The European project BOSS4SME completed the identification of winning practices in the furniture and home interiors e-Commerce and it is identifying the skills needs to enable the "Online Sales Manager" to successfully implement them

Submitted by Juan José Ortega on 20 July 2017

The BOSS4SME project - Boosting Online cross-border Sales for furniture and households SMEs (http://www.boss4sme.com/) is developing a complete program and training contents for the professional profile of the "Online Sales Manager" with a special focus on SMEs of the furniture and home interiors sector - manufacturers and retailers - . This professional needs to acquire those skills and knowledge necessary to carry out e-Commerce winning strategies and practices. Companies with such trained professionals are expected to increase their cross-border sales using Internet as a sales channel.

At the meeting held in partner DANMAR offices in Rzeszów, the 6 consortium partners participated in the meeting and they reviewed the project progress at technical and management level. They dealt as well with other aspects including results dissemination and exploitation and quality assurance.

From a technical point of view, the research carried out by BOSS4SME partners has highlighted the e-Commerce good practices in the furniture and home interiors sector in Europe, which are implemented by leading companies in e-Commerce and with high cross-border traffic of visits in their websites. Based on this information, the project identified the skills and knowledge needed by the "Online Sales Manager" to successfully implement these e-Commerce winning strategies.

Before proceeding with the development of those training contents that will satisfy the knowledge requirements, these needs will be validated through questionnaires submitted to companies from the four partner countries. The training contents will respond to ECVET criteria and will be implemented in an e-learning platform (called e-Commerce Genie) which will deliver adapted training paths to users, according to their existing competences, and their companies features and needs. The project foresees the organization of different events to present, validate and disseminate the results, which will be announced on its website (http://www.boss4sme.com/).

The partners represent four countries: Spain, Greece, Italy and Poland. In addition to CENFIM - Furnishing Cluster and Innovation hub, VET provider and project coordinator, the other project partners are the Spanish furniture business associations AMIC and AMUEBLA, the Greek partner CCS, expert developer of educational software, the Italian partner EUROCREA MERCHANT, expert in training quality assurance, and the Polish partner DANMAR, expert in developing e-learning contents. BOSS4SME is co-financed by the EU Erasmus + Program as a Strategic Partnership for vocational training.

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