SQEP Phase 2 and 3

[00:00:00] Danielle: Today we are going to be going over the second and third phase of Walmart's Supplier Quality Excellence Program, or what we call SQEP. Before we start, we always like to introduce ourselves. My name is Danielle Gloy, I will be monitoring the chat today, and then leading our content is Peter Spaulding. 
 

Our job is to research and write about topics that are helpful and insightful for suppliers like you, which if this is your first time joining one of our webinars, we are part of SupplierWiki, which is like the educational arm of SupplyPike. So we help create free educational resources like these webinars. 
 

We have multiple ebooks that cover content across different retailers. We do a variety of articles. We also address a lot of retailer updates and news in our Vanderbilt newsletter. So if you want to stay in the loop, you can sign up for our newsletter on our website. Our goal is to make content that is going to be the most beneficial to you and that is ultimately going to set you up for success. 
 

So if there's any content that you maybe want to see more of, please feel free to reach out to us so that we can help create that for you. So moving on to the agenda, we have a lot to cover in these 30 minutes. So we're going to start off the content portion by doing a brief overview of the SQEP program. 
 

We will do a deep dive into the second and third phases, third phase of SQEP. So this is where we'll be going over barcode and labeling compliance and packaging pallet and load compliance. Then we'll move into a more action oriented section where we will break down the steps that can be taken to dispute SQEP finds in high radius. 
 

And finally, we will be opening the floor for some Q& A time with Peter and myself at the end. and we'll wrap up the webinar with a product preview of SupplyPike for Walmart. So we have a lot of good content to cover today. Alright, so here are a few FAQs that we typically get during webinars. So first being, will we be getting a copy of this slide deck? 
 

Yes, absolutely. You can expect to see the PDF version of this slide deck, as well as the recording of this webinar appear in your email inbox in about three to four business days. If you ever want to find another webinar that you maybe weren't able to attend, or if maybe the email got lost, please contact me. 
 

Among your other emails, you can go to our website where you will find the recordings there, as well as the PDF version of the slide decks. They are always accessible to you. And the second question that we typically get is, what is the best way to ask a question? So at the bottom of your screen, you'll see a Q& A tab that has two little speech bubbles. 
 

And this is where we ask you to please submit any questions. Any questions related to the content as I'll be able to monitor them and then tee them up for Peter for the Q& A time at the end. And so last little thing before we get into today's content, SupplyPike is a platform designed to help suppliers get paid and get better. 
 

So we do this with a software that identifies, recovers, and prevents deductions and compliance issues. We do this in a lot of different ways with multiple different retailers, like Amazon, Target, Home Depot, Kroger, CVS, and Walmart. some things we cover at Walmart include AP deductions, OTIF, SQEP, Overages. 
 

So anything that could be impacting your bottom line, we have built these tools to help target and resolve those revenue loss issues. And just a little shout out, we work with a lot of great suppliers. We have some of them up here on the slide today. And if you aren't currently working with us, we would love to see your brand's logo up here in the future. 
 

And with that, I will hand it over to Peter to get in today's content.  
 

[00:04:01] Peter: Thank you, Danielle. Yes, as Danielle mentioned, we're on half an hour today instead of a full hour. So I'm going to, I'm going to have to be moving at a much faster pace. I normally talk too much for the regular hour, so this will be pretty interesting. 
 

but yeah, hopefully we'll have enough time at the end for our product preview. If we go over a little bit, of course, feel free to jump off if you need to. but. Definitely try to get your questions in early if you have them. the Q& A time officially is supposed to start at 1120. if, if you have any questions that are percolating right now, maybe just start thinking in that direction, we can get going. 
 

But this first part, I'm going to, I'm going to fly through because I hope most of you are familiar with SQEP or S Q E P, at least on a kind of like a basic level. but yeah, this is a, this is a. more or less kind of post COVID initiative of Walmart's, on Walmart's, side of trying to basically just improve compliance and improve supply chains, to be as efficient as possible, have this zero based mindset. 
 

and it was broken down into a number of different component parts, with scheduling and transportation as the kind of still not yet there piece. that is likely to be released in the next. I think from right about now, that's what we've heard. But still, we've been hearing that for years. 
 

we've been hearing it since, 2021. So there's no real kind of guarantee. And we also have very little, idea of what that would actually be. If that has more to do with ship points and, collect shipping or something like that. all of that kind of remains to be seen. stay tuned for Phase 4. 
 

