Challenge

If you’ve had the pleasure of eating and relaxing at a Mellow Mushroom, you will know that art is central to the experience at every restaurant.

Along with great pizza, art is one of the most effective ways the company engages visitors and builds customer loyalty. As the brand has grown from humble, hippie beginnings in Atlanta to more than 200 franchises across the country, managing that art — from creation to inventory and installation — had become quite a challenge.

“We were using paper tags and spreadsheets to keep tabs on warehouses full of signage, sculptures, gears, giant robots, bike parts, mushroom people, you name it,” said Mark Malcolm, title. “It worked, to an extent, but it was incredibly time consuming and we had almost no visibility into our inventory and availability.”

With stores needing to know what they could order, with new inventory arriving regularly, and with artist schedules in play, Mellow Mushroom needed an image-based system that would help catalogue more than 10,000 pieces and provide visibility to executives, managers, artists and franchisees.

Solution

To address the need, 5th Method partnered with Mellow Mushroom to build a SharePoint asset management solution.

It gives designated Mellow Mushroom employees, contractors and franchisees instant access to information about this massive art collection — including details on each piece of art, where it’s currently stored or installed, and any associated installation imagery. The system helps manage intake, refurbishing processes, scheduling, shipping and more.

The system is used to oversee the entire lifecycle of the art assets and artifacts that live, evolve and move around within the Mellow Mushroom ecosystem. Artists or franchisees can request art (and modifications to the art) through the system, which kicks off workflows that alert and assign tasks to warehouse managers, contractors and anyone else involved.

The solution is built almost entirely on Office 365, incorporating SharePoint add-ins, workflows and an image library solution. Content types are used to organize the site and categorize inventory, which improves search dramatically.

“Pieces are constantly coming in and out, and this system helps me keep everything organized,” Malcolm said. “Now I know who gets what pieces and what’s available for others to request. I can also now report to my boss: This is what that art looked like when it was sitting here in the warehouse, here are the modifications that were made to it and here’s what the installation looks like.”

With the 5th Method solution in place, Accounting now has greater visibility of company assets and Malcolm is freed up to get more work done in less time.

“The most incredible benefits are visibility and time savings,” Malcom said. “We’re using the system even more than we thought we would.

“Tasks that used to take hours — like tagging a batch of items — can now be done in about 30 minutes.”