British Film Institute
The British Film Institute (BFI) is charity that combines cultural, creative and industrial roles. Its core purpose is to champion the future success of film in the UK
The charity brings together the BFI National Archive, the BFI Reuben Library, film distribution, exhibitions and educational work at BFI Southbank, BFI IMAX, and popup festivals. Its vast range of services means that business clarity and connected systems need to be at the heart of the charities’ technology landscape.
The Problem
To enhance the charity’s retail operations, it needed new technologies to respond to the changing market where customers want the same experience when they shop at home as on-site. At the centre of needed a new eCommerce store to fit within the existing Drupal website. The new store needed to be fully integrated and synchronised with Inventory Management and a new central data warehouse.
As BFI’s data warehouse had no native integration support for the new eCommerce site, so the charity’s senior management team were unsure how their new integrated system would work within their vast and diverse technology landscape. Talisman helped them to map out and develop a strategy covering the full range of systems.
Implementation
The result was an eCommerce Magento store and inventory system that integrated seamlessly into the BFI’s existing Drupal powered website and new data warehouse. At the heart of the connectivity is Talisman’s TIDEConnects integration platform, which takes the sales data from Magento and transforms it on-the-fly into the schema the BFI employ in the Acuma Data Warehouse. This allows the different systems to easily share data and talk to each other.
The platforms integrated in this project were:
- Magento
- Acuma Data Warehouse
- TIDEConnects integration platform
BFI now has a range of business systems that fulfils individual needs of the different departments. These systems are integrated automatically using TIDEConnects, with no manual intervention.
TIDEConnects also enable the BFI to integrate its future platforms with each other with minimal disruption; allowing for quick response to changing market trends or technological innovations.
The Result
The new joined-up technology saves BFI about four hours per day, as previously the BFI team would have had to manually copy and paste data between systems to another in order to keep them in-sync. This time can then be repurposed across business and customer strategic activities.
Integration between Magento and Acuma allows the BFI to model, understand and utilise sales data from the online store in order to understand its customers and their buying habits, which will help drive sales and marketing campaigns.