How to Get the Most Out of Luminate

10.24 How to Get the Most Out of Luminate 
 

[00:00:00] Danielle: Oh, welcome everybody. We are really excited to have you all on this webinar. Today we are going to discuss how to get the most out of Luminate. My name is Danielle Gloy. I will be hosting our content today. So I'll be monitoring any questions that come through in the chat and I'll probably be sending through a couple of resources along the way. 
 

And then leading our content is Peter Spaulding. Peter is our senior SupplierWiki writer. He has spent a lot of time researching and writing about Luminate. So really looking forward to the content that he's going to bring today. So just a little bit about us here at SupplierWiki, we create free educational content with the main goal of setting suppliers like you up for success. 
 

So we do this in a couple of different ways. For example, through webinars, we have free eBooks that you can download and articles that you can read. And this is all available on our website. We also have a weekly newsletter that goes out. So we usually put like retailer updates in there or supplier hot topics. 
 

So if you're looking for a quick read and just want to stay updated on the things going on in the industry, I will send that link in the chat for you. to sign up. So moving on to the agenda, we are going to start off the webinar with some report building techniques in Luminate Basic. So just like how to pull and build reports and really just maximize the features, available to you. 
 

Then we'll go through Luminate Charter Apps. So as Basic is the free version, Charter is the paid. so we'll have a look at some of the apps Charter offers. next we will be addressing some Luminate updates and release notes. And finally, we will wrap up the webinar with a live Q&A session. 
 

All right, so here are a few FAQs that we typically get during webinars. So the first being, will we be getting a copy of the slide deck? Yes, absolutely. So we always send a copy of the slide deck in PDF format, as well as the recording of the webinar. So that should appear in your email inbox in about three to four business days. 
 

And just a little hack, if you go to our website, you can find all of our past recordings and a PDF of those slide decks available to download. So it is all available to you. And then the second question that we often get is, what is the best way to ask a question? So at the bottom of the screen, you will see a chat tab and then you'll see a Q&A tab. 
 

So the chat tab is going to be a great place to engage with the group or just share any insights that you may have. And then the best way to submit questions is through that Q&A tab, as I'll be able to monitor them and then tee them up for Peter for the Q&A time at the end. 
 

Okay, last thing before we get into the content, SupplyPike is a platform that helps suppliers get paid and get better. this is done with a software that identifies, recovers, and prevents deductions and compliance issues. we do this with a couple of different retailers like Walmart, Amazon, Target, Kroger, Home Depot, and CVS. 
 

If I'm not mistaken, I think SupplyPike has helped suppliers recover more than 850 million. we are in the business of helping suppliers get paid and get better. So if this is something you want to hear more of or explore for your company, I'll go ahead and send a link in the chat. But in the meantime, I'm going to hand it over to Peter to get into the Luminate content. 
 

[00:03:27] Peter: Great. Thank you, Danielle. Yes. I think we're about to have our billion dollar party, sometime, hopefully soon, which will be pretty exciting. but yeah, what we're talking about today really doesn't touch SupplyPike's products at all. So we won't really be getting into that. If you have, a deduction solution that you're unhappy with, or if you're curious more about how you could, improve your business from the perspective of AP deductions and, doing validity checks and, and auto disputing and all that, SupplyPike software really is the best in the business. 
 

It's really cool and exciting. But today we'll be talking about Scintilla. correct me if that pronunciation is wrong, Walmart just decided to rebrand Luminate less than a year after its launch, so don't know what that's about, don't know what that's about. it's allegedly Latin, but I don't, yeah, anyways, Scintilla, would be the correct Latin pronunciation, but I don't think that's what they, are going for. 
 

So yeah, that's it. It's just a rebrand. caused a little bit of panic at the beginning, but it's just changing the name. It's just changing the branding, not even the brand colors. So I think that's just a nominal thing. Not really totally sure why. I don't know anything about the, mindset behind that. 
 

but that won't really go into effect until later on. I think we're going to have a webinar in December where, we call Luminate Scintilla, but that's technically premature because it won't be until either January or February of 2025 that they will actually put that change and that rebrand into effect it. 
 

Luminate is always growing. It's always evolving. And we'll be talking about that today. What the, what those new kind of product updates are and where to find those. But this change does not feel connected to that at all. At least that's what we're hearing from Walmart. This is just a nominal change. 
 

