Luminate Charter Recipes

[00:00:00] Allie Truong: Here are your writing and history nerds, um, from school. My name is Allie Trong. I lead the research efforts on SupplierWiki. And then leading today's webinar is Peter Spalding. He is our senior SupplierWiki writer. Um, so he's going to lead us through this content. I'm really excited to get into this new webinar we're doing. 
 

Okay, as you can see, we have a packed agenda. Um, we're going to just talk a little bit about in the beginning, um, The differences between BASIC versus Charter, so understanding what features are available versus not, because BASIC is the free version of Luminate and Charter is the paid version. Then we're going to talk about in depth some of the areas in which Charter, uh, differentiates from basic. 
 

So we're going to jump into shopper behavior, into channel performance, into customer perception, and then we will have a Q and A with myself and Peter. And then, um, at the top of the hour, we're going to dive into a product preview on SupplyPike for Walmart. So really at SupplierWiki, we try to keep things a hundred percent educational, educational, but Just for that extra credit, if you want to stick around, um, we'll talk about how SupplyPike, um, helps automate deductions. 
 

All right, I mentioned this a little bit, but if this is your first webinar, welcome. We are SupplierWiki. Our job is to create free educational content for suppliers like you. Today you're on a webinar. We're really excited to have you, but we also create free ebooks. articles, um, and other content like our newsletter to support supplier education. 
 

So engage with us and let us know if there's content that you want to see created and we're happy to put that together. A couple of FAQs that we have on every webinar is will you get a copy of today's slide deck? Absolutely. We are always going to send you a slide deck and a recording to your inbox in about three to four business days. 
 

So But you can also find old recordings of past webinars on YouTube. Um, and you can go and download slide decks on SupplierWiki as well. So check those out if you're looking for some older slide decks. So what's the best way to ask a question today? I am anticipating a couple of questions coming in because illuminated has been a hot button topic. 
 

So if you put those in the Q& A tab, I'm going to be off camera looking at those, um, and we'll prioritize those. But if you drop them in the chat, I'll try to get to those as well. The chat is just best for sharing, you know, your least favorite subject in school, as well as helpful information for other suppliers to understand, um, some of the obstacles or roadblocks that they may have with, with Luminate, um, or other, um, Retailer questions. 
 

So show you those if you just want to kind of educate the rest of the supplier community who's joining us here today. And then on the next slide, we have a little bit about who we are. So we're part of SupplierWiki, which is under SupplyPike. So SupplyPike is a platform that helps suppliers get paid and get better. 
 

It's a software that helps identify, recover, and prevent deductions and compliance issues. And we do that at a lot of different locations. Retailers, um, in, in their different revenue loss areas like deduction or compliance. Um, and we do that with a lot of different supplier partners. So we've got some of them represented here. 
 

Um, but today we're going to talk about Walmart and we're going to talk a little bit about Luminate specifically. But if you have questions about SupplyPike, You can put those in the chat too, and we'll answer those at the end. And then last thing, SupplierWiki is an educational wiki base, and we don't speak authoritatively on the behalf of Walmart. 
 

This is just the research that we have gotten from suppliers like you, as well as engaging with the content that Luminate has released. So we're interpreting this, and if you want to kind of add to that conversation, please feel free to do so. We'd love to kind of share everyone else's perspectives, um, and just educate. 
 

And before I end, I'll add Andrea's least favorite subject in school, and it was trig, um, and I can agree with that, Andrea. So now I'm going to pass it over to Peter, um, for today's content.  
 

[00:04:24] Peter Spaulding: Well, we don't have any math apologists in the chat today, unfortunately. Um, but, uh, it's, it's important. We all need it. 
 

That's why we're here. Maybe that's, maybe this is just a biased sample because everyone's like, I Looking for help with the, uh, with pulling data, um, interpreting data. Uh, okay. Yeah. So we've been talking about Luminate for a long time. We've been, we've been trying to kind of walk alongside a lot of suppliers in this transition from DSS to Luminate. 
 

And today, the main kind of goal that we want to do is to explore the differences between BASIC and Charter to try to give as, uh, as detailed a picture as we can of the benefits of Charter so that you guys can kind of, um, try to make, uh, decisions, uh, for yourselves or, or, um, uh, just get a little bit of a kind of a sneak peek into what Charter is like if you don't have it. 
 

Um, if it's, if it's something that y'all are paying for, um, how can we get the most out of it? which, which of the different apps within Charter are most relevant for your particular team or, or, or what have you. So, um, that's what we'll be talking about today. Another kind of part of the disclaimer that I wanted to mention, um, just as we kind of get underway is that, um, we also don't want to be your kind of like financial advisor on the decision about whether you should, um, commit to Charter or not. 
 

It's something that is really, uh, can only be, um, can only be, um, Decision that can only be made at a very high level within a given kind of CPG company. So we won't be saying, you know, if you're this, this, and this, you should definitely do charter, um, because, um, yeah, it's a little bit outside of the range of our kind of prerogative jurisdiction kind of on this. 
 

