Significantly reduce your time-to-market
Concrete's Connect Product Accelerator is a unique and highly valuable tool for any retailer who needs to reduce the time to market of product and streamline the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Range Plan and Open to Buy (OTB) process within their business.
PLM - Product Lifecycle Management
Product Accelerator starts by acting as your PLM platform, tracking design, manufacture and sign off within your business, all the time driving the process forward courtesy of Connect's unique "invitation system", a highly effective tool for prompting stakeholders to carry out tasks, contacting them via email and/or SMS, so driving your projects forward as quickly as possible. Product Accelerator uses highly intuitive, graphical interfaces, allowing users to easily use the tool, managing the sign off of your blue, red and gold seal samples on time and an on budget.
Range Plan
Once your range has been signed off, Product Accelerator enables you to either build your range plan or act as a secondary range plan tool for your international business. As with all Connect tools, being entirely web based, your range plan tool can be accessed anywhere by authorised users, enabling them to build their range needs through a simple e-commerce style selection environment. For many businesses, the international side of range planning is a semi-manual process, heavily reliant on spreadsheets and email. Connect's Range Plan function can ingest your UK range plan and allow any number of versions to be created for your international markets. By centralising in this way, roll-up process is handled automatically, and users require no software to access their range plan. Furthermore, the dedicated web based interface does away with the fragile and slow use of complex spreadsheets for this critical process.
Concrete's experience in the field also extends to helping many businesses re-design their workflow around product imagery, enabling them to provide imagery at the range planning stage, but without any extra cost to the business. For more information on this, or any other aspect of Concrete's offer, please get in touch via the contact area.
OTB - Open to Buy
As the selection function of Range Planning, Connect Product Accelerator offers a highly intuitive, yet powerful tool for businesses that operate an OTB scheme.
Whilst in many cases, the physical handling of product, particularly garments, can never be truly replaced, many of the quantative processes in the OTB process can be done remotely. Connect Product Accelerator allows you to put together collection options accurately and easily for multiple markets. Markets can then access the collections remotely, shape their collection according to quantity and size curve and put together complementary collections via the unique "drag & drop" interface, allowing users to actually see what certain garments look like together. All of this work can be done remotely, completing the bulk of the administrative and selection work before visiting the buying event. This leaves the buying event for quality checks and confirmation only. For markets that cannot feasibly make the journey for every buying event, Connect Product Accelerator is the next best thing.
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