National Army Museum

The National Army Museum aims to educate and engage its visitors with the history of the UK military, and has done so since its opening in 1960. The museum, based in London, has an on-site retail outlet, but also enables customers to purchase online.

The museum aims to be a place that moves, inspires, challenges, educates, and entertains a range of audiences. The leadership team at the museum wanted to make sure customers the best experience possible across every interaction they have with the museum, so they decided it was time for a technology overhaul.

The Problem

As part of a three-year £23.75M refit, in 2016 the museum set about selecting new retail systems to take advantage of the best technology innovations. They needed a system that was operational quickly – ready in time for the re-launch of The National Army Museum by HM the Queen.

The museum had multiple retail and back-office areas that either didn’t have systems in-place, or if they did, those systems were not talking with each other. The museum was struggling with incomplete views of the customer and disjointed views of the business operations.

The museum staff wanted to have a clearer view of the business operations in order to understand their customers, manage stock levels, and improve their bottom line. The new systems had to be able to manage, synchronise and maintain data across multiple key areas.

 

Implementation

TIDEConnects helped The National Army Museum choose and integrate a set of new, commercial and operational systems. With TIDEConnects at the centre, these systems integrated with each other, as well as with the Museum’s existing Salesforce CRM and NetSuite Finance Platform.

The platforms connected were:

  • Red61 Ticketing
  • Salesforce CRM and Membership Management
  • Lightspeed EPOS, Inventory Management and eCommerce
  • Netsuite Financials

Normally such a diverse range of systems will almost never speak to, or share intelligence, with each other. But with the TIDEConnects platform acting as the middle-man, data is kept synchronised across all of them. TIDEConnects now sits at the heart of the new systems. TIDEConnects’ pre-existing connectors mean that integrating retail systems together takes days, not weeks – reducing project time and cost.

The Result

The outcome of the project was a fully integrated system that synchronised in real-time and met all of the museum’s needs:

  • Automatically create and maintain a Single View of the Customer in their Salesforce CRM
  • Consolidate and maintain all financial transaction, from all sales channels, in their NetSuite finance system
  • Automate membership programme benefits across sales channels
  • Automate management reporting
  • Operational efficiencies between sales and inventory
  • See visitor behaviour patterns to develop appropriate marketing and sales strategies

Due to the swift speed of integration that TIDEConnects enables, the project was completed in only 3 months, ready in time for the re-launch of the museum.

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