That one hasn't come out yet. But basically, we're looking at, the first, three phases are all live and running. And there are defect finds in place for those, already. there's some really high level stuff, we want to call out, early on talking about SQEP. There are Three really important, apps for getting, for avoiding SQEP finds, for having a really good kind of performance scorecard. 
 

The first one is the big one that everyone's familiar with, the SQEP scorecard. That's really for tracking compliance and reporting on SQEP performance over time. Fix it, is another big one. This, graphic doesn't really do a, great job of differentiating these, but SQEP and Fixit, the SQEP scorecard and Fixit are both retail link apps. 
 

High Radius is not a retail link app. It is a separate software company that Walmart has, brought on to do their, Disputing side of SQEP. So if you're going to make a dispute, you're going to do that in high radius. It's a third party app. You can get access to it through your RetailLink admin administrator, but it isn't in the app section on RetailLink, whereas the SQEP scorecard, just like the OTIF, And Fixit, those are all in RetailLink. 
 

Fixit is a more granular thing. I don't think we'll be getting in too much detail about Fixit today, which is a shame because it is very important for Phases 2 and 3 compliance. But, yeah, it's a, it's, that's where you can really see the actual images that are uploaded of the instances of non compliance. 
 

It's very important for doing any kind of actual disputing with SQEP. We see a lot of people. have limited success with disputing SQEP fines. Where we have seen people make success happen with disputing SQEP fines is whenever there's an image and whenever there's proof in the image that what's being pictured is not what is actually being described in the fine itself. 
 

That's what Fixit is really important for. If you're going to have success disputing SQEP fines, generally speaking, it'll be because the evidence is there in the photographs. if you're not familiar with these apps, definitely familiarize yourself with them, check them out. Fixit is the more granular, detailed level. 
 

SQEP is a very high level, company wide or six or nine digit level performance on SQEP. SQEP, and then HighRadius is where you'll go to look at the finds themselves and to dispute them if that's what you're going to do. that's all that. FixItPortal, I've touched on this a little bit. This is, from Walmart's perspective, this is where they're looking for corrective action. 
 

And this is what compliance is all about. This is what the SQEP, program is all about. How can we avoid problems like this from happening again in the future? It's going to, it's going to, it's going to have to happen on that granular individual level. clicking an individual ticket will give you access to the photos taken at the DC that pertain to the particular error. 
 

Also, we don't recommend using FixIt as a dispute portal because it's not for that. But we have seen some fines get removed. through that chat feature and fix it. I'm not sure if we, if I get into this in greater detail later on. yeah, so I'll just mention this now. In the individual tickets, There's a little chat box. 
 

Now this is not a chat box. You're not going to get more than one response. You can ask one really solid and specific question about that particular find, about that particular instance of a lack of compliance or a compliance error. And that question you will probably have answered. So carefully wording that question is really important. 
 

If you ask a follow up question later on, they're unlikely to respond. but what we have seen is if there's a picture and you're saying the pallets look fine in this, I got a, I got fine for pallet compliance. What's going on there? If it's a specific enough question, if it's direct enough, sometimes what will happen is the whole ticket will be erased and the fine won't actually go through at the end of the month. 
 

that we've seen happen before, it's a very interesting, it's very different from a regular AP deduction. And that's going to be a big kind of thing. message that I have for this webinar is just that we need to think about compliance as different from your regular, your standard AP deduction. 
 

AP deductions are a, there's a whole world of disputing that happens there. Disputing is such a big part of the AP deductions kind of space. In SQEP and in OTIF, especially at Walmart, You're much more likely to have success if you can avoid the finds altogether, and this is one of the ways that we can do that. 
 

If you, if we can actually, if we can actually make the find go away at the fix it level through the chat box, but it's tricky. Doesn't always happen that way. Here's a little bit of the dashboard, what it looks like. You see all that awaiting corrective action. Most of the time, what fix it is used for is not the disputing. 
 