Um, but we will be hopefully creating a bunch of, uh, or, uh, providing you with a lot of information to kind of help someone make that decision or to help a team make that decision. Um, so this should be kind of helpful for that. If you guys are already on Charter, it should be helpful for, um, getting the most, um, out of that investment, um, already. 
 

So here, uh, we have the, uh, DSS timeline. Um, originally it was March 1st. I think it's gone now. I think that it was announced that at the end of May, or maybe I'm conflating that with item 360. There's a lot of change that's going on. DSS is well on its way out, so if you haven't transitioned those reports over, look out for one of our earlier DSS Those recordings on YouTube, those might be a little bit helpful for figuring out what that transition is. 
 

But The assumption that I'm going to make, um, and it's always dangerous whenever you assume, but the assumption that I'm going to make is that a lot of you guys are pretty familiar with Luminae already, and you've been interacting with some of this stuff already. So I'll kind of fly through a little bit of this already. 
 

This is, uh, outward facing, supplier facing documentation from Walmart. Um, on what are the differences and what are the, and this is them, uh, basically trying to sell Charter to their suppliers, um, by, by laying out all of the, uh, not in, not in a lot of detail, right? So we're going to go into more detail today, but in a little bit of detail, um, what the benefits of Charter will be, um, what have kind of, you know, What has kind of, um, been, uh, added in with Illuminate basic that wasn't there in DSS. 
 

What has been taken away from DSS that was, or, uh, what, what functions were there in DSS that are being taken away in the basic version of Illuminate. And then, um, uh, how you can get those back in Charter, um, and all that. So, I won't really go into this in too much detail. Um, Ali's already posted the ebook that we did on Luminate that this is all kind of explained in more detail there as well. 
 

So, um, you can read about that a little bit more. You can also find access to this on Luminate, or at least you could back in the day. Um, so definitely kind of, uh, go look for that, um, in there. But today what we're looking at is some of the stuff that's toward the bottom of this graphic. Um, the stuff that was not available in DSS, is not available in Basic Illuminate, and is available in Charter. 
 

What are these new programs? What are they reporting on? Um, and, um, basically, yeah, that's all that we're going to talk about and kind of leave you to Um, make the, uh, make the executive decision about is this something that is actually going to kind of pay out or not? Um, what would be really great, we're looking about, we're, we're looking into having a, a, a Luminate panel, um, of, uh, people who've been in Luminate for a while talking about, um, the benefits of Charter versus not. I think that that would be kind of the best case scenario. Um, uh, because it's hard to tell from Walmart's, um, documentation what exactly, um, the benefit is, if it's something that, that is paying out really high benefit or not. So, uh, yeah, all of that, uh, we're gonna, we're gonna be looking at a little bit into the APIs, which are a pretty cool new feature. 
 

Some of the insights as well. But we'll be getting into that later. Okay. So, DSS features that are not included in Luminate Basics. So, these are the things that basically are going away or moving to a different app. You can see the PO information. Our SupplyPike software used to pull PO information from DSS and we had to switch to Nova, I believe, or SupplierOne. 
 

I'm not sure. It's also available in SupplierOne. All of Nova's functionality is there too. If you guys have questions about SupplierOne, uh, we talk a lot about that on SupplierWiki too. You can look out for that, too. But report sharing was available in DSS, is not available in BASIC, and is available in Charter. 
 

And then bot access, which is kind of a, uh, it's kind of a catch all term. Basically, Walmart doesn't want any automated things happening in Luminaid. So, that's a, Different, different from DSS. A lot of people would, would use bots or would use some kind of software integration with DSS to help do some pulling of reports. 
 

that weren't as manual. So, uh, a part of what's going on there is that Walmart wants you to buy Luminate Charter so that you can have the APIs do that. API is basically bot access just kind of on the back end. Uh, so pretty interesting stuff, but we'll cover all that later. New features and basic that weren't, uh, available in DSS. 
 

So this is, this is the stuff that Walmart is saying, Hey. It's a better feature. It's, it's, or it's a better program. It's a better app than DSS. So here's why you should get excited about it. Well, the enhanced e com sales, Walmart was saying a lot at the beginning was just, Luminate is more accurate. 
 

Luminate is more accurate than DSS, so we need you all to switch over sooner rather than later, etc. Excuse me. Email notifications on report completion. But also, I think it's important to mention, these are kind of specific features. It's important to mention just that DSS was built out in the 90s. It's a really old app, and so Luminate ideally should be less buggy. 
 

It should be a little bit more sleek and modern. But let us know how your experience with that has been. Is that, is it something that you've found to be true? I've heard, I've heard some people who are suppliers who are really big fan of Illuminate. They really like that, uh, it's more modern look. They think that it is a good transition away from DSS. 
 