It's just aesthetic. It's just surface level. It doesn't have anything to do with the apps themselves, which. which are growing into their own thing as well. A long term DSS solution that is Walmart Luminate. So we have a lot of webinars on Luminate. If you're really just here for the first time and you haven't learned anything about this process, especially about the early phases of the process when DSS and Luminate were happening at the same time, and there was this window of time where you could try to translate as many of those DSS reports into Luminate, as possible. 
 

if you're curious about more of that, you can go back to some of our old content on Luminate. We really are skipping the beginning portion for now. And what we're doing is we're moving into report building. So how, just the more kind of practical stuff, the, bread and butter of Luminate. And we'll talk a little bit about basic. 
 

We'll talk a little bit about Charter. We'll talk more about charter probably. So if you're, asking this question of do I want to make the leap from basic to charter, if you're a smaller or SMB supplier in Walmart, that's probably a question that you're having right now. The word on the street, according to what I've heard, is that A lot of people are just paying for charter. 
 

so let us know if, that's your experience too. Are you still on the fence? Are you not totally sure? Has Walmart made it so that basically it's impossible to stay competitive without buying charter? is the payout for charter Right there, right away in your sales, or is it something that you're reconsidering? 
 

Do I want to keep paying for charter? All of that is, is stuff that, of course, it's just going to vary a lot from supplier to supplier. My experience has been that bigger suppliers find that it's worth the investment because they have other very big CPG companies that they're competing with, within major retailers and without of major retailers. 
 

So that's the, thing that I've noticed is smaller suppliers are maybe just not sure if that's something that they want to invest in and they can keep their retail sales without having to invest in it. but yeah, I'm not totally sure about that. That's just from the limited exposure that I've had to actual Luminate users, what, what their experience has been. 
 

So the report building in Luminate Basic is available to everyone, but the report builder app does look different based on whether you have Basic or Charter. So a lot of this is really just the rudiments of report building in Walmart. The, absolute basics of what you'll need for any report that you would run, will be here, but there are a lot of things, even with the most Simple Luminate reports in the report builder. 
 

There are different things that you can add onto those different kinds of, what's the phrase that I'm looking for? Customizations basically that you can add in if you have charter. So again, Walmart wants to sell charter to people. They're going to, not necessarily make it difficult for people to just use basic. 
 

but yeah, that again, that's another thing. I, what the, the conversations that you have with your buyer or during line reviews, all of those will be very data based. is it easier to prove your success in Walmart for line reviews or something like that with Charter or without, is it something that your buyer is pushing you towards? 
 

that's all. That's all going to change a lot from person to person. but as always, we recommend the Walmart Supplier Support Group for questions like that, so that you can hear from other people. but yeah, what you're going to need, if you want to do anything at all, you need a dimension, you need a metric, and you need a filter for time. 
 

And basically this is just. You're going to need the time filter to put limitations on what you're doing. And then you're going to need columns, essentially. Columns and rows is one way to think about it. So if you're totally new to Luminate and you've never done anything in there before, You can, go to the support tab that will include instructions for pulling reports. 
 

My, the experience that I have with these articles is that they are not super detailed and they're not super helpful. And what's most helpful in my opinion is just pulling the reports and studying them. and talking about them with your team. I think that is really the best way to learn the new language of reporting that Luminate is pushing suppliers towards, because it is a completely different language from what we saw in, DSS. 
 

Some of that is for the best. DSS's reports were very dated. Some of them were inaccurate, and it was becoming very expensive for, and just difficult for Walmart and, suppliers to. become aligned on the DSS reports. for better or for worse, Luminate is what we have now. I mentioned the vendor scorecard. 
 

That's going to be an essential for any kind of line review situation or just for your buyer to know how you're doing. bearing in mind, your buyer will also Be judged on the, their own ability to, make sales. And they'll be looking at numbers too with, other people at Walmart to make sure that they're performing well. 
 

So all of that is, is a part of the vendor scorecard is still pretty similar to the scorecard in DSS, with. obviously there's some customizations that you can add in there that can, that are a little different, but for the most part, Walmart hasn't had a complete, change of operations in terms of what they think of supplier success as being. 
 

If you're still selling stuff, you're still going to do well. You're still going to, you're still going to have spots on the shelves. And then of course, data, set overview and sample reports. are really helpful as well for getting started. So in order to go to the Report Builder, a lot of you will see it right away in your apps from the very beginning whenever you first log into Luminate. 
 

If you can't, the left nav drop down will have Report Builder in it for most if not all of you. Even if you don't have Charter, Report Builder is essential and you still need to be able to pull the vendor scorecard. That's what we'll be talking about now. And we've just got some of these visuals here, just to walk you through it. 
 