It's not that chat box function so much as it is. what actually went wrong here? Is this something that We need to talk with our 3PLs about, is this something that we need to work on our end? Do we need to update XYZ barcodes or whatever? but the language that Walmart will use, and again, Walmart isn't, they're not twisting their mustaches necessarily, but the language that they're using is that there's a problem with what you did and we're awaiting your corrective action. 
 

but some of the times, again, they are really just pointing out that What is a receiving error or something like that? So it's about trying to tow that line, of course, like anything else in, in business, especially in the retail industry. It's about trying to, how can I communicate that there was a receiving error in the best way so that we can avoid it in the future? 
 

So basically like turning corrective action back on Walmart to an extent, or is there something, is there a problem with our supply chain at this point? some point in this issue? Is there a problem with our policies? Is there a problem with our 3PLs? Are we seeing patterns in any of that? and then how can we, narrow it down enough to fix particular issues? 
 

And then once you get to a certain level of, fluency, in your supply chain, Then those individual problems become much easier to fix or address or just eat. I think that the zero based mindset that Walmart is talking about doesn't take into consideration that we live in the world and that there are just problems that happen that are unavoidable sometimes. 
 

So is this an instance of an individual human error or a, just an act of God, an act of nature that this DC is not receiving properly because there was a storm or something like that, right? So at what point do we just need to eat a fine? At what point does Walmart need to eat a fine and not, a fine exactly, but eat their profits, right? 
 

So what are these, how are these avoidable? How are they not? Breaking it down in terms of that and having a very, efficient and, fluid supply chain just makes it easier to be able to tell are these patterns or these just one offs. So yeah, all that. I know I'm preaching to the choir, but Fixit, again, it's most important for phases two and three. What you're looking at is these, the actual kind of physical process of compliance. That's what phases two and three are. We're looking at barcode and labeling. We're looking at palette stuff, all of that, right? We're not talking about the ASNs. 
 

We're not talking about PO compliance. That's what phase one is. And, we're not talking about like scheduling and stuff like that, which is presumably what phase four will be all about. This is a lot of, Walmart's, language for describing what Phase 2 actually is. What it comes down to is your, supply chain, compliance. 
 

I'm trying to think of the name of the document. It's escaped me. Your, secondary packaging guide supply chain. the supply chain portion of the secondary packaging guide. That's what this is all about. Of course, familiarize yourself with that and it'll have much more detailed granular instructions for how to deal with this stuff. 
 

But again, it's, it depends on who you are. It depends on what your problems are. You're probably not on the logistic side of things, or maybe you are. I don't want to, I don't want to assume anything. but from a financial perspective, it really is important to understand the logistical side of things too. 
 

And a big part of what we're trying to do just with SupplierWiki generally, is to help these, different teams speak the same language, right? The, finance team, the sales team, the supply chain team, the logistics 3PL or whoever, right? All of these people, if they're all speaking the same language, it can be really helpful. 
 

So looking at Walmart's language is helpful for, unifying that whole front. but yeah, phase two, we're looking at labeling and we're looking at barcode compliance. This is all about making it as easy as possible for the, for the receiving teams at Walmart to, scan the labels and scan the barcodes. 
 

And, we'll be spending a lot of time talking about, again, the financial side of this, right? So what do these fines actually look like? basically things are automated or they're inspected. And, the future is automated, right? For everything. But especially for DCs, especially for receiving. 
 

Walmart, because it's so massive, has had a hard time being able to, being able to automate everything. but that's definitely the change that is on the horizon. And this is the big takeaway from this whole section that I want to, that I want to look at. And this goes for phase three as well. The automation looks cheaper. 
 

The automated finds do not look as expensive, right? Because you don't have to pay that big 200 admin fee. what we've seen in the data is that the more automated things are, the more fines people are receiving. Now that might be just a learning curve and eventually the supply chains will adapt to the automated receiving and be able to give them exactly what they want in a much more efficient way. 
 

But what we're seeing is right now in this period of transition, as things become more automated at the DC level, the fines are. are stacking up. So again, the admin fee, we want to get rid of inspection. We want things to be automated. We want things to be more efficient, but at the same time, in the short term, it might be a big, it might be a big pain. 
 

It might be a big, pill to swallow, right? So that's what inspection and automation really is. So here's our inspection example. of course things are measured in defects per million and you can see all of that in the SQEP dashboard too. So if 12 cases were inspected, and there are three defects, you're looking at a defects per million score of 250, 000, because it's a quarter of, everything that is actually, a defect, right? 
 