So let us know, you know, if you, if, if you can look past the, like, the grieving period of DSS, of having to learn a whole new kind of system, and if you can get past some of the frustrations of the reports having different names and different business elements and all of that, what's it been like? Is it something that you've, that you've been, that you've been able to transition to, or what has that transition been like? 
 

We may actually have that in the form of a question on the slide here coming up too, but please, uh, let us know. What that's been like for you as well. So this is the main subject that we'll be covering today. There is a lot of stuff that is available in Charter that is not available in BASIC, uh, or in DSS. 
 

So, but these bottom three that we've bolded, Insights, Shopper, Behavior, and Customer Perception. These are the, this is the language that Walmart is using around describing what the Charter kind of benefits are. Can you look at category? Can you integrate your category data into competitor's data? Stuff like that. 
 

Yes, we'll be looking into that too. The data feeds and APIs is also something that is a feature of Charter that is not available in Luminate Basic. But if you, if you pay for Charter, you'll, you'll also be able to do a lot of stuff in one place. You can look at POs, you can look at OTIF so that you don't need to go into RetailLink for that information. 
 

Maybe that's easier for you. Maybe it's not. Is that something that you're even doing on your team? Or are you just doing more like sales based reports, replenishment stuff? Uh, depends on, depends on the level of insight that. Any one kind of individual person needs to have or the, the, the detailed, the amount of detail in the reports that any individual person in your team needs to have. 
 

So the report sharing is also apparently a lot better in Charter 2. So, and there's a data preview before report creation feature. So it's a little bit of features. It's a little bit of like apps. What are the Charter kind of, uh, functionalities. Is it worth having all that? Or are you guys using SupplierOne a lot already and that's not something that would even be perceived as a benefit? 
 

Um, so we've covered this a little bit, so I'll be, I'll be kind of brief. We're already at 1120, but basically it's about channel performance, omni channel, uh, uh, visibility, right? Walmart wants to guide the way that Suppliers are pulling reports and guide the way that buyers are analyzing them. So one of the ways is to have more of an omni channel emphasis, but also just better visibility into omni channel and a better infrastructure in terms of the actual app itself. 
 

DSS, it's, you know, you never know what you got till it's gone, but I think that if you do go back and you remember, there will be a lot of frustrations that people had with DSS that they will have with Luminate. or that they won't have with Luminate. And there will also be new frustrations with Luminate that weren't there with DSS too. 
 

So, um, but yeah, I'm going to kind of skim over this. You're probably familiar with a lot of the stuff already. This is what, this is what Walmart was really kind of talking about in a lot of their training sessions for Luminate too. So, uh, um, take it all with a grain of salt. Um, so a few things to consider when, when thinking about Charter as an investment. 
 

One thing that's been something of a stumbling block, a stumbling block for some suppliers is that it is based off of retail sales, not sales to Walmart. So again, that's a bigger issue for some suppliers than it is for others. Uh, some, uh, some suppliers are viewing this investment as, uh, an essential thing to remain competitive in their category. 
 

So we'll look at some of the category data that you can pull, um, how you can integrate competitor, uh, data. into that as well. So that is, that is pretty good. So that, that is the perception that some suppliers are having with it as well. Um, I will say that generally speaking, uh, what I've seen in my experience, that's, this isn't necessarily true of everyone across the board, but larger companies who are trying to be really competitive in their category are the ones who are investing in charter and, uh, smaller companies, uh, not so much, right? 
 

So that's, that's a trend that I've seen, but let me know if that's, if that's not true in your experience. I don't necessarily think that that trend is. Uh, is indicative of some reality even, like, like that smaller companies should not invest in Charter? I don't know, but that's just something that I've seen. 
 

So, uh, take that with a another pinch of salt. We got a lot of pinches of salt in this first section. But, uh, what we've also heard is that Walmart is pitching Charter to some, probably some of the bigger suppliers as well. Something that they want bigger suppliers to be paying for, obviously, but, but also using to, to get better insights. 
 

So go to Walmart, uh, Luminate resources, learn and, and take those courses, all of that, it'll be really helpful. And, and you'll also be able to use that to see in more detail the stuff that we're going to be talking about today, which is these main, these three kind of apps that comprise, uh, Luminate Charter. 
 

So, shopper behavior, got some really interesting stuff to talk about here. This is the first of the three, if you, if you're reading left to right, uh, shopper behavior. Analyze evolving behavior to activate against the changing needs of shoppers. Okay. So keep your finger on the pulse of what your customers, what your shoppers are doing. 
 

It is, it is. There is some overlap between these, so, but, yes, shopper behavior we can look at first. So, basically, they're, they're designed to get at performance, your performance, with, with different trends and different profiles of shoppers. So, how are you performing with this particular kind of shopper. 
 

