Create IT implements My Ceetrus Platform

About the Client

Founded in 1976 to support the development of its longstanding partner Auchan, Ceetrus - which was known as Immochan until June 2018 - is now reinventing its commercial sites as well as embarking on new urban projects.

As a developer of community and shopping hubs, Ceetrus contributes to developing the social ties that will bring life to tomorrow's cities by creating smart, sustainable and vibrant places: shops, housing, offices, major urban infrastructures.

In Portugal, the company runs 6 centers: Alegro Alfragide, Alegro Montijo, Alegro Setúbal, Alegro Sintra, Sintra Retail Park, Galeria Comercial Auchan Maia, Cinco District, Galeria Comercial Aucham Famalicão.

The Challenge

With more than 40 years of experience in the market, today Ceetrus is one of the leading real estate companies in the world, present in 12 countries across Europe and Asia. With the company’s Vision 2030, they are aiming to move on to a major urban entity on a global scale, diversifying their activity and truly answering to the territory’s needs.

In Portugal, Ceetrus is present in 11 municipalities, managing over 200 thousand m2 of GLA, distributed by more than 700 stores and kiosks in shopping centres. Its portfolio includes Jumbo Commercial Galleries located in Alverca, Canidelo, Cascais, Famalicão, Maia, Santo Tirso and Sintra; Alegro Shopping Centres in Alfragide, Castelo Branco and Setúbal; Forum Montijo; Forum Sintra and Sintra Retail Park.

In 2016, Ceetrus launched internally the Cortex Project, which aimed to accelerate the digital transformation of the company as a whole and its assets in particular.

This digital focused project, aimed all of the company’s stakeholders, from end customers, to tenants or coworkers.

Portugal was selected to test a B2B platform, as an additional and powerful tool of their management services, focused on the relationship with tenants.The provider chosen to join them was Diggspace.

The Solution

The main goal of the project was to help workers at Ceetrus’ shopping centres to feel like they belong to a community and, at the same time, they wanted to ease their daily tasks thus helping them improve their performance:

Develop a strong sense of community among all shopping centre workers by:
Improve bidirectional communication with store workers by:
Simplify, digitalize and streamline sales declaration process, for tenants and ceetrus teams.

Due to the pressing need of improving agility in their digital transformation strategy, they searched the market for the right partners for this challenge. Ceetrus wanted to find a ready-to-use internal communication portal to enable productivity and promote engagement and sharing between their teams and tenants. But also find a modular solution able to evolve with the business, answer their specific needs and capable to measure results.

“Along this process we came across DiggSpace that was introduced to us by Create IT, a Microsoft Gold Partner. DiggSpace platform revealed to be a natural choice for this project, due to its fast deployment and cloud driven globalization, reinforced by modular and extensive ability to integrate Office 365. The autonomy provided to its users, that rarely require IT support, also played an important part in the process”, explains Carlos Costa, Ceetrus Portugal Property & Leasing Director.

Diggspace was also involved in the early process of designing and implementing the structure that supports communication with shopkeepers, within MY CEETRUS, and participated in the development of modules specific to Ceetrus business, namely the Sales Statements and Authorization Requests.

Diggspace also trained teams at Ceetrus so they are autonomous enough to manage the MY CEETRUS platform. As in all projects, Diggspace managed the entire process, together with Ceetrus, using the agile methodology Scrum.

Ultimately, DiggSpace ticked all the boxes:
adapted to Ceetrus reality
allowing a 100% compliant system with their corporate solution
promoting a more efficient digital structure to their organization

Ceetrus was then able to set the keys for success:
To include relevant features for their tenants on a daily basis, like news, documents, performance tools, and more;
A platform that can scale to their international shopping centres portfolio. As a proof of concept for Ceetrus, they needed a worldwide partner that would allow to use this digital platform in any of the 12 countries where they currently operate;
To be a mobile-friendly platform, so that it’s also available for those who can’t leave their workplace (mainly the store workers) to have access to the tool through a computer;
Collect a database of tenants and keep track of their requests, to use for Analytics & Predictive Data.

Key Figures

+750

users

+14 000

sessions

+600

stores

+80 000

pageviews

What's next?

The Proof-of-Concept phase showed how flexible and solicit DiggSpace is. Having constant new features and new updates clearly was an added value to the platform. Ceetrus relied in the suppleness showed by Diggspace to study and implement solutions adapted to their reality by listening and engaging with their teams. “The continuous support and training makes us confident that our partner is capable to meet our growing needs and adapt this solution”, says Carlos Costa.

Ceetrus roadmap includes scalability to other Ceetrus assets and dissemination to countries where Ceetrus is currently represented. Today the success of a business relies in its capability to innovate, by creating digital experiences and services that truly add value to customers (B2B + B2C). Ceetrus has underlined the need of welcoming tenants as friends by catering and providing solutions to their needs. To achieve this, communication is key.

Therefore, Ceetrus worked alongside with Diggspace to make a convenient and practical solution that enables tenants to reach all the departments of Ceetrus, get access to information in a multi-platform (mobile phone, laptop and tablet), chat message or submit forms. All of this in an effort to upgrade and facilitate our tenants’ everyday work life.

“Bearing the future in mind, Ceetrus is committed to keep exploring DiggSpace’s potential to meet our needs and support our vision of the business for the future”, concludes Carlos Costa.

Being so functional, expandable and scalable, the implementation of a DiggSpace platform, which we named MY CEETRUS, was smooth and quick-passed. Communication content was swiftly provided to stores, as well as business support tools that allowed the dialog to flow between shopping centre management and tenants.

Carlos CostaCeetrus Portugal Property & Leasing Director