How Cell-Ed, Ace&Tate and Carrot shipped great External Tools

Our last article covered the reasons why we decided to package an offer to address the needs of companies willing to place a layer of operational data between them and their partners, vendors, suppliers or even customers.

As an off-the-shelf version of such a piece of software is unheard of, companies have been forced to develop their own application or rely on clunky software up until now.

Now let us deep dive into concrete use cases of how companies leverage Forest Admin’s newest features to build the tools they share with their external partners.

A platform for coaches to train millions of workers

A little bit of context on Cell-Ed business: Cell-Ed offers a complete mobile solution for employers and education providers to reach, train, coach, and upskill their workers worldwide on any device with no internet connection or data plan needed.

Public governments, NGOs and employers use Cell-ed to train millions of workers in order to help them acquire literacy, language and job skills to get and keep the jobs they want.

In addition to providing their external teams with a tool that allows them to manage their operations, Cell-Ed needed to quickly deploy a tool to empower their internal coaching team with enhanced features. An enhanced tool that would allow them to visualize and manage data in order to monitor their user usage and adapt specialized training content and user support accordingly.

They evaluated different options:

Rely on BI tools which require a costly upfront investment but wouldn't cover entirely their needs.
Develop the extended platform in-house, which would have taken too long and eventually turned out to be very expensive.

Forest Admin came out as the ideal solution, enabling them to both deploy the platform very rapidly on their own infrastructure and at a fraction of the cost of in-house development.

Deploying FA took them less than a month from start to finish!

Granting access to external partners to submit challenges

The team at BTC Inc. decided to launch Carrot, a rewards platform where users can earn bitcoin simply by supporting the brands and creators they love. Creators of all sorts (writers, podcasters, open-source collectives...) can publish challenges to be carried out by their audiences and offer bitcoin for their completion.

One use case that proved to be critical for the Carrot team was uploading and reviewing the bounties sent by creators. They needed serious internal tooling to launch this app rapidly and in a cost-effective manner and decided to rely on Forest Admin for some parts.

For this to happen, external partners had to be granted access to Forest Admin to submit challenges with little help or no support. Leveraging Forest Admin's team-based permissions, Carrot restricted their access to a user-friendly form where it was possible to write a description, set the reward size and upload a few images.

Once submitted, the challenges are reviewed by the Carrot Operations team and the approved ones become visible to all users on the platform. In total, the deployment of FA on this use case took them 2 days in total!

You can learn more about the way Carrot uses Forest Admin in this case study.

Deployment of an Order Management System across 50+ physical stores

Ace & Tate is an established direct-to-consumer (D2C) eyewear brand from Amsterdam which diversified itself by launching brick and mortar shops around Europe.

While shifting from a digitally native business to physical stores, they had to overcome the challenge of providing their stores with the best layer of operational data reflecting their real-time inventory and retailers orders statuses (also know as Order Management System - OMS).

They initially relied on Netsuite, an Oracle ERP, which they eventually ditched to switch to a homemade solution. Developing the tool themselves quickly proved not to be the best use of their technical resources, so they started looking for a solution that would do all the heavy lifting expected from a SaaS while offering the flexibility of a homemade admin panel.

After an extensive mapping of their needs through a pilot phase, it became obvious that having a fully integrated platform for both the operational teams located in the headquarters as well as their physical stores would be way more effective. They thus decided to deploy Forest Admin to manage both their e-commerce website as well as empower their store managers with the same operational tool. They did so using our granular permissions levels and powerful data segregation system.

In total, the deployment of FA took them 2 weeks - the duration of our onboarding program.

Those 3 use cases are just examples for you to better project yourself in the way you could use Forest Admin for your external partners. There are still millions of other use cases for us to discover and we'd love to hear more about them! So if you have a use case in mind you'd like to discuss with us, just send us a message!