Elastic Suite — B2B Retail Sales Management and Product Merchandising

Elastic is a suite of tools for managing B2B (business-to-business) sales and merchandising. Currently the Elastic Suite is comprised of Elastic Sales, a desktop order entry and management tool; Elastic Merchandising, a desktop product merchandising tool; Elastic Online, an online, web-based version of Elastic Sales; and various support utilities designed to meet client needs that fall outside the usual Elastic applications.

My role in Elastic is to design, development and maintain the desktop software. All of the desktop software is written in Adobe Flex (older stuff is in Flex 3, newer stuff in Flex 4) and deployed with Adobe AIR.

All of the Elastic Suite applications are designed to compliment each other and this is accomplished through a single, xml-based file format that is shared across all applications. This approach ensures that Elastic will never be married to one technology and that users can use the tool that best suits their needs without worrying about compatibility issues.

Elastic Merchandising

Elastic Merchandising allows marketers to visually communicate with retailers how to layout products in an actual store. Features include:

  • A page (or pages) with a drag and drop interface, photos of all merchandise and powerful search and filtering tools.
  • Support for merchandise as well as fixtures (the things products hang on in the store) and other client-supplied graphics.
  • Robust drawing tools that allow users to work with a page like an actual piece of paper.
  • A text tool so layouts can be further explained with words.
  • High resolution (300dpi) PDF print outs.
Elastic Sales

Elastic Sales facilitates a simplified work flow for Retailer and Sales Rep purchasing. The main features of Elastic Sales are:

  • A shopping cart with a simple drag and drop interface, photos of all the merchandise and powerful searching and filtering tools.
  • A details view offering multiple views of a product and a listing of all product features.
  • A sizing view that allows shoppers to quickly enter sizes for large orders.
  • A tabbed interface, allowing large orders to be separated into logical units.
  • A robust invoicing view that ties into the tabbing interface. This allows different tabs to be shipped at different dates, to different place and more.
  • An inventory control system that syncs with a server for real-time product availability.
  • Full localization for US English, French and German.

Check it out here.