So you're going to start out in my reports. In this case, we don't have any reports, to show, but most of you probably will at this point. Start out there and you're going to build a new report, which is on the right side. So with datasets and reports, datasets are helpful for what I was calling before learning the language of reporting in Luminate. 
 

what are the new directions that Walmart is wanting to go in, in terms of their data reporting? And, so you can, Go through those and you can pull those as well. But for the vendor scorecard, which is what we're talking about right now, that's going to be in reports. And in this case, this is a Either an example of a very early Luminate access or someone who's on Basic and not on Charter or both, the Vendor Scorecard will live in Reports is the long and short of it. 
 

You'll probably have other options in there as well, depending on your size and depending on whether you have Charter or not. Okay, once you go into the Vendor Scorecard, You're going to see the available filters, right? So you can just run this normally with everything else, or you can be a little bit more selective about what you want to see. 
 

Are you looking at the store sales in dollars, POS sales in dollars, POS sales in units? The POS, visibility is a little tricky when you have basic. When you have charter, you have a little bit more, visibility into where those sales are actually happening. And that is a major bummer. We have some stuff written about that. 
 

I can see Danielle already, posted our guide to Walmart's Luminate in there. so you can read all about it there. but whenever it comes to making that decision about charter or basic, it's about how many insights can you on your Walmart team, on your retailer team, how many insights can you then take and turn around to the greater organization, your whole CPG organization and say, Hey, here's, what's really working for brick and mortar. 
 

Here's, what's really working for e commerce. and you have a little bit more of that visibility. So I think that for these larger CPG companies who have a big contingent of their business, but not all of their. not all of their business going to Walmart, what they can do is they can say, Hey, we'll, sign off on this software, right? 
 

We'll sign off on this purchase so that we can then get better insights that Walmart has gate kept within their own processes because we want to grow our business there. And we want to take those insights and apply them to our own, to other brick and mortar or other e commerce opportunities, if that makes sense. 
 

So that's just another, that's just one example of why. of how that decision gets made. oftentimes the retailer teams aren't going to be the ones who are in charge of making a business decision as big as can we purchase, charter or can we not. so yeah, take all that with a grain of salt. 
 

All right. These are the big, these are the big filters that, that you can apply to these. Item, Category, Brand, Vendor. those are the levels that you can look at with it. And yeah, if you have multiple vendor ID numbers, you're in multiple departments, it's mostly just what that means at Walmart. 
 

then you can filter out according to that as well. Or categories, I should say, not departments. and then, Brand, Category item. You can, get very granular with that as well. Okay, so for the, final touches, you can, choose whether you want to run this continuously or not. You can come up with a report name. 
 

Again, all of that is, you'll want to be descriptive. Obviously, you'll want to be describing the, specific thing that you're pulling for. But within your organization, within your retailer team, whatever, you may want to make these more specific to the person who is polling them or something like that, just in case. 
 

However you, want to try to deal with reports or go through them together as a team. And then, you can format those in Excel or CSV. Excuse me, depending on, again, what you use on your team or what's just most beneficial for you. Okay, so that's the Vendor Scorecard. That's not too different from the Vendor Scorecard in DSS. 
 

Most of these other reports are going to be completely different. So a big part of the pain point that people have had in the transition from DSS to Luminate is how do I pull this report that I was pulling in DSS now in Luminate? And the short answer is just you can't. Thank you. You have to try to, you have to try to take the general kind of area, what you were, trying to look for, let's say an inventory or something like that in DSS, and just do a bunch of reports in Luminate until you can try to aggregate that data. 
 

But what Walmart really wants you to do is to, This is my, when I was trying to learn Spanish in college, and my Spanish teacher was saying is you can't just translate everything in your head into English and then re translate it back into Spanish. You have to be immersed into it long enough so that you learn how to think in Spanish. 
 

And that, of course, for me, where I was living at the time, I wasn't getting immersed and I just didn't learn the language. what Walmart is really trying to do is a similar sort of thing, is throwing suppliers into the deep end with Luminate. And then, having them learn the new reports just through experience. 
 

the good news is that a lot of buyers are aware of this. Buyers are the way that they're being, the way that they're pulling reports isn't necessarily changing. but they are having to judge supplier performance based off of Luminae reports instead of DSS reports. They are just as confused about it as a lot of suppliers are. 
 

So it's a learning process for everyone together, having to learn the new language at the same time. but yeah, so the apps that you'll, pull down from this left nav, this will differ depending on whether you have, whether you have Charter or not. Insights, Shopper Behavior, those are Charter apps. 
 

so it looks different. or at least I think ShopperBehaviour is a charter app. We'll get to it in a little bit if we, don't already. But ReportBuilder is for BASIC. So ReportBuilder will be there, for everyone. These data sets may change as well depending on, BASIC or charter as well. So if this looks different from what you're looking at, take it with a pinch of salt. 
 

