What is Walmart’s Scintilla?
Walmart announced that starting March 1st of 2024 they will be discontinuing the Decision Support System app (DSS) and replacing it with Luminate (later to be rebranded as Scintilla), split into a required unpaid service (Luminate Basic) or an optional paid service (Luminate Charter). Luminate Basic started rolling out to all suppliers October 2023.
After March 1st, suppliers were told that they would no longer be able to view reports in DSS, “historical or otherwise.” Later in 2024, Walmart slowly sunsetted DSS, with the final access removed for suppliers in Q4.
Around the same time, Walmart announced that Luminate would be rebranded as “Scintilla” in early 2025.
DSS and Luminate/Scintilla
Walmart’s Decision Support System (DSS) app in Retail Link was the primary means suppliers had of measuring a wide variety of performance based metrics in Walmart. DSS measured sales (in store and eComm), some aspects of supply chain performance, transportation, replenishment, and performance at item, store, and warehouse levels.
Walmart’s Scintilla measures the same performance metrics but with some significant changes in the way reports are named and pulled.
In the Scintilla Basic training, Walmart explained its decision to make this change. The architecture of DSS was as old as the 90s and was therefore laggy, expensive, and somewhat inaccurate, especially in terms of .com numbers. A major component of the push to Scintilla was to have better tracking across omnichannel.
Walmart has stated that Scintilla will include “a suite of analytic tools that deliver actionable, customer-centric insights to drive better business decisions at Walmart.” The retailer says that “Both options of Walmart Scintilla will allow [suppliers] to unlock meaningful metrics, including enhanced eCommerce data.”
In general, Walmart promises that Scintilla will be helpful for:
- New product launches and line extensions
- Package redesigns
- Seasonal promotions
- Distribution and/or modular changes that also account for “Pickup & Delivery”
Scintilla is meant to work as the future of performance analytics reporting for suppliers (Basic) while offering bonus insight into eComm and shopper behavior (Charter). Some suppliers are worried, however, that they don’t have the data-pulling and report-building freedom in Scintilla that was available in DSS or the assurance that Scintilla Charter will be worth the investment.
DSS, Scintilla Basic, and Scintilla Charter
The central concern around the discontinuation of DSS for most suppliers is that they will be forced into buying Scintilla Charter in order to receive the same level of depth and detail in reporting that they had in DSS.
Walmart Data Ventures recently released a presentation detailing on a more granular level the differences between, not just Scintilla Basic and Charter, but also the differences that those programs would have with DSS:
According to this report, the features included in DSS that will not be included in Scintilla Basic are:
- Purchase Orders (PO; available in Retail Link’s NOVA app and Supplier One)
- Report Sharing
- Bot Access
New features included in Scintilla Basic that are not included in DSS are:
- Enhanced eComm Sales
- Email notifications on report completion
In sum, the features that Scintilla Charter adds to the supplier experience are:
- OTIF (On-Time, In-Full: available in the OTIF Scorecard)
- POs
- Net New Data Assets
- Data Preview before Report Creation
- Report Sharing in Custom Attributes and Groups
- Data Feeds & APIs
- Insights
- Shopper Behavior
- Customer Perception
Some of these features—like OTIF and POs—can be found elsewhere in Retail Link, or, at least, the enhanced benefits of viewing these in Scintilla Charter are not fully explained. Other features, like “Insights” and “Shopper Behavior,” appear to have major ROI potential.
If there is no benefit to viewing POs in Scintilla Charter and “Report Sharing” can be worked around, the only real downside for suppliers to the dissolution of DSS would be the loss of bot access to the app, which may mean more manual work for reporting.
Scintilla Basic access will also include “rich media webinars, knowledge articles, and other training resources,” presumably concerning app use. It will also be accessible for Merchants on the Walmart side.
What is the Report Builder App in Scintilla?
For Scintilla users who are not on Charter, the Report Builder app is the main function of Scintilla. Most of the old DSS functionality lives under different names in the Report Builder. Other apps for Charter, like Customer Perception and Shopper Behavior, have new insights that weren’t previously available.
Another key difference between Charter and Basic is which datasets suppliers have access to. The Walmart datasets that are visible in Basic are:
- Store Sales & Inventory
- DC Metrics
- Modular Plan Metrics
- Store Demand Forecast
- Order Forecast
- Store Markup and Markdowns
- eComm Sales
- eComm Inventory
All of the above are available in Charter, but these Walmart datasets are available only in Charter:
- Hourly Store Inventory
- Purchase Order
- Omni Sales
- OMNI OTIF
This image will look different if you are a subscriber to Charter. If subscribed to Charter, the above datasets will be integrated into the regular “Walmart dataset” section.
For more on building your own Custom Datasets, see the “How to Create Custom Datasets” section below.