customers, orders, purchases and delivery.

The Problem

Previously, Bespoke Cycling developed a set of semi-automated routines in Salesforce to manage orders and stock. However, as product purchase, stock management and customer payments are handled in Vend, integration between the two systems was necessary. Sales orders had to be uploaded manually into Vend, with the updating of purchase orders and bulk price changes being particularly challenging.

Impacts on the Bespoke Cycling business included:

  • Large amounts of time wasted manually entering data – up to a day a week
  • Access to key customer and stock data was slow
  • Considerable errors in order fulfilment
  • Lack of trust in their data across all staff teams.

Bespoke Cycle realised middleware integration was the key to solving these issues, how to implement it was crucial. They didn’t want to replace everything, as some functionality was key to their customer offering. Outsourcing custom development wasn’t an option due to managing resource availability and coding efficiency. Employing an individual was not cost effective. They needed a flexible, extensible and standards-based platform that could be configured to meet their demanding requirement.

Implementation

A multi-phase engagement was agreed and between May and August 2019, Bespoke Cycling and TIDEConnects worked to connect Vend and Salesforce together and integrate their product data, using the product Sku as the unique identifier linking the two systems.

TIDEConnects provided a series of automated processes for Bespoke Cycling:

  • New product for sale; the product details are entered into Salesforce and then a new product is automatically created in Vend, with all product details transferred into the Vend data structures
  • Existing product updated; with a new price, or a bulk price change, TIDEConnects synchronises the new data in Salesforce with the corresponding record in Vend
  • New stock; purchased through Vend, stock levels are updated in Salesforce. As Bespoke Cycling hold stock at multiple physical locations, stock is also allocated to the right store.

In September 2019 a second phase was implemented which ensured both systems have consistent and up-to-date Customer data:

  • New Customer created or an existing Customer updated in Salesforce, all corresponding Customer data fields in Vend are updated
  • Customer makes a new transaction in Vend, the outstanding balance and a year to date spent figure is transferred to Salesforce.

By automating these time-consuming and error prone processes, TIDEConnects has made a significant contribution to streamlining the Bespoke Cycling business. TIDEConnects’ replaced the existing custom functionality and added extra automation, enabling considerably more quality data to be transferred back and forth.

The Result

In only three months TIDEConnects has made a considerable impact. The back-office data management function is now seamless. Bespoke Cycling has achieved improved efficiency in all departments, not just replacing manual uploads of data. Customers no longer have to hold on the phone while Staff physically check to see if items are in stock as they now trust the stock data. In addition, the sales team’s speed of access to data has improved and they have more confidence in the better-quality data.

“Our experience of TIDEConnects has been super-efficient all the way through. Thanks to TIDEConnects the time I used to spend on data management, I now spend on business management and the data quality is far better. I no longer have to spend a day a week, or more doing pricing uploads, manually transferring and checking the data, as I now trust it.  It is crucial to spend that time on other areas to grow our business. We trust TIDEConnects and are looking forward to connecting more of our cloud-based systems. As a business we need to be as efficient as possible to ride any situation. If businesses don’t do that they fail.” Said Liam Lynch, Director, Bespoke Cycling.

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