But again, we've got, the data sets there and the data sets are different from the reports, but they're all really reports, if you want to think of it in those terms. A lot of the stuff that you were pulling in DSS has rough equivalents here again, and it's just, it's a translated word. it's a completely different thing. 
 

but it has a, it has. Some kind of connection to, the things that you were doing in DSS as well. But yeah, this is the new way that, that, Walmart wants suppliers to think about things, in terms of Omni, but then you've got it broken down by store sales and inventory. you have Omni sales. 
 

DCMetrics, ModularPlanMetrics, StoreDemandForecast, OrderForecast, StoreMarkup and Markdowns, OmniOTIF, and EcomInventory. This is what you should be seeing for a lot of these datasets. 
 

in your, world. So we're going to start by looking at a few just store sales and inventory. this is the whopper. This is a really big one. If you don't know how you're doing in the stores, if you don't know how you're doing in Walmart, then what's the point? this is the, bread and butter. 
 

So it'll show you your essential in store performance data sets, online pickup and delivery. Returns, Markup, and Markdown, and then this is me trying to do the translation of what the rough DSS equivalent is, in SalesMargin, CompanySummaryReport, or StoreDetailReport. But again, it's we're looking at one dataset here for something that was A bunch of different reports in DSS. 
 

So that's one of the ways that it's changed is your data sets are big. These reports are going to be big. and it may be just a little bit instead of figuring out ahead of time, what specific kind of report do I want to pull to get the data that I'm looking for? It may be pull the report and then see if the data that you're looking for is in it until you've figured out where to find all of them. 
 

but yeah, that's just the. The, pain point of it, at least at the beginning. And it could be helpful in the long run. I've talked with a lot of people who like Luminate, who are really like, DSS, I was comfortable with, but it was just not a 21st century tool. And, Luminate is, There's that. And, I want to call out as well, this is back to store sales and inventory. the level of granularity and the kind of the, specificity of online pickup and delivery or the omni channel insights vary whether you have basic or charter, I'm pretty sure. this basic, store sales and inventory dataset should have everything that you need to. 
 

To be able to prove to your buyer, we're doing well or, to be able to know if you're not and in what areas. That's happening. but going into, point of sale stuff and omni channel visibility, it's just not as good in basic as charter. So take that with a grain of salt as well. But what we're talking about in this section is just basic. 
 

So we'll try to, we'll try to just focus on that. the OmniSales data set. Yep, Luminate is all about Omnichannel. Everyone's all about Omnichannel. But in this one, you're looking at items across these channels in 13 week trends. So you've got the rough DSS equivalent of basically reporting from scratch. 
 

Your, again, your sales summary, the sales and margin and company summary is similar to this. But. One of the strengths of Luminate is that it will break it down by channel for you. So that can be very important to some, suppliers. Okay. So for DC metrics, we're looking at warehouse inventory. 
 

it, with this one, what we're recommending is, trying to build a report from scratch to find, data from more than a week ago. And, basically this is the whole supply chain category in DSS. All crammed into one data set, with really just two quick report options. So that's why we're recommending that, build a report from scratch thing. 
 

Just get a sense of what's going on there by trying it from scratch first. Wanted to call it the store demand forecast as well. Obviously a super important data set that you might want to build those reports out of. And, Yeah, so you can, like with others, you can compare warehouse inventory by subcategory or the nine digit vendor number. 
 

at some point, I think that this, I think that you now can, pull by nine digit vendor number. If you couldn't at the beginning, it was because they wanted you to filter by category, and then use the six digit VendorNumber. I don't, but I think that changed and I think that you can now, you can now pull reports by nine digit. 
 

but I remember in a training a long time ago that coming up. So just, be aware of that as well. If you can't pull something with a nine digit vendor number, then what you do is you just filter by the category, and your six digit and that should give you the same information. same thing with this one, we recommend building the report from scratch. 
 

And then, again, we're looking at the supply chain section of DSS. Okay, You can, I've been calling this out a lot already, but Charter will help you just make a little bit more, customization and curation happen in, shopper behavior channel performance and customer perception. 
 