So simple math example there, you're 75 percent compliant. Now, what you do is you have, in order to calculate that, you have to add on the flat 200 inspection fee for every defect. You have to add that to the cases that are impacted, and then your fine there is going to be 203. Now again, it looks like the majority of this fine is really coming from that inspection fee, and it is in this particular example, but the inspection fees are not as costly as the automation is because there's just such a tiny amount of cases that are actually inspected relative to the whole, right? 
 

or at least that's what we're seeing, is that when things become more it can catch more instances of non compliance. Now, with automation, Walmart should be more accurate in their receiving, right? That's the whole point. If the automation is not accurate in their receiving, it should also be flagged really quickly. 
 

But the question is, who's going to be holding them accountable? It might have to be the suppliers. The suppliers might have to be the ones who are saying, These are actually, legit. but of course all of that depends on education. Okay. In this case, there's 200 cases that are, received two items with a hundred cases each. 
 

And there were a hundred defects. So you're looking at a 50 percent compliance rate and there's no, flat fee for the automation. You're getting a hundred dollar fine there because half of them are inaccurate. In that example, it's a cheaper one, but. But the point that I personally would like to make is that automation is not cheaper, at least not in the short term. 
 

All right. In phase three, we're looking at packaging, pallet and load compliance, right? So all of this stuff is like a one off, if you're getting a ton of these fines, there is actually supplier action that can be made that can fix it for the most part, unless there's a repeated issue that's happening at a particular DC or something like that. 
 

all of these sections in the Secondary Packaging Guide, I keep forgetting, are pretty clear about what they're looking for with this. One thing to call out is just that you're going to make sure that you want to have the most recent, the most updated version of the Secondary Packaging Guide, because those change every year. 
 

The last one, I think, came out in January or February. And, yeah, there were some changes that were made. And of course, there are changes that are being made all the time as things become more automated. palette compliance example, the, this is an inspection example as well. You're looking at, 66 percent compliance there if there are three defects on nine palettes, right? 
 

You're only a third of the way there. the, this, but, this calculation is, somewhat different. A charge is multiplied by the number of POs that are affected, right? So there's, a 200 fine that's on that level, and then there's a different charge that is multiplied by the number of pallets affected, so the fine that you're looking at there is, 200. 
 

is based on POs and palettes. So the individual things and then the orders is how you're looking at that. We're going to fly through disputing in high radius here so that we can make sure that we have enough, enough time for questions. Make sure to get your questions in too, early if you can. 
 

So there's a number of things that you're looking for. Obviously it depends on the situation, right? But here's some things that you're basically going to be seeing is like most of the time when you're disputing phase two and three, fines and high radius, here's what you're going to need. You're going to need the PO number, the item number, the defect type, the DC number, and the number of impacted cases. 
 

There's a number of other things that you might need depending on how specific the issue is. I was calling out the images in Fixit. Sometimes images in Fixit are helpful at the dispute point. if you're including the, item number, the PO number, all of this information, and then you're also including some of the images from Fixit, it can help, it's just your single source of truth. 
 

Everything is all there, right? So that's what's, that's what this slide is all about. Disputing packaging related fines. Sometimes. Maybe the wrong image is attached to it, right? It's all people are doing this process and people make mistakes. Maybe there's a wrong image. Maybe there was a miscommunication about what particular issue there was with this shipment, right? 
 

And that's visible in the images. Sometimes the images, because they're just very low quality, are completely unhelpful. And in those instances, It's like the rug is taken out from under you. You can really, you can really, you have to take Walmart at their word because there isn't an actual, legitimate sort of thing going on there. 
 

In that case, what do you do how do you actually communicate about it? it might make sense to take that question to the chat bot and fix it to say, I can't tell if these, if this fine is legit or not based off of these images, right? So I'm going to dispute it or something like that, right? 
 

I'm not sure what that relationship is like for you guys, how, you would want to do that, how you'd want to handle that. Is that something you want to handle with your buyer or do you want to try to do it and fix it or irradius, right? So there's a lot of different levels and layers to it, but the images can be helpful for this as well, too. 
 

you can dispute open and you can dispute closed bills as well as a little call out. We don't want people thinking that closed bills can't be disputed. this is just, bills that have been paid off or matched with the transactions or not, right? So those are open bills and, after matching, they're marked as closed, but they can both be disputed there. 
 

