CART Introduces Itself with a Successful Retail Conference

25 Apr 18

MISI’s Center for e-Commerce And Retail Transformation (CART) is receiving high praise for its inaugural conference, held on April 11 in Kuala Lumpur.

CART hosted seven highly distinguished individuals, with over a century of collective experience in diverse domains, to explore the impending transformation of the Malaysian retail ecosystem fueled by the rapid growth of e-commerce.

From left : Dr Shardul Phadnis, Szilard Brenner, Emmanuel Coucke, Nurezali Osma, Amy Blair, Shah Ruben, Chris Sultemeier and Zakki Jabbar

The half-day conference was organized into two sessions of two-plus hours each—focused on understanding the pros-and-cons of different retail business models, and learning dos-and-don’ts of transformation to the omnichannel retail environment—that allowed the audience to get detailed, nuanced insights into the retail’s digital transformation.

The speakers ranged from senior executives at the world’s and Malaysia’s largest brick-and-mortar and e-commerce retailers, to founders and CEOs of local start-ups, to a partner at an elite global consulting firm and a senior executing driving Malaysia’s digital transformation. They shared their views in keynote speeches and deliberated those ideas further with other speakers in extensive panel sessions facilitated by CART’s Director, Dr. Shardul Phadnis.

Below is some of the feedback received from the conference participants:

“The conference was really informative, the speakers were concise, relevant and the best in their industries and the venue was perfect. I believe more people could have benefitted from this. With the resource of speakers and connections that MISI has, I trust the conference will take off in a big way, in a short period. I am also quite positive you have achieved your goal in regards to the purpose of the conference.” – Manager at a talent academy

“For speeches the half day format is ideal so we get quality sharing and some interactions via Q&A. If you do a full day, a working session i.e., ideastorming on what can be done to solve specific issues would be an added value.” – Senior VP at an Industry-Government research consortium

“In my opinion, the CART conference set the benchmark for quality conferences about supply chain management in Malaysia. This benchmarking was especially good for MISI because it was able to explicitly convey MISI’s thought leadership and industry outreach.” – Anonymous