These are, Walmart's way of saying we have access to a lot of the feelings that our customers have about your product and we can sell that back to you in the form of a charter. so yeah, really helpful and insightful stuff, but not necessarily something that every supplier needs. Okay, so we're gonna, we're gonna break this down in terms of, we're gonna spend a little bit of time talking about shopper behavior, a little bit of time talking about channel performance, and a little bit of time talking about customer perception. 
 

these are the main, these are the big three. and then, We're going to talk about updates at the end as well, where it seems like there's a little bit more that's coming. and not more, the, parts of the app that they're really building out are, charter for the most part. shopper behavior is really, is really digging into the behaviors and profiles of the Walmart shoppers who are buying your products, that are, looking at, obviously, item performance, but really trying to isolate trends, and trends in the profiles of buyers. 
 

So there's a bunch of other, reports that you can't get in BASIC that are tied to this one. but it's essentially the same idea. You're pulling reports to check on your performance. It's just, there's a little bit more insight into who these shoppers actually are. There's a key measures table in the shopper behavior performance report that shows insight into the performance at the item level. This is all in the dashboard for shopper behavior. and, yeah, you can, isolate these I mentioned by item level, but you can, do it in a bunch of different ways as well. 
 

So you can. whatever that KPI is that you want to look at, there's a bunch of different, timeframes that you can pull for that as well. you can look at it, through the weekly performance, monthly performance, quarterly, weekly latest versus previous, and then rolling contribution chart. All that is available there. 
 

So for the shopper behavior profiles, they have these three major kind of breakdowns 
 

with income. You're looking at, a, profile income shopper. This is just three really big categories that Walmart has for their shoppers, less than 50k, income 50k to 150k, income, over 150k or unclassified. And these are obviously really sketchy, profiles in terms of you're not going to get an exact, idea, but it's of course related to store trading and all that as well. 
 

Age is a little bit more. easier to track in a very kind of hard scientific way where you're looking at our product is really working or we're really trying to target 50 year old shoppers and we're either succeeding or not in that. People, we're targeting 50 year old shoppers but we're seeing a lot of young people buy this for their parents or something like that, right? 
 

All of those, all those insights are going in there as well. And then you could have an unclassified as well. And then the same thing goes for gender too. So you can break all of your performance data down by those specifications as well. Yeah. For channel performance, you can create custom attributes to use in the regular report builder that would be in Luminate Basics. 
 

So basically this is these custom attributes can just basically make those, basic reports a little bit more insightful. and then you have the insights dashboard as well. in store and online data from high, to granular levels. the way that they break that down is Your highest level is your channel. 
 

So that's your brick and mortar or your Omni channel, right? That is technically the highest level. but then you can look at, brick and mortar, e com, and then you can break it down by, category, store. You can look at individual stores. You can look at regions and then you can look at items. 
 

And the three main views that they have here, or the, three main callouts, and we've got a visual of this on the next slide, just wanted to kind of prep for it, is you have your global filters, which is what that is doing that, in store and online data from high to granular level. You'll do all of that in your global filters, and then you've got your, normal kind of dashboard view, and then a tabular view. 
 

this is the breakdown of that dashboard. Your global filters are up there. The summary view is there. And that's obviously helpful for, if you're experiencing something that's very, a trend or something like that's really a sharp distinction that might be something that you want to hop on right away, have sales plummeted, or, do we need to reroute more, items to this location? 
 

Because this store has just everything's flying off the shelves, etc. But really the main bulk of the value in my opinion of channel performance is in your tabular view because you can break everything down year over year. You can break it down by the last 13 weeks. You can look at your catalog item ID or UPC. 
 

And then you've got all of the, the individual items right here as well. or subcategories that you can customize yourself as well. So whatever the level of granularity that you want to get into, you really can do it there in the tabular view. Customer perception is a little bit, unique, I would say. 
 

And, I haven't heard that much about it in terms of the user experience of suppliers. but I would be really curious too, just to see, Is this, how helpful it is? people, CPG companies will be doing constant, customer, interviews and, they'll be doing research into this specific thing all of the time. 
 

is the Customer Perception app in Walmart Giving you real insights that you can turn around and give to your CPG org that are helpful. Or are those insights really just living within the retailer team and they're not as universal as other research could be. but yeah, you want to know from people who are buying your product in Walmart, what that experience is what their reactions to pricing are, all of that, but it is a primary research with real customers. 
 

And I was hating on the, on Luminate for a while. I will say that the help documents with customer perception, I remember, being pretty good, pretty detailed into, what, what all is there. And I wonder if that's because it's a different kind of report. there's a lot more anecdotal reporting that happens in, in customer perception than in the others. 
 