So select the charts that you would like to dispute by clicking the box and you can, you can select a lot of them. Say there's an, say there's an instance of a, a bunch of fines accidentally get sent out, but they were all, it was all just a particular DC got hit with bad weather or something like that, right? 
 

You're going to want to select all of those and dispute them all together because there's a single, there's a single issue that's, going on there. DisputeReason, AmountToBeDisputed, and Comments, these are all really important. The DisputeReason is essential and the AmountToBeDisputed is essential as well. 
 

Comments are more than, more likely than not going to be essential. And then attachments, I, again, we always recommend. It's a good idea just to have all of that, in there in the same place. But again, this is a much more manual process than APDP is. It's a much more, it's a much more manual process of actually reviewing. 
 

these disputes as well. yes, I think making it succinct and making it simple, straightforward is the best way to do that because someone is just going through a lot of these. thinking about it in those terms. Of course, you can save these for later and you can submit them as well and then you can follow up under the disputes tab. 
 

Very just kind of high level way of looking at it. and of organizing all of that, that I hope is a little bit helpful for those of you who are less familiar with High Radius, but yeah, it's a standard dashboard and you would go about it that way. Those are some, regular kind of speed bumps that people experience. 
 

we always like to call out that, these things are connected, right? The SQEP team, the OTIF team, the, AP deductions teams at Walmart. These are all separate from each other and they function separately, but that doesn't mean that these things are not. are not intimately connected in terms of the supply chain. 
 

A particular error, receiving or delivering, we can, think of it as potentially having a lot of different consequences and adding up, right? yeah, all of that is just to say a shortage can be connected to an overage and vice versa. so those should be, those should always be thought about in tandem where possible. 
 

Again, it helps if you have somebody like SupplyPike that can do some of that work for you, but all of that is, it's a, it can become really costly in the long run. And when it comes to compliance, again, it's about Walmart's language isn't completely unhelpful. It does help to think of this in terms of what are the corrective actions that we can make to stop the bleeding at this particular point. 
 

But it looks like we have some questions. Danielle, what do you got for us?  
 

[00:26:38] Danielle: thank you for going through all of that content, Peter. The first question that I have for you today is from Jess. Jess says, hello, inspection and automation in phase two. Are we already receiving both? I know that we receive a lot of inspection type charges. 
 

Will we move to automation only, or is that already happening?  
 

[00:26:59] Peter: Yeah, I think that you'll know whenever it happens. I, what I can speak to is that I know of a lot of suppliers who are also only getting inspection, fees. And I think that. Automation is on the horizon, like it will happen at some point. I imagine that it might be a little bit more of a sea change that is abrupt. 
 

Just, knowing Walmart and how these things happen. I would say it's more something that we want to just be talking about in our teams and, preparing people for that. This all might change a little bit in the future, but I do know of a lot of other people who are only getting those inspection related fines. 
 

so I would just say, yeah, it's something to be cognizant of, but I will also say that SQEP, Walmart was pushing SQEP really hard the last couple, or a couple of years ago, and there's been a noted, slowing down, I will say. We can, infer that phase four, taking, two, three years to actually finish getting developed. 
 

to me, my, the inference that I make of that on Walmart side is that it's not their priority right now. They're moving on to other things, right? So there's still a SQEP team. There's still people who are going through this whole process. But, maybe the perception is just that SQEP is adding insult to injury for, for suppliers. 
 

And maybe what we want to do is to prioritize, what we're doing. reporting, something like that. let's just move all of our energy over to Luminate to try to make sure that we have more accurate reporting or something like that. but my belief is that automation is still on the horizon, but you're not the only one who hasn't received those yet. 
 

But I would, so my understanding is you see whenever it's an inspection related fine, whenever it's an automated fine, I don't know if they're advertising that on the, on the ticket itself or if what they're saying is, just like that it wasn't inspected. so I would just keep an eye out for that. 
 

[00:29:07] Danielle: Thanks for that question, Jess. the next one that we have is more shipping related. We are moving to collect. Will Walmart then be responsible for their pallets conditions? 
 

