It’s a major challenge to manage just one gift shop for a cultural attraction such as a museum, science center, botanical garden, or aquarium. San Diego-based Event Network manages over 100 of these stores, each of which has its own online store. Their partners include The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Smithsonian American Art Museum, the American Museum of Natural History and more!
With their partner list rapidly expanding and still in need of assistance managing all of their partner’s stores, Event Network selected SILK Software to provide much-needed Magento support through SILK’s Managed Services program. It was a natural choice, as SILK had previously helped Event Network build the initial multi-store system.
Managed Services Workflow
To ensure smooth communication between both partners, SILK appointed a project manager to provide weekly status updates and progress reports to Event Network. When changes are needed, Event Network utilizes SILK’s sophisticated ticketing system to request modifications. The requests are then fielded by SILK’s development team.
Prior to pushing modifications to the live site, SILK tests and re-tests the updates on a staging site for accuracy, once verified, the new feature is published. Nothing is pushed live until it’s been approved.
Recent Work
SILK’s managed services program has been utilized to address a number of Event Network’s operational issues. Among these was inventory management. Event Network had been utilizing the Microsoft Dynamics NAV ERP software to keep track of their partner’s product inventory. Event Network wanted a way to monitor/manage inventory through their Magento admin account. To achieve this, SILK built a bridge from their ERP to Magento’s database to ensure a continuous flow of data. This channel retrieves all data from the ERP including newly created orders, financials, inventory and order processing and automatically adjusts product updates and inventory in the Magento database in real time.
Thanks to this integration Event Network now is able to monitor any store’ inventory online!
SILK also recently helped Event Network with the workflow for launching a new store. Through the old system Event Network utilized a pre-existing template to design and deploy a new partner’s store. After a few launches, Event Network identified the need for a less time-consuming process that would allow for speedier store launches. To achieve this goal, SILK modified some special configurations to the design templates, and now with only a few simple modifications to some CSS elements, a new store can go live with a just few clicks of the mouse!
Today, Event Network continues to rely on SILK for Magento support through our Managed Services program, we look forward to a long lasting relationship with Event Network.