Heritage attraction · Bickenhill, Solihull
A museum where the booking system
going down is a very public problem.
Over a thousand machines, a substantial conference and events business, admissions, a shop, and more than forty years of continuous operation. The systems behind all of that are ours to run.
Exhibits on display
Years in operation
Distinct systems
Where
The problem
An attraction is several businesses wearing one name
A visitor attraction of this size is not one operation. It is a museum with timed admissions, a conference and events venue selling space to companies months ahead, a retail business, and a heritage collection that has to be catalogued and kept. Each of those has its own rhythm, its own paperwork and its own idea of what a customer record looks like, and each tends to acquire its own software independently over a long period.
Forty years produces a great deal of that. Systems arrive one at a time, each solving the problem in front of somebody that year, and none of them designed to know about the others. The result is not usually dramatic — nothing collapses — but the same information ends up living in three places, staff spend real time reconciling it by hand, and the organisation slowly loses the ability to answer simple questions about itself without somebody opening four screens.
The other constraint is visibility. This is a public attraction with a conference business attached, which means the failure mode is not an internal inconvenience. If admissions stop working on a Saturday, or an events enquiry disappears, it happens in front of paying customers and corporate clients, and it is remembered.
What we built
Systems that know about each other
The work here is continuous rather than a single project — a long-running relationship maintaining and extending what the museum runs on.
Admissions
The front door of the whole operation, and the part that cannot be down. Ticketing and entry handled so that a busy Saturday is a normal day rather than an event.
Events and conference
A separate business with a much longer sales cycle than admissions — enquiries, availability, space and the follow-up that turns one into a booking.
E-commerce
A retail operation attached to an attraction, which is its own discipline: much of the demand is impulse, on site or immediately after a visit.
The collection
Over a thousand exhibits, catalogued. A heritage collection is a data problem as much as a physical one, and the record is part of what the museum is for.
Keeping it running
Hosting, monitoring, updates and someone to ring. For an organisation without technical staff of its own, this is frequently the part that matters most.
Not replacing what works
Forty years of accumulated systems contains a lot that is fine. The job is to join and modernise, not to rebuild everything because it is old.
Where it got to
Still running, which is the whole point
The measure of this kind of work is unglamorous: the museum opens, people get in, events get booked, the shop sells things, and nobody has to think about any of it. There is no dramatic percentage to quote here and we are not going to invent one.
What we would point at instead is duration. This is a long-standing relationship with an organisation that has been operating for more than four decades and cannot afford to be experimented on. That kind of client does not keep a supplier out of inertia — attractions of this size have a board, a finance function and no shortage of agencies offering to rebuild everything.
It is also, for anyone in Solihull or the wider West Midlands weighing us up, a piece of proof you can inspect in person. The museum is open to the public at Bickenhill. Very few of the firms competing for the same searches can offer that.
What it runs on
Long-running systems maintained and extended in place rather than replaced wholesale. Hosting, monitoring, backups and updates run on our own UK infrastructure.
Running an attraction
on systems that do not talk?
It is the commonest shape of problem we see in organisations that have been going a long time. Tell us what your Saturday looks like and we will tell you honestly whether we can help.