Shaping the Modern Store: Navigating Challenges with Innovation in Retail

Simon is a highly experienced and well-regarded corporate host, moderator, commentator, business editor and narrowcaster. Having been in Singapore nearly 22 years, Simon has hosted hundreds of business events and travelled widely to present addresses, chair industry panels and produce events. Simon has a long history in business editing, covering myriad industry sectors including banking and finance, human resources, healthcare, luxury, retail, power and energy and ESG. He has held roles Group Editor, Managing Editor and General Manager for several business publishers (including now leading client The Charlton Media Group) before establishing his own communications practice Simon Hyett Media (formerly BOTR Communications) well over a decade ago.
 
Simon is a qualified lawyer, professional musician, entrepreneur and father to two fantastic teenage sons. He has been described as having an unhealthy relationship with world flags, geography and in particular, nation shapes. He is passionate about fairness, justice, corporate accountability, and humanity in business. Simon has sat on the Board of the Media and Publishers’ Association of Singapore, was the longest serving President of his sons’ international school community group and is a boardmember of the Australian Chamber of Commerce SME Committee. Simon is an eternal survivor, loves life, loves people’s stories both personal and in business and conducts all his hosting and moderating in a warm, human, energetic and infectiously positive manner.
 
For testimonials on Simon’s experience and style, please contact him at [email protected].

Darren is a dedicated and experienced IT professional in the industry, currently serving as the Regional Sales Lead of Software Solutions ANZ at Zebra Technologies. For over two years, he has been leading and supporting the Retail Software Solutions sales team to achieve revenue growth goals across their entire software portfolio in Australia and New Zealand.
 
Prior to joining Zebra, Darren spent the majority of his career at Kronos Incorporated, where he held various roles over a span of nearly 20 years. As a Strategic Account Manager based in Hong Kong and covering South East Asia, Japan and Korea, he used his experience to help clients maximize the value from their investment in the Kronos Workforce Management Suite. Earlier in his career at Kronos, Darren also served as a Senior Business Analyst and an Application Consultant in the same company.
 
Darren has a Bachelor's degree in Business Accounting from the Monash University.

Robert is an accomplished business executive, with 20+ years of global experience in 
retail operations, project management, corporate strategy, supply chain  functions, and manufacturing.

A proven history of delivering superior  financial results and increasing profit via strong leadership and execution of change and efficiency projects. Robert is passionate about optimizing processes and linking change initiatives to the employees, customers and the business’ bottom line.

Josh is a retail technology expert in unified communications and has been instrumental in pioneering the voice service for Woolworths Group over the last 7 years. This is coupled with his experience as a network integrator with Dimension Data in service management, delivering to Woolworths Group over the last 15 years.

Currently as a Product Owner, Josh leads major engineering transformations of the voice ecosystem through strategic, foundational, and leading innovation initiatives for the group. This includes scaling the recent Zebra Workforce Connect’s Voice & Push-to-Talk Softclient’s capability into the trading stores domain which spans over a community of 200,000+ team members on 35,000+ devices in over 1300+ locations nationally. 

This has resulted in a significant uplift to the voice services consumed through the group with a focus on maturing technology themes including, but not limited to, improving metrics related to service, sustainability, simplification, savings & smarts.