PlumSlice Labs
Collaborative Workflow-based RepositoryApps to Support Digital Commerce Ecosystem

With the changing business dynamics and increasing competition, (R)Etail companies are adapting newer technologies to enhance customer-shopping experience as well as revamp internal processes that impact that experience. Once skeptical, (R)Etailers are now harnessing cloud computing and mo-bility at a rapid pace to better connect with their customers, collaborate with suppliers worldwide, streamline internal processes, and reduce IT costs. Understanding this new paradigm, San Francisco, CA based PlumSlice Labs, is leveraging cloud, big data and mobile business technology to provide a suite of web and mobile apps to help retailers manage and sell their products more economically, creatively, and efficiently by:

1) Streamlining workflows for the extended enterprise including suppliers
2) Helping manage product data creation, flow, quality management
3) Providing automation in workflow decision making where possible

Abnesh Raina, CEO and Founder of PlumSlice Labs remarks, “While we started with the vision of building a Product Cloud with four core applications, driven by the customer pain points and requests for additional solutions, we ended up creating eight products as part of our retail ecosystem application suite”

One of company’s flagship products, PlumSlice PIM+ is designed as a collaborative workflow-based repository that helps retailers’ internal and external teams collaborate, create, manage, govern, and distribute product content. Its UI driven dynamic API build combined with Restful API’s helps companies connect PlumSlice to their core eCommerce and ERP systems as well as external partners including search engines, x-sell/up-sell recommendation engines, marketplaces etc. PlumSlice Digital Asset Management, another solution of the company helps manage product’s digital assets on cloud including images and videos of the products.

Similarly PlumSlice’s Select tool enables company’s buyers visiting factories or tradeshows to streamline the product selection process via its SELECT Mobile and Web Apps.

“Our RESEARCH tool analyzes linkages between structured data such as orders, returns, inventory etc. and unstructured data like product reviews, social media posts etc., to provide 70+ pre-enabled out of box widgets/scenarios for insights into product performance at any level of product hierarchy, the latest trends, different search pat¬terns within the scenarios,” briefs Raina.

While we started with the vision of building a Product Cloud with four core applications, driven by the customer pain points and requests for additional solutions, we ended up creating eight products as part of our retail ecosystem application suite

The company also offers a cloud based Vendor Portal that delivers built-in collaboration between buying teams and their suppliers. Furthermore, “We also offer PlumSlice Develop software, which is a light weight Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) tool for smaller to mid-sized retailers,” remarks Raina.

Highlighting a few case studies, Raina said that they recently streamlined the entire end to end product data management process for a large multi-branded retailer. As they were accessing more than 15 spreadsheets with over 600 product attributes prior to implementing PlumSlice, they were in dire need of a solution to reduce manual mistakes and improve time to market. With PlumSlice’s multiple fully integrated module offerings, the client was able to streamline their end to end product content management process. “Our system is highly configurable, and we helped the client to manage the implementation economically within three months,” adds Raina.

Moving ahead, on two main areas the company aims to focus on the retail industry are—mobile and automation. “We plan to enhance the mobile applications and add other features to the existing tool and are working on automating the decision making process to speed up the end to end processes for our customers,” ends Raina.