So, it contains within it other reports that are not available in Luminate Basic, too. So, it can go beyond that a little bit. But this is a helpful way of breaking down some of the benefits of this particular app. Performance, trends, and profiles. Okay. So, shopper behavior reports express PerformanceExpress. 
 

This is a, uh, a report that's designed to identify customer behavior metrics, uh, that are, that are, that are working out for you over time. So all of these, you'll be able to kind of break down by an individual time period, just like you could with any DSS report. So that's, uh, that's the customer behavior metrics. 
 

Particularly for that. ProfileExpress, this is how you kind of identify or, or, or locate the profile of the types of customers your category or brand appeals to. And all of these can be combined with and, and, and limited like any report can to an individual SKU or something like that as well. 
 

TrendsExpress. So this is, uh, this is, Um, about identifying customer behavior metrics in, in trended visualization. So we, we can't really get into that too much, but you can look at You can look at trends over time in that way. Multi channel, so this helps you understand how your customers are shopping, um, in any kind of particular channel, uh, how your, that, um, those shoppers are, are preferring maybe a particular item in this channel over this one, and then you can, you can use that information to make different inferences, obviously. as well. Performance in detail is a big one. So you can, you can identify customer behavior metrics, uh, driving performance over time and the profile of the types of customers your category or brand appeals to. So it's kind of like a combination of a few of those as well. And some of these can be used as a way of, as a way of, of, uh, pulling the same reports in the other ones as well. 
 

This is like a broader report. It essentially contains this report within it, um, just like you could with any, with, with a lot of the others in DSS as well. Uh, Performance 100k is, uh, is designed to help you understand the key drivers of change of performance at group and category level up to 100, 000 products. 
 

So, um, Again, it's kind of like a, it's kind of like an amalgamation of some of the others. Hourly and daily trends is exactly what it sounds like. So you can look at your KPIs down to the hour, day of the week, stuff like that. And you can drill down, um, uh, to that particular, uh, level. Control store group creation. 
 

This is an interesting, an interesting way of identifying and creating a group of control stores, uh, that are matched to a predefined set of test scores, of test stores, considering both sales and customer perspectives. So what does that mean? Basically, how can we, how can we compare these test stores to what we should be expecting? 
 

Right? Maybe we're looking at some trends. We're a little bit worried about this, um, stores in this particular region not performing as well. Well, how can we compare that against a control group? Uh, so, there's that. Testing control evaluation is similar, but, um, a little bit more broad. You can evaluate how a test run in one set of stores performed by assessing it against another set of stores that didn't run the test. So, similar sort of thing, um, but you can, you can use it to do a little bit more, I think, as well there. And then basket is huge. Basket analysis displays the items that are most commonly found in the same baskets with your products. 
 

So that's obviously a super valuable information that you can have. Best customers. So this is what is our ideal customer look like? I know this is a conversation that happens at a kind of a high level in a lot of these different companies where it can go. Really high up those conversations. Um, and of course they're important to have farther down as well too. 
 

But yeah, uh, what's your customer segment? Who's your kind of target market? Who's it working for? Who should it be working for? And it's not working for any more stuff like that. Shop across time, uh, kind of similar. You can track the purchasing behaviors, um, of these different customer profiles. Um, are we more successful with. 
 

Uh, more elderly customers for the first time in a while. If so, why is that something that we can control? Is it something that we want? So all of that cross shop products, you're, you're analyzing, uh, this, this report, uh, is, is you're analyzing how customers shop across different products or brands. So enabling you to understand your exclusive customers and cross shopping behavior, uh, source of value is you're basically, you're basically going to the source of the sale. 
 

Following an event, uh, such as an assortment change, um, and, and making inferences about how that can, uh, impact other product groups. And then switching is you can see how product sales have changed over time as a result of customers switching their spend in or out of the category. So. Yeah, a lot of category data, a lot of category information. 
 

Switching over time is the same thing, but with a little bit more detailed kind of granular time segmentation. Trial and repeat is, um, you can understand how customers trial and repeat purchase of your products and brands. So what kind of cadence are they purchasing your product at and your brand? And then you can measure the effect of promotional activity against that as well. 
 

It's really important for that. Okay. So, uh, some more shopper behavior reports that are about more, um, uh, optimized, uh, plans. You have a new product evaluation, which is super important. Uh, that's, that's information that you need really quickly and, um, and, and immediately to be able to adjust that product placement, um, as quickly as possible. 
 

New product selection is very similar. Run prior to the new product evaluation report to identify what new product launches took place in the category on what dates. So that's how you kind of That's how you figure out what product evaluation you should be doing, what the scope of that will be. 
 

Promotions is, I think, similar conceptually in the same sort of way. How are your promotions working? How are your products performing in relation to that? Pretty self explanatory too. But again, a lot of these, a lot of these are, uh, are similar to DSS, but they're different, they're pointing, they're pointing suppliers in a different direction. 
 

