New tools to ease e-retailer franchise management

Concrete's new tools could help retailers improve their international businesses

Digital asset management and e-commerce software vendor Concrete is set to announce two new solutions to its flagship Connect suite of applications designed to support the back-office tasks which will enable retailers to manage their international franchises with greater efficiency.

Concrete Connect is a customisable Software as a Service suite covering marketing automation, supply chain management, staff resourcing and more, all designed to help staff suppliers, partners and customers collaborate and communicate more effectively.

New to the suite are project management and merchandise procurement capabilities, according to the firm’s chief executive, Tristan Rogers.

The project management tool has been created to allow firms to build complex projects and share them with international franchise partners – an area where traditional tools have been lacking, explained Rogers.

“As consumers we can use eBay, Amazon and YouTube and then we use Microsoft at work, but they are poles apart in terms of ease of use and pleasure of use,” he argued. “With the project management tool we’ve managed to make it attractive to look at and intuitive and easy to use, but with enterprise functionality.”

The merchandise procurement platform, meanwhile, has been built to allow domestic plans to be shared with a retailer’s international team as quickly and easily as possible. In this way, it’s able to pull data from the domestic side and present it via a web browser for the international user.

The tool can also pull data from other legacy parts of the business such as accounting tools, e-commerce software and product lifecycle management stores, and it is rights managed so different users in different territories will only be able to access the data relevant to them, said Rogers.