Hawkins Strategic and OTT to Develop Online Retail Education Series

Online Training Technologies (OTT), a Valley Forge, Pa.-based provider of online education for compliance and job skills development, licensed proprietary content from Hawkins Strategic – a retail technology consultancy owned by Green Hills CEO Gary Hawkins – to develop as a retailer education tool.

The license agreement will enable Syracuse, N.Y.-based Hawkins Strategic to deliver its methodologies and best practices to a global market in a scalable form. Hawkins Strategic helped launch one of the first retail loyalty programs in the US. In 1993, and has specialized in helping retailers and brand manufacturers understand how to focus the entire retail supply chain on the shopper.

"We wanted to offer our best practices and learnings to a large audience, and OTT is a market leader in online training," said Hawkins. "As Hawkins Strategic continues to innovate around Retail 3.0, OTT will play a crucial role in promulgating our research to the retail industry."

Hawkins Strategic and OTT will develop online learning programs to help educate the industry on customer loyalty economics, the proper use of shopper data across the supply chain, and the basics of running a retail operation. Individual courses will be geared towards executive management and line employees at retail, wholesale, manufacturing, and technology firms. The principle of making the shopper the focus of the entire retail supply chain will be consistent throughout all courses, and is of primary importance to virtually all businesses.

The initial series of courses are scheduled for October release.

Green Hills is a community-based independent in Syracuse N.Y. that is also host to the Center for Advanced Retail Technology, a retail technology lab in a live store setting.