And there's a lot that we can infer from what Walmart is really looking for based off of those changes too. So more optimized plans, uh, uh, reports, assortment. You can compare how products in your category are performing based on a combination of sales and customer measures to inform and support your assortment reviews. 
 

All of this is very important for doing competitor analysis as well too. Where sold, you can understand and analyze your products and product groups performances by store format, state, region. So in what regions are we doing well and what states are we doing well? Okay, so still in shopper behavior we're looking at performance. 
 

Here we have In this visual over here, key measures, the key measures table, you're looking at the latest and you're looking at the change percentage in the performance of an individual product group name, right? So, um, in general, shopper behavior is designed to isolate those customer behaviors. that are going to be, that are going to be impacting trends. 
 

But the key measures table, uh, is in the shopper, uh, uh, behavior performance report. And it, it's giving you basically that, that latest, uh, um, that latest performance number. And then the change percentage with the previous date, right? And in the, in the performance report generally, that's where you're going to select those dates. 
 

So whenever you go in there the first time, I know it's very easy to kind of just slip into it and then to start making insights. That time, that time window at the very top of the performance report. You always have to remember to set that for the particular time window that you were needing to report on or that you're interested in. 
 

And depending on how much freedom you have in your report polling too, changing up that time frame can be really, uh, uh, really important for drawing new and creative insights. Okay, so The trends analysis. Here's a little bit of a, uh, of a kind of peek into how they're wanting you to look at these change, these trends over time, KPI trends over time, um, to look at seasonal changes in, uh, in customer behavior and sales, right? 
 

For whatever reason, uh, this particular item always performs well in the colder months. Um, what can we kind of. What can we infer from that? And the rolling contribution chart is designed to give the same sort of insight as well. So, for the profiles and chopper behavior, here are some of them. You can split up by gender, you can split up by age, which is a very important one. 
 

Um, from, uh, 18 to 29, uh, to above 90. And, um, the income bracket as well is super important too. So that's a little window into what those are like. 
 

Excuse me. Now, uh, we'll be looking at channel performance. This is our second here, so you're, um, uh, it's designed to analyze and act upon cross channel performance to drive loyalty and grow sales. Ideally, we've got shoppers, um, shopping on all of our different channels. They're so loyal. Um, but that's, Not always the case. 
 

So, uh, in Report Builder, you can create custom attributes. And this is one of the, one of the big kind of pluses, right, um, that you can use in the, in the regular Report Builder. So that is a, is a big plus. The Insights dashboard has in store and online data, um, from a, from a high to a, uh, uh, granular level. 
 

So across the channel itself, like we've been talking about and down to an individual item. Uh, so yeah, but, uh, we're going to break down this dashboard a little bit, um, more and explain a little bit more about what that is too. So the global filters, that's where you can do some of that high or granular level detail that you're looking for, as well as like timeframes and stuff like that. 
 

And then you have the summary and tabular views, which we'll be looking at here. So Here's the breakdown. Global filters. 
 

That's really important for setting your early parameters, what it is that you want to actually look at. Um, you can also do a little kind of shout out to that we cover in more detail in the eBook. You can also go into, um, uh, subcategories that, uh, you could go to the kind of fine line level as well. So all of that is, is handled in the global filters. 
 

And then the summary view and the tabular view are basically just the parameters. the displays of that particular, uh, performance, how they want you to look at it. Well, they want you to look at it by channel. They want you to look at it by total units relative to the previous, uh, time period and then net sales as well over time. 
 

So, uh, the tabular view, again, this depends on how many items you have, how many, uh, how many categories you're looking at or departments. Um, and you can kind of break those down by, by time period as well as net sales units and AUR and, uh, some other really kind of helpful stuff too. That's your dashboard. 
 

That's what it looks like. And that's the kind of high level. So the global filters, um, I, I've mentioned this a little bit already. Got your time range. Uh, the channel type omni store or e-comm. So, uh, you're looking at store e-comm, or both the department or category. So this is where you can, you can customize your subcategories. 
 

Um, uh, they also have defaulted subcategories as well, so you can. You can look at that if you want to look within a particular category, performance of different, um, uh, subtypes. Uh, this will only apply to the department or category slash hierarchy filter and not to the others. It's a little call out there. 
 

And then, uh, UPC as well. So, a little bit more detail here, uh, the net sales, in the summary view, uh, definition is the revenue as recorded financially, calculated at an item level, and aggregated as a sum across the levels of item location and time range hierarchies. So, uh, the question, the question that you always have to be asking yourself is how granular is this particular data set? 
 

What's, what, what, what's the particularity of what we're looking at? Is this all of our item omni channel stuff? This is just, this is how the item is doing? Is this, this is how the, the category is doing in omni channel? Um, or are we looking at store and e com or, or, or this particular timeframe or whatever, right? 
 

So, um, that's, uh, uh, net sales. That's a very helpful definition. But you're always going to be asking that question of really how, how granular is the data that I'm looking at? Um, and how granular do we need to go in order to pull real insights? And all of that information is really important for trying to determine whether Charter is actually a good investment for you or not. 
 