[00:29:26] Peter: that's a great question. Yeah, I, I would assume that you are completely not. involved with that. if Walmart doesn't give itself SQEP fines. So that is, a part of it. What we're looking at when we're looking at the, the more detailed packaging stuff, it's just the stuff that you're producing. 
 

This, I've never heard of this happening, but if you are receiving fines for collect shipments for pallet, Compliance, then I would dispute those under that banner of, this is collect, so these aren't our palettes. I haven't seen that, I haven't heard of it as an issue, but that doesn't mean that it, that doesn't mean that it wouldn't happen. 
 

and I would imagine if it is going to happen, it, would probably happen during that transition period. So I think that's a really great shout out too, but it's not something that I've heard of. If other people have experienced that. are you getting these compliance fines for collect shipments? 
 

But with, SQEP, it's, phases two and three are, much more kind of relevant for prepaid shippers generally. if you're shipping collect, you can still get hit with phase two and three fines, but for pallets, unless they're your pallets that Walmart is using, yeah, I don't know. 
 

Maybe that's something. sorry, Rosanne has just mentioned, We are a collect customer. So just shipping, collect, and receiving pallet condition fines. yeah, definitely, I'd look into that. Okay, Jeanette is also getting them too. our company is collect. We are fined for pallets. We put the orders on the pallets. 
 

If a pallet is used and is poor quality, then we are fined. Yeah, it would just be about making sure that You're aware of the sourcing for those pallets. If you're ShippingCollect and, you're not doing the pallets, then that would be something that's disputable, But I think the consensus is that when you move to ShippingCollect, they are still your pallets. 
 

And so Walmart will still be sending out fines for that. That would be my, that would be my kind of best guess for that. We also had another call out earlier here, Jess said in the chat that, they focus on not disputing in high radius, but trying to catch it and fix it. So push back on fix it tickets before they become a fine. 
 

That's what I've heard a lot too, is just that, you're much more likely to get something removed if it hasn't become a fine yet. And one way of thinking about that is just that High Radius, again, is a partner. It's not Walmart themselves. So if they're sending it out to a partner, it just becomes a much more complicated thing. 
 

to tie all that together. but yeah, great. Okay. So a couple of takeaways there at the end, just to reiterate, to make sure we're all on the same page here too. when you're shipping collect, those may still be your pallets, right? you're still going to be palletizing it in your own warehouses, right? 
 

if they're not though, it's going to be really important to be aware of that. so that if you're getting fined for those. you won't, and then of course, fix it, try to nip it in the bud earlier on, and then it'll be easier to avoid.  
 

[00:32:56] Danielle: Thank you, Peter. Thank you everybody for the great questions, and just people in the chat, we really appreciate the insights and the engagements. 
 

in the meantime, I just want to call out some of our resources. If you're looking for more hands on material, we have multiple free educational ebooks, like I mentioned earlier. A great one to go hand in hand with this webinar is that SQEP handbook. We also recently released a new cheat sheet on Walmart departments, categories, and fine lines. 
 

Essentially, it is a resource that breakdown, that breaks down like the item hierarchy at Walmart. So we'll see some information on accounting departments, item subcategories, and fine lines. There is also item analysis with SupplierOne and Luminate in this resource. So I will go ahead and send it in the chat so you can download it if it is something that you are interested in. 
 

And if you would like to contact us, if you think of any questions later on, or you would like to share any more insight, please feel free to reach out to us on our email, or you can find us at supplypike. com. We would love to continue that conversation with you. But this is all we have for our content portion of today's webinar. 
 

We're going to switch it up and move on to our product preview. Where we will go into some of our deduction solutions. So Peter is going to show you some really cool features and just give you a little insight into how we could potentially help you.  
 

[00:34:22] Peter: Yeah. Thanks, Danielle. And thanks everyone in the chat, for, helping us through that. 
 

It's really great. Just, the best way for suppliers to learn is from each other, people who are really boots on the ground and engaging with all these things all the time. yeah. I love to see that. It really warms my heart and I really appreciate it. so today we won't be talking about the SQEP product actually that we have. 
 

We do have a SQEP product. Our demo page is down currently. but we'll be talking about the deductions side of things generally. And there's a lot of similarities here in terms of the dashboard and in terms of the Philosophy of SupplyPike, what SupplyPike is really trying to do with suppliers and to help suppliers. 
 

