Client
Minnesota Historical Society
Website
Category
- Shopify Plus Implementation
- ECommerce
- Point of Sale
- Inventory
Software
- Shopify Plus
- Stocky
Implementing Best Practices for Inventory Management and POS with Shopify Plus●
The Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS) is a nonprofit educational and cultural institution dedicated to preserving the history of the U.S. state of Minnesota. It was founded by the territorial legislature in 1849, almost a decade before statehood. The Society is named in the Minnesota Constitution. It is headquartered in the Minnesota History Center in downtown Saint Paul. Although its focus is on Minnesota history, it is not constrained by it. Its work on the North American fur trade has been recognized in Canada as well. MNHS holds a collection of nearly 550,000 books, 37,000 maps, 250,000 photographs, 225,000 historical artifacts, 950,000 archaeological items, 38,000 cubic feet of manuscripts, 45,000 cubic feet of government records, 5,500 paintings, prints and drawings; and 1,300 moving image items. They play an important role in Minnesota’s historic preservation, education and tourism, providing the public with award-winning programs, exhibitions and events. With many stores across Minnesota, both their inventory and point of sale processes had become disjointed. Due to BlueBolt's reputation of having deep knowledge of the Shopify Plus platform, the Minnesota Historical Society hired BlueBolt to overhaul its inventory management and point of sale systems.
Service Provided:
- Shopify Plus Implementation
- Data Management
- Point of Sale Best Practices
- Support, Training and Maintenance
- Account Management
Minnesota Historical Society Project Highlights●
Clean and Organize Inventory Data
When BlueBolt did a deep dive in the Minnesota Historical Society Data, it found data that was disorganized and often duplicated or triplicated.
Create Best Practices to Use Shopify Plus as a Point of Sale System
Store managers were not using Shopify and Stocky properly, causing data to be out of whack and inventory control to be nonexistent.
Unite and Train the Minnesota Historical Society Team
Not having been trained to use Shopify Plus and Stocky properly, each MNHS store manager was doing their own thing, creating SKUs and products.
The Minnesota Historical Society came to BlueBolt because they were having problems using Shopify Plus and Stocky as the Point of Sale and inventory management in their stores across Minnesota. They tasked BlueBolt with discovering what was going wrong and organizing their data and inventory. They also asked BlueBolt to establish best practices in using the Shopify Plus system in this manner and to train their staff to use the software efficiently.
The initial discovery process BlueBolt conducted found that Minnesota Historical Societies’ inventory system wasn’t being properly used. Each store manager was individually adding their own inventory into the system, which was causing duplicated and triplicated SKUs across Minnesota. Consequently, when stores were selling an item, choosing the right SKU for their own store became very problematic. Adding to the chaos, an app they were using was injecting bad data into their inventory catalog.
Unified Success●
After cleaning up the inventory data and organizing it into a hierarchical structure that supported the organization as a whole, with multiple stores, BlueBolt created documentation on retail management best practices on how to run their Point of Sale and inventory control. The BlueBolt team then trained the Minnesota Historical Society store managers on how to use the system. Now, store managers are able to work together, improving the overall operation everyone.