Um, at what point does the granularity, do you lose the forest for the leaves? You know what I mean? Like, are you seeing the forest? Are you looking too much at this particular kind of leaf? Uh, we talked about science earlier, and so it's Uh, on the mind. I'm being triggered to my high school days, but, uh, units. 
 

Okay. Yeah. Walmart defines these as the, uh, uh, the total number of units sold to customers for transactions online and in store. That's obviously Omnichannel, but you can break that down, uh, into those as well. And then channel performance, it can also be broken down by similar, uh, uh, sort of categories. Um, and there you have buy in store, BIS. 
 

or ShipToHome, Ecom. They use different language there. So, again, probably information you all have already, but can be important to know. So, uh, we talked a little bit about the tabular view. We can dive into that a little bit more already. So, it's listed not by item, but by, uh, department level, and then within that you have the subcategories. 
 

And so, you can, you can also do the comparison time period, you can, you can edit that a little bit there, and those, and those filters. It's important to remember, now, When we're in the tabular view, we're applying filters to filters. It's like a meta filter. It's, you're, you're, you're, you're filtering down within the global filters that have already been kind of set at the top of the insights dashboard. 
 

So, It's, this is where it can get really confusing. Um, and it's important whenever you're reporting, obviously, to just remember the level of the granularity. What is the level of the granularity that we're looking at? Well, we're looking in hardware and then within that, uh, we have air purifiers, right? 
 

That's our subcategory that we're really interested in kind of measuring the performance of. How are they doing? It should be pretty regular, right? People need to replace their air filters with some kind of regularity. Um, Is our, is our, are our sales kind of, uh, reporting that? Or have we only become relevant to e com and we've lost the in store performance to one of our competitors? 
 

Something like that, right? So the tabular view is how you really can get, you can get really down into the weeds. Um, uh, And so that's where all of the great insights are happening, but it's also, um, where, uh, you can lose track of the forest, if that makes sense. This is where the rubber really meets the road, but at the same time, um, when your, when your insights are more granular, their applicability is also more granular and only helpful to a smaller kind of number of people. 
 

Your dashboard, is what the CFOs are going to want to look at. It's what your, um, supply chain management leadership is going to want to look at. So, um, yes, this is the, this is the kind of the, the more, uh, granular detail, um, that can be very helpful and maybe Um, can be too much detail depending on sort of the size of the company, depending on the, the scale. 
 

What, how much are you actually doing in Walmart? And, um, do you need subcategories or is there one item in one category and you don't need to break it down by this at all? Right? So don't lose your sales in store. If, if you, if it's super easy for you to get all the information that you need about your items performance from, you know, Just the regular shopper behavior. 
 

Preaching to the choir. But all of that is there as well. Customer perception. This is very cool. It's pretty different. It's not just your average, you know, um, report, uh, performance, uh, uh, channel performance, sales reporting, or, uh, or kind of shopper insights. Reporting. It is similar to Shopper Insights, or sorry, it is similar to Shopper Behavior, but instead of looking at kind of before the sale and at the point of sale, you're really looking at after the sale, right? 
 

Is this a purchase that you like? Like, let's hear back from the customers. Um, and this is something that it is, it is pretty cool, um, that When you're working in the retailer world, sometimes it feels like the retailer is a middleman between the customer and the supplier, but at the same time, um, you can think of it as the retailer having access, especially in the case of Walmart, right? 
 

Where there's such a high volume of shoppers, such a high volume of customers. We can think of it now as the That retailer has access to the perception that, that these shoppers have. Right. A kind of access that it might be tricky to get through e-comm. It might be tricky to get through, uh, website sales or through your brick and mortar sales or something like that, that are not retailer based. 
 

Right. So, um, this, again, it's, it's interesting. It's a little bit different. I noticed too that in their help docs for describing it. The language that they're written in is pretty different, I would say, than the language for, um, uh, the others. And, uh, so I'm not sure. It's a different team working on it. But, yeah, it's pretty helpful. 
 

So I included some of the quotes from some of these help docs because I find some of their language that they use really interesting. Uh, this isn't really an app. Of course, it has an app and there's an interface and everything as well, but it really is just the service that Walmart is providing by Walmart going out there and interviewing people, um, or, or, uh, giving surveys, basically. 
 

So, um, these are, these are opportunities for suppliers to, uh, conduct their own primary research with real customers. Um, that's, again, that's a direct quote from the help docs that I find, uh, to be, uh, Pretty interesting. A very good description of what, of what this program actually is. So, obviously to help you get a better sense of what is important to your customers, um, especially around, um, pricing and stuff like that. 
 

So, but you can ask, uh, you can ask your customers whatever you want. So how do you actually aggregate this data? How do you actually communicate it? So this is, again, this is very, very good description, I think, on some of their help docs. Very specific information that they're, that they're sharing with us about how they aggregate this data. 
 

