The four-day conference kicked off Sunday at the Grand Hyatt in San Antonio with more than 100 companies represented in a turnout that was 8% higher than last year.
"We continue to raise the bar on the whole concept of doing business electronically," Greg Gilkerson, president of the Temple, Texas-based PDI, told CSP Daily News. "The main concerns [image-nocss] are how to manage change in the attendees' respective organizations, PCI [Payment Card Industry mandates] and moving to item-level management with item inventories and business analysis."
Customers attended a variety of two-day classes focused on areas of financials, site automation and reporting from the data warehouse.
New to the conference this year was what the company calls its "PDI Special Interest Groups." The interest groups allow customers with similar issues to come together to discuss and develop best practices to streamline business processes and optimize the use of PDI software. PDI also offered advanced training on several new features, including lottery reconciliation, transaction-based analysis and reporting, and a web-based dealer portal. The conference featured 23 classes taking up 78 hours of class time.
Speaking of the higher attendance rate, Bruce Bates, PDI's vice president of sales, said, "Given all that has happened in the economy during the last 12 months, the turnout this year is an affirmation that our customers find great value in coming together to learn and to share with one another."
At the conference, the company also announced a new, strategic partnership with Gasbuddy.com, Brooklyn Park, Minn., a website that hunts for lower-priced gasoline at the retail level. Gilkerson said the two companies are "committed to highly integrated solutions that generate new customer opportunities throughout the GasBuddy family of websites."
PDI provides software, hardware and professional services to convenience retailers and wholesale-petroleum marketers. Worldwide, more than 300 companies and over 20,000 retail locations use PDI's systems for retail automation, fuel and warehouse management, business intelligence, financial reporting and employee selection and training.
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