Recently we attended the Retail Week Conference at the Hilton London Metropole Hotel in London. The conference proves to be an inspirational meeting of retail minds and the insight gained from both the speakers and the other delegates is invaluable.
In particular we enjoyed hearing from Charlie Mayfield, Chairman at John Lewis Partnership, about understanding how the consumer is viewing the ever changing world of retail; a session on how to encourage brand-loyal multichannel activities from Robin Terrell of House of Fraser with Alan White of the N Brown Group, Vince Russell from The Cloud and Lucy Neville-Rolfe from Tesco; and a fascinating session from Tim Steiner, Chief Executive of Ocado, about how the business makes it as easy as possible for consumers to shop on their various platforms, which included some surprising usage statistics.
Oracle's own Vice President of Retail, Paul Dickson, also held a session with Richard Pennycook, Group Finance Director at Morrisons, about the role of technology in accelerating and supporting the business strategy. Morrisons' 'Evolve' programme takes a litte-and-often approach to updating its technology infrastructure to spread cost and keep the adoption process gentle for staff, and the session explored how the process works and how Oracle's technology underpins the programme to optimise their operations using actionable insight.
We had a quick chat with Paul Dickson at the session to get his thoughts on the programme - the video is below. We also filmed the whole presentation, so keep checking back on this blog if you're interested in seeing it.