Um, well, so they have this, this, uh, Customer Spark community. Um, and it is an invite only group of Walmart customers designed to be a sample size of the entire Walmart customer population. So, um, they're responsible really for finding people all across, uh, whatever the demographics are, um, to give a, a, a clear insight into who these people are. 
 

Who are the people who, who think that your, that your items are priced as they should be? Who are the people who do not? And then again, insights can be drawn. Though, how valuable it is to your company will change a lot depending on what kind of numbers you're doing, what kind of, um, how many departments you're in, how many categories you're in, um, so all that. 
 

But this group is composed of members aggregated across 749 attributes. Uh, and this is again, I think this is a direct quote. Calculated through machine learning analysis. Okay, so it was the machine that came up with these attributes, not us. Um, well it is really fascinating that there are so many and so, um, from there they're using that to make insights based off of, uh, traded stores and locations and all that too. 
 

So, what do these customer surveys look like? Um, so there's a, there's a, there's a pretty big range. And again, the way that they, the way that they break it down is between qualitative and quantitative analysis, right? Like you would for any, uh, any kind of survey or polling, right? Um, there's a bunch of different, um, there's a bunch of different, Places along that spectrum that, um, could be helpful for building insights. 
 

So, uh, the, the more, uh, qualitative surveys, uh, will vary much more than the quantitative ones will. So there's some surveys that Walmart basically has canned. That can be like, hey, why don't you use this survey for this region? And, and it would be more kind of easier to do, but if you want to do real qualitative analysis, it's something that you have to do at your company. 
 

Is that something that you guys have the work hours for? Is that something that you can, um, that you can really build out to get your money's worth from Charter? Well, It's something to be proactive about for sure, because these qualitative surveys are really important for, uh, for hearing the real voices of real customers that can sometimes feel like they're separated by so many, you know, uh, uh, links in the supply chain, right? 
 

So, uh, it can be helpful for just kind of cutting through that whole process and hearing directly, like right from the, uh, from the horse's mouth, from the shopper's mouth. Um, how much would you expect to pay for X? What might your purchase, uh, why might you purchase X instead of Y? So these are some examples that they give, um, compared to other products like it. 
 

Would you say that? Fill in the blank, right? So, and that can be as specific and as, as. Um, basically personal, um, as you would like. So that's kind of the one side of it. Um, on the other side of it, you can do more, um, quantitative analysis. Right? Where you're, you're asking a fairly kind of broad question, um, across a, a broad range of topics or regions or something like that as well. 
 

But yeah, that's the Customer Perception section, and that is it for our content. Um, again, that's a high level view of your, uh, three main apps within Charter, what some of their benefits are, and, um, and what, uh, uh, some of the kind of, um, insights are. 
 

[00:43:25] Allie Truong: Thank you so much, Peter. I'm looking at the chat in the Q& A, and I'll have these up here for a second. I'm not seeing any questions, so I'll talk about some of our next steps here. But again, if you have a question, it's not too late. We would love to answer it. Here are some of our resources. I've sent the ebook on Luminate in the chat, so please go check that out. 
 

That's free for you to download, and it goes a little bit more in depth on what you can do on BASIC and some of the other information on Luminate, but we have lots of other books. So you can see these are all Walmart or supply chain books, so go look at those as well. We've got a lot on our ebooks and cheat sheets. 
 

Um, and we'll go to the next slide and share our emails as well. So sometimes I get stumped on what question I need to ask, or I realize it's going to be like three paragraphs. Um, so you can always email us your questions and we'll get back to you. We've got a wealth of experts at SupplyPike. Um, so if we can't answer your questions directly, we can always find someone within our network at SupplyPike who can help you, um, understand this as well. 
 

Last thing I'll say is we're going to do, um, as Peter's transitioning here, um, he's going to pull up the SupplyPike for Walmart application, um, and I want to just call out that this is a product preview. So we are going to fly by Um, just a five minute high level overview of what SupplyPike can do for your company, um, and what we do for other suppliers. 
 

But no means is this an in depth, um, demo. So I would say go to SupplyPike. com. I'll share it in the chat while Peter's going through this. And the really cool thing about being on a demo is we can connect your data and you can get a free analysis of, you know, what is going on within your portfolio of revenue loss. 
 

So you can see, oh, I have 700 deductions that I need to go dispute that are actually actionable and it's costing me 50, 000. Okay, cool. And if you decide to not go with us, that's totally fine, but it's better to know what is kind of laying out and money that is on the table rather than, um, Not having that visibility. 
 

So, thank you guys for joining on the educational content side. I'm going to transo transition this over to Peter, um, but if you're already a customer, we might be talking about some new features, or if you're not interested in more of the sales side of this, we totally understand. Jump off, no pressure. So, with that, Peter, go ahead and take it away. 
 

