By: Carol Abel, Vice President, Education Program Development, FMI

Today’s supermarkets are not your parents’ grocery stores. They have evolved to incorporate sweeping technological advancements that enhance customer service, inventory maintenance, checkout efficiency and financial recordkeeping and transactions. The latter activity is most critical to a food company’s success, as healthy finances provide the lifeblood for successful businesses. Fortunately, much has improved since the days of old, and today, we find ourselves at the threshold of a new, forward-thinking era in the finance and internal auditing space. We call this era Retail 4.0.

Retail 4.0 is the Age of Metamorphosis, a fundamental restructuring of how retailers operate, go to market, and create value as the industry experiences change and disruption unlike any time before. Like the simple caterpillar giving way to the complex butterfly, retail is undergoing a metamorphosis, the DNA of traditional retail is becoming digitized and mixed with accelerating and converging technologies. The digital transformation of retail will be breathtaking in its scale, scope, and speed — are you ready?

If so, we invite you to join us at FMI’s Financial Executive & Internal Auditing (FEIA) Conference from April May 1-3 in Tampa Bay, FL. This exciting event will promote important conversations and thinking around some of the biggest topics facing financial executives and internal auditors in the food retail industry. Kicking off the FEIA Conference will be Gary Hawkins, CEO of the Center for Advancing Retail & Technology, LLC, who will deliver the opening keynote speech on what’s in store for Retail 4.0. He will identify the drivers behind the explosive growth of new innovation; provide insight on how business strategy, retail competition, and value creation are transforming as retail industry digitalization accelerates; and justify the imperative for food retailers to invest early in disruptive innovation to create an innovation flywheel. Attendees are encouraged to think deeply about change and disruption, which is leading to a restructuring of how retailers operate.

Place yourself firmly at the forefront of a new era in food industry finance and auditing. Register for the 2022 Financial Executive and Internal Auditing Conference today. Also, check out the full event schedule.