December 20, 2023
Trek through the Amazon Rainforest or explore ancient ruins in Treetop Adventure Golf’s iconic 18-hole mini golf courses. With five sites across Cardiff, Manchester, Leicester, Birmingham, and the newest site in Gateshead, each venue combines exciting social gaming and delicious food and drink in the Jungle Buzz café, Thirsty Toucan bar, and Market’s Pizza Cabana.
Managing four sites, expanding into a fifth, and working to maintain excellent customer service and growth is no easy feat. Throw in ongoing industry challenges and the increased popularity of social gaming venues, and running a business becomes overwhelming.
These were all factors that Treetop Adventure Golf was facing: the team decided to overcome these difficulties by searching for a technology partner that could simplify processes whilst future-proofing the business.
Philip Edwards, Head of Operations at Treetop Adventure Golf, explains: “With our five sites, we felt that it was an opportunity to align our approach as a startup, moving to an early growth business.”
The expansion of the business was a key turning point: implementing a system with the flexibility and scalability needed to support its growth had become a necessity.
“We were looking for a solutions provider that would support us as we continue our growth over the coming years. We wanted a system that could bring in a one-system approach to how we review data, how we report, and inform us to make better decisions,” explains Philip.
“We wanted to enable our teams to deliver a better experience to our guests, one that meant they could focus on guests rather than needing to focus on tills.”
Sustained growth was one of the primary objectives for Treetop Adventure Golf, and the disconnected EPOS system in place couldn’t provide the scalability needed for future expansions. Seamless integrations with leading platforms and software were another key objective, alongside more granular reporting, and accurate stock management.
Specific requirements for the new technology ecosystem included: comprehensive reporting across all areas of the business, easier management of stock and inventory across all sites, specific integrations for improving the customer journey and simplifying processes, and ultimately a fully connected system with direct and accurate cross-technology communication.
Philip’s initial meetings with the teams at Tevalis were positive: “When we met with Tevalis, it was really apparent that there was a can-do attitude to their approach. They wanted to work with us, and importantly to partner with us, as we grew from a startup to one that is continuing to grow in the future.”
He explains “What we liked was the ability to see everything in one place. Everything felt connected and there wasn’t a need to hover or filter between different systems or platforms, or to try and work out where key information sat.”
Undoubtedly, Treetop Adventure Golf required a comprehensive hospitality ecosystem implemented across their five sites that would grow alongside their business. Their teams quickly recognised Tevalis’ flexible and effective approach, and the potential for a lucrative and long-term partnership between the two businesses.
Together, our various teams developed a complete and connected ecosystem. Each Treetop site was fitted with user-friendly EPOS terminals which sync seamlessly with cloud-based management modules Business Analytics, Centralised Management, and Stock Management.
Advanced reporting was a key requirement for the teams at Treetop. Philip describes his experience with the management tools installed:
“Tevalis’ reporting dashboard gives me all the site information at my fingertips. It’s one which enables better discussions with my ops manager and for them to have more, better-informed discussions with their site managers as well.”
Improving stock management across their sites was imperative to improving operations, and with the Tevalis Stock Management module now managing their inventory, Treetop can optimise their products and services.
“Tevalis gives me the ability to look at the full sales breakdown, whether that’s by quantity sold, or by total revenue for the day by hour, by day splits across the week, across the month. But more importantly, it gives me the ability to understand stock management by wastage, by inventory, to make better, more informed decisions at that moment across the week and looking into the future,” explains Philip.
“Day-to-day it gives us the ability to understand where items maybe aren’t selling as well as they need to, ones that aren’t available, and just better support how we might decide what our seasonal menus look like or items that we feel has greater opportunity by category.”
Completing Treetop’s tailored ecosystem are several integrations with Tevalis’ industry-leading partners. Their teams now utilise DesignMyNight for quick and easy reservations, Harri for comprehensive workforce management, Paymentsense for secure and reliable payments, Toggle for gift cards, Preoday for efficient order and pay, and Xero for streamlined accounting.
“What was very easy early on was Tevalis’ ability to suggest and position other integrations with us that would help us to better operate or elevate our way of doing things, whether that’s through integrating with Toggle, creating an existing integration with DesignMyNight, or more importantly, being able to recommend to us an Order at Table platform,” explains Philip.
Our knowledgeable partnerships team can easily identify the best integrations for the needs of the business, whether that’s to simplify processes for staff or to improve the customer experience. Treetop introduced an integration to give guests more choices over their ordering journey.
“We introduced Preoday, an Order at Table platform, through Tevalis. That gave us the ability for our guests to scan a QR code on the table, decide what they would like to eat or drink and then order it through our team.”
Philip explains the benefits of this new integration:
“The biggest win with that integration is anything that updates on Tevalis automatically updates on Preoday. With the two systems connecting seamlessly, it means that there’s low administrative time needed to support, and there’s a great guest experience continuing to be delivered too.”
Implementation of the new Tevalis ecosystem has brought significant changes to the way the business operates. With vast benefits experienced across all sites and all areas, the opening of the 5th Treetop site could move forward with confidence in the improved digital strategy.
The various teams benefit from our robust and reliable EPOS, granular reporting and analytics through intelligent software, and insight into essential business performance data. Further expansions can be planned without concerns around the scalability of their technology, meaning focus can be placed on more complex and time-consuming areas.
Philip describes his experience with Tevalis:
“Having worked with other EPOS providers in the past, Tevalis provides ease of use, saving huge amounts of time in finding information, and being able to make those quick decisions which are really important in day-to-day operations.”
He continues: “One of the unexpected benefits of Tevalis is the recipe builder. It enables us to better understand what our cost of sale was at that moment in time, and it helps us to make better-informed decisions when we’re evolving our menu offering. We understand the cost of what it is to deliver these items to our guests.”
“What the Tevalis ecosystem has enabled them to do is not need to concentrate on where things are occurring or if the payment is going through, but really focusing on connecting with our guests each and every time.”
Treetop Adventure Golf’s comprehensive ecosystem is improving operations across all areas of the business, ensuring that its customers have a smooth and enjoyable social gaming experience.
“The main benefit is we’ve got wider depths of information. We can find the information out quicker where we’ve just not ever been able to do that,” says Philip.
“As we look to expand and bring our experience to more guests around the UK over the coming years, we look forward to partnering with Tevalis throughout.”
