Blue Business Media is the organizer of CEE Retail Summit events in several Eastern European Countries. LS Retail plans to participate in several of them. First in the line was Poland, 25 - 26 March. We were there together with IT.integro - our successful local partner.

The event was organized as a congress – with participants not only directly from within retail but also companies closely connected to retail, logistics specialists, human resources, accounting and so on.

This was the first time for LS Retail and IT.integro together to participate at such an event and we all were positively surprised. It was very well organized, sessions were diverse and interesting, panel discussions were interesting and visitors were top executives from many Poland retail companies.

         

Sales Manager, Sveinn Aki Ludviksson presented our LS Retail solution and the company – on one of the official plenary sessions and the LS Retail had many visitors. IT.integro prepared a presentation of localized solution (POS and fiscal printer running there) as well as projected presentation. On the first night IT.integro hosted a dinner with existing and potential customers and we had good discussions and good time.

Among topics covered at the event were: globalization, economic perspective, multiformat strategies of retail trade, Euro zone challenges, organizational model as the key success factor in retail, cooperation strategies for chain stores and suppliers, wholesale model in future years, demand forecasting and effective stock management, IT support, outsourcing , and E-commerce.

We heard many interesting ideas connected with retail. Retailers are facing constant crises and so this latest one is just one of many. Competition creates alertness for better and better possibilities to offer unique services and goods to consumers. Private labels, e-commerce and outsourcing were presented as latest trends – together with social networking. There are huge potentials – but as mentioned by one of the speakers - we all must not forget the basics in retail: retailers are serving customers, so things like parking place with simple instructions, good lightning, friendly personnel, well planned assortment, easy and simple processes, total look of the store etc ... are still very important. And here we come to important role of IT and software – by covering all the retailer needs we enable them to focus on what they do best: serve the customer.