It's not necessarily all just sheets and tables. but yeah, pretty interesting. So there are a bunch of surveys that are already available to suppliers and customer perception. And the range that they break it down by, and this is what I was getting into when I'm talking about anecdotal reporting, is their spectrum, they call it qualitative and quantitative. 
 

And really all of the customer perception app is more qualitative than the other reports, the other apps that you would be using Luminate for in the sense that it's real engagements with customers and, real surveys that they're taking. But within that, there is still a range of, from qualitative to quantitative. 
 

I would also think of it in terms of anecdotal versus like data, right? Are you just taking a kind of one off, data checkpoint for all of your customers within this region, or are you, asking someone to give a verbal response, in the form of a tiny little written paragraph, about what they think about that, that purchasing experience? 
 

but yeah, Some of these example questions that they, have in these custom surveys that they've already created are things like, how much would you expect to pay for X? why might you purchase X instead of Y compared to other products like it? What would you say that it does well or that it does poorly or whatever? 
 

again, this is. Because it's more anecdotal and because it's more qualitative than quantitative, these can vary a lot. And I think Walmart does give suppliers a lot of room to customize their own surveys as well. But I'm curious about that. For people who've been using it a lot, what have you found that to be helpful with or not. 
 

Something to consider is, again, it's about the, supplier's retailer team's relationship with the, supplier organization at large. Is this stuff that is really important for the whole organization? in which case, maybe it's that. Maybe it's the team who's doing a lot of, customer success at the org level who would be really interested in that. 
 

In which case maybe you can find a more creative way of funding something like Charter than just, than it just being the retailer team who has to bear that burden. just, curious things that I think about whenever I think about something like customer perception, which to me seems really fascinating. 
 

okay. Want to cover this pretty quickly so we can save some time for questions at the end. I want to call on, we have, I see that we have one question already that we can get to at the end, but please get your questions in, preferably ahead of time if you have any. this one, I, there's some pretty interesting stuff that's coming out every month from, from Luminate. 
 

So we want to call this out, it is an app in development still. It's been a year but it's still growing and it seems like it will continue to grow in a lot of ways for the future. A part of what I see the, sea change from DSS to Luminate being, is that now Walmart can make changes pretty regularly. 
 

Whereas in DSS, it's a bigger, it's a bigger engine, it's harder to get parts moved around within that. Whereas in Luminate, it's They can add things in all the time. So that I see being really beneficial from their perspective as well. So one thing, just keep an eye on this. If you're logging into Luminate daily or weekly, then you'll see these release notes in the form of a pop up most likely. 
 

unless there's someone else on your team who gets the pop up and then maybe closes it or says, yes, I see this and then you don't get to see it. so it's good to go and just check these and we'll show you a couple of example of these. We've got the October one in there too. September and October is what we'll show you just so you get a little bit of a sense of, what it means. 
 

but if you want to look at all of them, they've got them all backlogged. They're up until January or February of this year, whenever they were, Really filling out the app still and adding a bunch of things all the time. you go to Resources and then Release Notes. In the Resources tab, that's where you're also going to see all those educational articles about what these apps are and how to use them. 
 

It's a really helpful place to go, especially if you're just getting started. again, some of those articles are more helpful than others. You may want to just go in and build a report. Okay, so yeah, I mentioned here that these are released monthly, and they're ordered by month, but you can sort them on the left side, there on the left nav, there's a, a way that you can sort it by, by the app within Charter or within Luminate that's being updated. 
 

So if you're just wanting to see shopper behavior updates, you can look at that too. I don't know if we have that image on one of these slides or not. But yeah, it may be helpful to just go back to the very beginning and look at all of it. Excuse me. So this is what one looks like. This is maybe a little bit on the heavier side. 
 

but there's a lot of, there's a lot of information, in this, but yeah, you're going to see the, ReportBuilder and ShopperBehavior. These will almost always have, updates every month, just little things they're adding in. some of these things are very not specific, for ReportBuilder, they have just Vendor Performance Scorecard listed there as if it's an update. 
 

but that's, Always lived there in the report builder before the month of September of this year. So maybe that just means there's updates that are happening in there for basic, Luminate basic users. So yeah, there's different levels of specificity. You see here the digital landscapes callout. 
 

Enhanced Consolidation, Enhanced Consolidated External Traffic from X or Twitter, and Updated Product Selection Hierarchy Updates in Global Filters. so Digital Landscapes, has an update there that is a little bit more specific. There's a little bit more information, that they're putting in there. 
 

But we've highlighted here, the big ones. Report Builder, Shopper Behavior. These are the ones that most people are going to be using. a lot of the time and, yeah, just wanted to call it out. Shopper behavior, switching on units, new user functions and improvements, and switching report, report title and duration of weeks displayed in the report interface, and updates to reports user interface. 
 