[00:45:59] Peter Spaulding: Thank you, Allie. Yes. We were talking about the dashboards in Luminate and the kind of insights that they're designed to give here. I'm going to kind of gloss over our dashboards because it's. Um, uh, very helpful for higher level reporting on deductions specifically, right? If Luminate, you're doing more kind of sales reporting. 
 

What we're doing is we're trying to tell you how much money is kind of being lost in the exchange of goods from a supplier, a CBG supplier, to a retailer. And, uh, you can see, um, over here some of the other retailers that we have, um, already integrated with, um, that we're kind of working this all out with. 
 

So here's a kind of higher level breakdown. We can tell you right away what your performance is. So where's all the money that you're missing? Uh, what's the actionable stuff that you can dispute right away? Um, but in order to give you a better sense of how that happens, I want to go a little bit more granular into the deductions themselves. 
 

So here we have a lot of information all at once, a lot of different kind of filters that we can do. But what I want to do is I want to go into one of these to show you about our shipping document integration. Um, so here we have a couple of things that I want to call out, uh, right away. I want to look at, uh, this section right here. 
 

Select dispute documents. The way that SupplyPike works, uh, the way that it has been successful really, I would say the whole kind of backbone of the success of SupplyPike has been the shipping document integration, um, from the very beginning. Um, so what this means is we can find the PO, we can find the invoice, we can find the claim. 
 

Uh, and an example BOL in this case. And we can take all of that information, we can aggregate it, and then we can use that to basically do validity checks on individual deductions automatically for you so that it's not something that you have to spend time doing. So that's a big part of it. That's kind of the first part of it. 
 

Um, is this, is this a valid deduction or is it not? In this case, we have a validity unclear message here, so it might be worth disputing anyways. Um, but that's a very quick way that we have of just right away, um, we can, we can do all of your validity checks for you. So, we'll go back into the deductions here. 
 

Um, another thing that I want to call out is, um, so we can do validity checks automatically, right? To save you a lot of time with that. Well, what we can do also, if we can, if we can do validity checks by automatically attaching all the dispute documentation, that means, that means that we can also, um, automate. 
 

the disputes. So this is integrated into RetailLink. That's where we get the shipping, a lot of the shipping document integration or the purchase order information. So we can also send these disputes in right away too. So I want you to dispute all code 22s, um, uh, all shortages, let's say. So we can do, um, 22, 23, um, 24s and all criteria. Or we could just say let's only do the ones that are definitely invalid. 
 

I only want the invalid shortages to be disputed. And then we go down here and we can save changes. You could also do a, a, a deduction amount limit. If you only want to submit disputes above a certain number or below a certain number, you can do that too. Or you could just do enable auto disputing here, and that would work out that way too. 
 

So that's that for our, um, our the more granular, detailed level of the app itself. Um, and that might make some of this dashboard information a little bit clearer. It can help you kind of understand how we get all this information. Um, what's your dispute win rate? This is a really good one. Um, obviously this is, I should mention also, this is uh, demo data. 
 

So this is aggregated from, from real data, but it is not actually a particular um, company that we're looking at. And it is not, uh, uh, real time, if that makes sense. So, but yeah, normally whenever we onboard people, we see a really high total actionable number. And we can say right away, um, you've got X number of dollars that are just kind of waiting to be won back. 
 

Especially if we're talking about Walmart. Which in the case of Walmart, you can go back two years for shortages. Shortages are the ones that are most likely invalid. They're also the ones that people lose the most amount of money to. Well, we can integrate all of those shipping docs for the last two years and we can say, here's a big sum of money that you can win back right away. 
 

Of course, How soon Walmart will pay it is a different story, but, um, it's a different kind of thing. Another couple of, uh, things I want to call out here. I really like our Root Causes, um, feature. It's not something that has been, um, that has received a lot of attention or hype. Um, but basically what we're doing is where we can, we can tell with all the shipping document information, um, where the point of error is happening, right? 
 

If you're seeing a lot of receiving errors at a particular DC, for example, um, that's really helpful information to know. Um, if you're getting a lot of, uh, invoicing errors or if you have a lot of, If you have a lot of errors on your own part, you can use root cause analysis to figure out if, uh, how your 3PLs are performing. 
 

And then you can use that as a part of the conversations that are happening with those companies too. So, um, all of that is, uh, really helpful. Of course, you could look at deductions over time. This could be really helpful for, uh, accounting at a high level in the company as well. So yeah, but that's that. 
 

If you have more questions about that, I'll put our, I'll put our emails back on here. If you have more questions about product or Luminate itself, please don't hesitate to reach out.  
 

[00:52:12] Allie Truong: Awesome. Thank you, Peter, for walking us through that content and a little product preview. Thank you for everybody who stayed on. 
 

Um, we appreciate you. And again, if you have any follow up questions, please let us know and we would love to see you at another webinar. All right. Thank you guys. Take care.