Together with Episerver, Mirabeau will once again be guiding the expert group’s program and facilitate the conversation about today’s challenges and questions in its capacity as chairman. Over the course of five meetings every expert group works its way towards writing a whitepaper.

Down below, Martin Miedema will share his opinion on his participation in last year’s expert group and elaborate on his hopes & expectations for this year’s edition.

 

“Participation in the expert group is not without restrictions. The expert’s level of competence is high and everyone expects of one another to exchange each other’s knowledge and experiences to get to a useful result. The members of the expert group work for very different companies, but the core principles for an online strategy are the same. You always pick up things from others. I noticed an environment in which I could easily and comfortably share my experiences with the successful implementation of e-commerce. The expert group’s level of professionalism was the main reason for me to resume my participation this year.”

What do you expect of the new expert group ‘B2B Experience’?

“Makro is currently working on a new business model so that it can better play into market changes as well as ensure a good customer experience over the entire supply chain. Makro itself is also part of an evolving chain —which presents opportunity as much as it can pose a threat. The essence is knowing where we stand ourselves, so that we may know how to adjust as a company.

What’s paramount is that your company should be flexible enough to move with market changes, in order to be able to keep meeting the chain’s demands. For example, in this way Makro has been managing its own supplies for years. We’re considering however, to move to a drop shipment construction whereby we would deliver our supplies straight from our assortments partner to the customer. The big advantage here would be cutting out the middleman, allowing us to focus on the customer more easily and in the process, maintain the Makro experience.

Our front office will change as well by, for example, offering articles through marketplaces like the platforms of Bol.com and Amazon, who have a lot of visitors.” 

What do you expect from the ‘B2B experience’ expert group’s composition?

“Already, many companies from different industries and types of organizations have enlisted in the expert group, like: Bunzl Verpakkingen, Decathlon, ERIKS, ABS All Brake Systems, Rexel, Staples and Royal Brinkman. The diversity offers advantages! With people from the same type of company, you tend to be able to find solutions to your problems more quickly, but at the same time there’s a far greater chance you produce interesting and novel ideas when thinking from the perspective of a different company type.”