So I actually want to start out on our deductions page because that could be a little bit, a little bit more helpful. What we have here are our AP deductions, right? So we're looking at These are the, this is the cash that is being withheld, here's the cash amount, and there's a lot of other details in here that can be a little bit disorienting, but going into one of these I think will be helpful for giving a sense of how SupplyPike works, people hear automating deductions, everyone is talking about automating deductions now, most of the time what they mean by that is, we'll pay someone, to go through and do all of that work for you, and it'll be a lot less efficient, a lot more expensive, and yeah, you'll be winning disputes back, but it won't be, it won't be as, as efficient as it could be. 
 

The difference, SupplyPike, what we do is we integrate with RetailLink, And we find all the shipping documents. So we integrate our, we integrate your shipping documents with the actual data that Walmart is saying, the actual information that Walmart is saying, and we find the misalignments there. So what we can do is we can automatically find all of the deductions. 
 

Where we have basically from Walmart and from your own, shipping documents proof that this is not a valid fine. So we can go through it, we can comb through everything right away and just say Alright, there's a hundred things here that you can dispute and the likelihood of winning it back is really high, right? 
 

Or the likelihood of it being invalid is really high, so therefore the likelihood of you winning that money back is really high too. So how do you do that? we just align everything here from the PO to the invoice, received report, BOL, right? If all of these things are aligned and we can scan it right away to try to figure out what it's actually trying to communicate, then we can create a narrative and we can create the root cause analysis there too. 
 

This is likely invalid because the shipped quantity matches the invoice quantity on deducted items, right? It does match up. All this matches up. And you probably, received in full what you thought was short. so that's the, that's just the basic philosophy of the SupplyPike software. 
 

That's how it works. and I like to start with that on the really detailed granular level of an individual deduction, because that's what normally trips people up is how are you actually doing all of these things? we're not really doing anything. The software is just amalgamating, it's bringing everything together and it's creating that single source of truth, that can, then make disputing and winning, invalid deductions back a lot smoother, a lot, less painful. Okay. that's that. Another thing that I want to call out is, another way that we automate these things or that we make them a lot more efficient. 
 

And hands free is we have a auto dispute feature. So what this does is basically you could turn it on for, individual codes. So you want to turn it on for carton shortage, SLC. This is a very common deduction, about 80 percent of all revenue loss comes from shortages. this is because it is very hard to keep up with, retailer demands. 
 

And then let's say, I want to automate it, but I only want to dispute the ones that we're completely sure are invalid. Maybe APDP is overwhelmed and we're thinking, we don't want to give them a lot more disputes than we absolutely need to. Let's just autodispute the invalid ones. we can do that, for 23s, we can do that for 22s as well. 
 

And then we can save those changes here. And then, I can still check SupplyPike. I can still check APDP, when I need to, but a lot of this stuff will start just running itself. automatically. You can save those changes there. You could also, you could also delimit it around a cache minimum or a cache maximum, which makes sense if there's a, if there's a super, if there's a massive shortage deduction, right? 
 

and it's, indicative of a larger issue. that's maybe something that we want to keep on our dashboard, and keep pretty high up, so that we can, monitor it because it might not be. it might not be just a simple shortage deduction. I'm going to speed up here because we're way over time. 
 

but I also love to highlight this. This is very helpful for reporting to higher ups, maybe a CFO. Why are you spending all this money on software? we can look at, here's what we've actually won back through the software. And Here's the return on investment, stuff like that. Very helpful. 
 

You can do root cause analysis based off of deduction codes. What's the individual root cause that's actually, that we're actually looking at? What are our deductions over time? And then, You can look at item number as well. You can, use this information to make a lot of insights and not just for deductions, but for overages, OTIF and, SQEP as well. 
 

So that's all that we really have time for getting into today. If you want to see a more kind of in depth demo, if you want us to plug your data in so that we can show you how much you can win back right away, then, shoot us an email and we can set you up, with that. 
 

[00:40:44] Danielle: That is all that we have for you guys today. Thank you so much. Our next webinar will be short shipping deductions and that will be on the 11th of July. So if you would like to see some more content, we encourage you to go and sign up for that. But with that, we just hope you guys have a wonderful day.

We'll see you next time.