15th ICA-AP Regional Workshop held in Singapore
The 15th ICA Asia-Pacific Regional Workshop on “Management of Consumer Co-operatives” was held by ICA-AP Consumer Committee, in Singapore from 2rd-5th of June 2015. NTUC Fairprice (Singapore) hosted the workshop, which was attended by 14 cooperators from, Malaysia, South Korea, Sri Lanka and Vietnam. The objectives of the 4-day training workshop were to promote understanding of socio- economic role of consumer cooperatives, to study the practical use of Social Media and to establish an international network of consumer cooperative leaders and managers.
The program started with welcome address by Seah Kian Peng, CEO, NTUC Fairprice followed by a lecture on the “Overview of National Trades Union Congress” by Ms. Jean Chew, Assistant Director, Corporate Communications, NTUC, and overview of NTUC Fairprice. After that a group discussion was held under the themes “What do you want to learn from the workshop?”, and “What are the strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities of your coop?”
On the second day and third day, participants visited 4 different retail format stores of NTUC Fairprice and received the lecture of “Retail Operation”, “Purchasing, Merchandising & International Trading”, “Supply Chain Management” and the “Practical use of Social Media” with resource persons from NTUC Fair Price respectively. On the fourth day, a group discussion and presentation session on “What they learnt from the workshop” was held followed by a debriefing on the presentation by Ms. Juliana Tan, Training & Development Manager, NTUC Fairprice. The meeting was brought to an end with one participant saying; “It was very good opportunity to consider the management of the consumer co-operative and also could know many different consumer co-ops in Asia Pacific. I could widen my view.”