Again, some of these, this is basically just their way of saying, hey, we've worked on this app this month. Sometimes it is a little bit more granular or specific. this is that same pathway, that was September. the, takeaways is that these, the language that Walmart is using is the word enhanced for talking about these reports, which basically just means that they're including more details that they didn't have before. 
 

And maybe some of those details were available in DSS and they were not available in the basic or the charter apps up until that point. Walmart has a bad habit of making people migrate to a new app or a new thing without finishing it. or, another way of looking at it without, trying to make Walmart seem like the bad guy is just that there's always bugs and there's always new things that you realize that you missed once you get a bunch of users on an app. 
 

And that's an important thing to really remember, too. but one thing we wanted to call out is there are UX updates that are happening. Obviously, they've rebranded too. yeah. Report title. This is an example. Report title and duration of weeks displayed in the report interface and updates to reports user interface. 
 

that makes sense to me a lot too as a newer app. you'll get a lot of feedback from people who are having a very hard time reading any app. That's new, no matter how user friendly it is from the very beginning. So it's no surprise to us that we'll see that we'll probably continue to see a lot of UX, updates in these apps as it goes along. 
 

And again, hopefully, Lord willing, they will be really helpful UX reports as well. So in October, this was, very early in the month. so we got to include this month's, release notes as well. they have a new product, Insights Activation. I'm not sure if anyone's really familiar with this or if anyone has actually used it already. 
 

but we're gonna call out, this also took the form of a, took the form of a, yeah, here it is, a pop up that we'll look at here too. if you missed this pop up in your Luminate, you'll be getting the slide deck here in a couple of days, too. So you can just read it there and hold on to it there if you want to see Walmart's language for what this Insights activation is all about. 
 

But it seems really on the surface just to be a way of trying to better integrate Luminate with Walmart Connect, which is their, their ads app, basically. So you can, so you can take insights from Luminate and help that to guide your advertising, in store and, and So the, the language at the bottom of this, notification is speak to your administrator to get access. 
 

I think that's, yeah, that's just right down there. so whoever your retail link admin is, say, Hey, please, I want this. But yeah, so Walmart Lumina Insights Activation seamlessly generates new opportunities based on shopper behavior based insights to inform and optimize Walmart Connect Ad Center Display campaigns. 
 

That's a, that is a Walmart sentence if I ever heard one. but yeah, your Walmart Connect, Ad Center Display campaigns. potentially this would be a kind of like an AI thing. It, they don't use the words AI. but the same kind of idea of if based off of these reports, we recommend making these, ad campaigns, something like that. 
 

Not totally sure, what that looks like. And I've never spent, any time in Walmart Connect. So I'm not sure what that, what this insights activation visually is going to look like at all. but yeah, you have the, the API integrations in Walmart, Luminate, Charter. And that's what this kind of seems like to me is we can be running these reports constantly and then using that to, to give us some ideas for what kind of ads we should do. 
 

Save compelling media opportunities directly to the Walmart Connect Ad Center, where you can activate them through display campaigns. That to me seems like there's something in Luminate now that you can do to where you're basically making campaigns in Luminate. but, yeah, a lot of this is just very high level, eliminate cumbersome efforts required to analyze data and extract relevant insights and opportunities through automatically generated recommendations delivered bi weekly campaigns. 
 

for every brand across various subcategories. So yeah, that's the kind of thing where even if people aren't using AI, they'll say it's AI. but, credit to Walmart for not doing that here. It seems like that sort of thing of just, we can cut out this. this process that you would have to do of transitioning from, these store related insights to how that should work for advertising. 
 

So that's, something to watch out for, on the horizon, but we've got plenty of time for questions. So let's get into them. 
 

[00:45:31] Danielle: for going through all of that content, Peter. we have a couple of questions that have come through. So the first one came through in the beginning of the webinar, and this was around report building. 
 

And so the question is from Roseanne and is asking, Warehouse slash e com only sales will apply in the filters too. So will warehouse e com only sales apply in the filters too? 
 

[00:45:57] Peter: yes. I think, I would say warehouse slash e com only sales will apply in the filters too. So you want to look at, e com only, that should be visible, whether you have basic or charter. 
 

I think it's what. The limitations of Basic are on, point of sale, in terms of is this a pick up from store, type of situation. So I think that you should be able to filter by that, but yeah, just go in and try it and see how they're displaying that information.  
 

