Monday, September 19, 2011

Manning Modern Retail Conference Insights

I am now working with a cool new company, Criti Inc, and am very excited with the kind of work I am getting to do here; Business Development, encompassing Lead Generation, Sales, Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Marketing Research, SEO and Analytics!
For a little heads up, Criti is head-quartered in Falls Church Virginia and is a part of the large technology group called Creative Information Technology Incorporated (CITI) USA. CITI has been regarded as a reliable technology partner by US government for the last 14 years with a pedigree of working on mission critical projects spanning across many government departments and over 200 countries.
I attended an RAI organized Manning Modern Retailing (MMR) 2011 on the 13th of September, 2011 along with Rashid Shariff, my HOD. He is a fun guy to be around.

The Focus of the event was to create a platform for retailers, consumer goods manufacturers, logistics service providers and management consultants to deliberate on issues at stake and discover road maps for growing volumes in retail through a collaborative approach to packaging and supply chain integration.
While it was an educative and enriching experience for Criti, the expert opinions of the Key Note Speakers strengthened Criti’s belief that given the high attrition and low levels of education amongst the Retail sectors front end sales staff, an intuitive graphical user interface was the need of the hour.
The Experts also bemoaned the lack of Inventory Management amongst small to medium scale Retailers; an issue which our flagship Retail Business Management suite Spectrum is best suited to handle, especially for the SBO and MBO segment. Another highlighted pain point for the Pharmacy sector was the lack of expiry tracking feature for drugs.
The pain points and salient highlights observed by Rashid and I are listed below:
1.                   High Attrition and low levels of Education amongst Front End Sales Staff.
2.                   Absence of Inventory Management amongst Small to Medium scale Retailers.
3.                   Lack of Expiry Tracking Features for Pharmacy sector.
4.                   Various Courses offered by institutions and a growing trend of building skills rather than providing just education.
5.                   Need to introduce Retail as a vocational subject post 10th grade.
6.                   Building name for the Retail Industry by Telling stories about Indian retailers and its customer service.
7.                   Promoting Retail as a viable career choice for masses thus making way for the future manpower requirement needs.


To know more about Spectrum and its powerful features, please visit www.retail-spectrum.com