[00:46:41] Danielle: Thank you. So the next question that we had come through is from Shane and he's asking, what added value do you see in Charter versus Basic, specifically in the supply chain data sets? 
 

For example, DC level in stock, performance, odds of performance, et cetera. 
 

[00:46:59] Peter: Yeah, I don't, I wouldn't say that I know of, enough about what kind of, what's the customization you could do in those data sets that would really I don't think you'll see a lot of, cash return on value for Charter when it comes to OTIF, really, at all. 
 

And same thing with in stocks. I think that your data is supposed to be accurate, whether you have Basic, whether you have Charter. Charter, and you should be able to see all of those just fine from Basic. But I, that could be my ignorance talking more than anything else. So I would definitely just, I would definitely just, try pulling all of those reports, with what you have right now in Basic. 
 

Everyone should have Basic, by the way. We skipped some of the introductory slides as well, but if you haven't been in yet, you should just be able to use your retail link credentials to get in. If you can't, then you could talk to your admin as well. But yeah, I would go in there and I would pull those in Basic and just See what it's like. 
 

I see the real benefit to Charter that I see from my reading and from my experience in the app and talking to other people is more of the like high level kind of profiling that you can do. The insights that you can gain from who your customers are, who's buying your stuff in stores, and what, What those behaviors are like, and this is why I say my experience has been, larger suppliers will say they'll see stuff like that and they'll say, absolutely, we need those reports. 
 

We need that data. whereas smaller suppliers, it's like, Hey, we're looking at sales and we're not going to get a lot more granular than that. as long as we're making a bunch of sales in Walmart, we're going to keep doing that because it's just so much more. beneficial to us. so yeah, I see it. 
 

That's why I talk more about like the CPG org and the Walmart team just because I think it's really big, suppliers are going to want to see all that data. Smaller suppliers maybe won't need to. but yeah, in terms of DC level in stock performance and OTIF performance, I don't see it. A super big benefit. 
 

But yeah, let me know someone in the chat too, if you feel like there could be one, that I'm not thinking about. 
 

[00:49:30] Danielle: Great question. our next question is from Adam. How would you recommend best using customer and basket panel filters in shopper behavior? It seems like there is a lot of information that may be too confusing to slice that small. 
 

[00:49:45] Peter: Yeah. Yeah. Great question. I've talked with people who have. this is just more complication, so this won't really answer your question. A lot of people will purchase category data from Nielsen and integrate it into Charter as well to generate insights on competitor, performance. So that's something if you want just more complication and not simpler, but it seems like you want a little bit more, ways of simplifying it. 
 

And I, I don't have much that will be helpful. I will say though that The feedback that Walmart gets, I think, from suppliers is that every report is so big. reports are not, I mentioned this when I was talking about DSS, is, there's just so many in DSS that didn't change very much. and now you have a, it's simplified in the sense that there's fewer reports, fewer data sets, but they are so big that, it feels just like maybe offloading more of that. 
 

interpretation responsibility on to the suppliers, which is tough. but yeah, we didn't talk about, the basket, reports at all. I recommend going to the ebook and just searching around in there for some of that, cause we cover that in a little bit more detail there. but yeah, it, there is a lot of information, and it is very confusing, to slice that small. 
 

I think, yeah, I don't know. Item level insights. Is my only recommendation, but that's everyone's doing that already anyways. but yeah, that's my, I don't have any recommendations or any, advice for, for helping to narrow that down, I think, or maybe just, spending a lot of time with it, pulling a bunch of different reports and trying to add as many filters as you can. 
 

but yeah, I'm sure that I'm sure that's stuff that you're doing already anyways. 
 

[00:52:00] Danielle: Thank you, Peter. Those are all great questions. it looks like we didn't have any further questions come through. I'm going to give it a little bit more time. and just in the meantime, call out some of our resources. 
 

so if you're looking for more hands on material that you can look back to, I did mention this earlier, but we have multiple e books that cover a variety of topics and for different retailers. Up on the slide is specifically for Walmart, so some of the popular e books in this case would be like that Walmart Deduction Codes Explained, and the Walmart Department Categories and Finelines. 
 

So if you go to our website, these are all available, they're free, just click on resources and you can find them under e books or cheat sheets. And we also recently released the fiscal calendar for Walmart for next year. So if you want to get ahead on planning, I'm going to send that link for you to download too. 
 

But that is all that we have. If you guys think of any further questions or would just like to share any insights, please feel free to reach out to us on our email or you can find us at supplypike.com. We would love to continue the conversation with you. But until then, thank you guys so much for joining. 
 

We will see you next time.