Retail Updates Every Supplier Should Before 2025 

[00:00:00] Peter Spaulding: We're doing, retail updates for 2025. we're the supplier wiki team. this is Allie. I'm Peter. We're on, one of, one of us is on basically every one of these webinars now. you might get tired of, of hearing from us, as we go. But this is us today. Our agenda is a little bit of news, so what's happening in the industry. 
 

And we'll do a little engaging trivia as well to get everyone,off their seats and thinking. And then we're going to go by retailer. What are some of the important changes and updates that, suppliers should know for each of these?Walmart, Target, And then we'll do Amazon, Home Depot, and Kroger as well in kind of one big section because the updates aren't as widespread there. 
 

And we'll do a Q& A at the end too. get those questions in early too. Speaking of, how do you do that? you can use the chat for more like public discourse, but our Q& A tab is for the more formal questions that you have for us regarding these updates. Oftentimes, if we don't have the answer to these, we can pass them on to someone else at the org who is more of a subject matter expert in that particular retailer or that particular compliance program or whatever it is. 
 

if we don't have the answers for you, we do know someone who does, or we know, how close we can get to an answer for some of those too. that's one of the wonderful things about, SupplierWiki. And then another question that we get pretty commonly is, will you be getting it? Copy of the slide deck. 
 

Yes, you will. So there's no need to take super, vigorous notes. you'll, we'll be sending out a copy of the slide deck as well as a recording of this webinar in the next three to four business days. We also have all of our slide decks and all of our recordings on our, domain at SupplierWiki.SupplyPike.com. 
 
You can see all of those under the on demand section. And so you can download. and you can view the old webinars as well. So let that be a helpful resource for you, as well. 
 

talked a little bit about SupplierWiki, but, SupplyPike is our,parent organization. Excuse me. 
 

I can feel that coming from At SupplyPike, basically what we're doing is we're using, automation software to help make the dispute process go really smoothly. So we partner with, or we, aggregate all of the shipping documents that are relevant to certain kinds of revenue loss. In order to do, validity checks on those and then automate the dispute process so that you guys can save time working on your, growing your business instead of trying to deal with all of that. 
 

that's really how we got started. We like to summarize what we do is helping suppliers to get paid. and then get better as well with visibility into compliance performance and supplier performance generally. So we're in a bunch of different categories and we work with a wide variety of suppliers and it's one of the coolest things about our job is that we really get to hear from the really big players in the retail space, the really big suppliers, as well as some of the smaller ones who are going to be only in one or two stores or one or two DCs. 
 

we get to interact with a lot of different kinds of suppliers and that helps us on the SupplierWiki side create educational content that is, that can span that whole range. that's another kind of cool thing that we do there too. So SupplierWiki, we are a team on this,in SupplyPike and our goal is to basically help create as much educational content as possible, for suppliers. 
 

To help them,with whatever it is. So not just revenue loss, but maybe it's, shipping and routing as you can see there. Or, we've been talking a ton about Luminate right now, soon to be scintilla with that, rebranding. but yeah, whatever the issue is, whatever the hazy fog of confusion is, whether that's a compliance program or some new initiative of a retailer's or whatever. 
 

We want to cover it and we want to help. y'all understand as much of it as possible, help summarize long, confusing documents, but also just connect suppliers with each other to be able to share insights, as well. So that's what our content really is, that's the main goal of it. 
 

of course, as I always like to say, if there's any, if there's any questions or recommendations that you have, anything that you're finding particularly confusing right now, you can put it in the Q& A, you could DM us, you can send it to our emails as well at the end. we'd love, we'd just love to hear from you guys about, what are the things that are really tripping you up right now, or that, you would like to learn more about? 
 

Whether that's in the form of a webinar, or an article, or something like that as well. That's that. That's some of our, resources. Now we're going to get into a trivia question. 
 

[00:04:47] Allie Truong: All right, Peter's going to launch our trivia question that should show up on your screen, and you can participate. I also don't know the answer to this, which global retailer pioneered the cross docking approach to make its supply chain more efficient? 
 

I feel like I'm going to answer this wrong. I think it's Walmart, but for some reason, Peter, Ikea is speaking to me. 
 

[00:05:09] Peter Spaulding: IKEA.  
 

[00:05:10] Allie Truong: that's a really great, we didn't write this question. someone else on our team did, so we're answering it in real time. I could see them being really great at that too. I, they're just so efficient. 
 

If you go into an IKEA, it's it's beautiful. 
 

[00:05:22] Peter Spaulding: Yeah. 
 

[00:05:23] Allie Truong: Walmart. 
 

[00:05:24] Peter Spaulding: It's amazing. It's a trap. That's what, I'm sorry. I shouldn't, that's, 
 

[00:05:26] Allie Truong: It is effective retail. That's what we'll say. 
 

[00:05:32] Peter Spaulding: My vote is for Amazon. We only have one vote for Amazon so far. I think I'll close this out pretty soon. So get your votes in if you haven't already. 
 

Angela said in the chat, Walmart seems pretty confident. We've also got, so we've got 10 voters. Eight of them have selected Walmart. 80 percent of our voters have said Walmart. And then we have one vote for Amazon, one vote for Costco. I'm going to end it right now, share the results. And we don't know what the correct answer is, unless It's probably Walmart. That's the Democratic vote. That's the people's choice, is Walmart. Do we have a slide with the answer in it? 
 

[00:06:08] Allie Truong: We don't. I can always check the notes. I'm pretty sure it's Walmart. Peter, you go verify. That we have the answer. I think it's in the slide deck notes, but we'll just keep going on and then you let us know if we're right. 
 

I think Walmart's right. awesome. We're going to go ahead and get started today. Like Peter said, we're covering a lot of recap that happened in 2024 across retailers. There was a lot that went on. primarily, we're going to focus on Walmart and Target because there were more changes in those retailers. 
 

However, we will cover some of the changes in Target, in Home Depot, Kroger, and I think we've got one more in there. Let me go back just to make sure I know. Yeah, Amazon, Home Depot, Kroger. I keep forgetting Amazon. What's going on? And Peter said the answer is Walmart, so congrats to everyone who said that. 
 

And no one voted for Ikea, so it definitely was a good, trick one. Okay, we're gonna start with just some news, what's happened in the last couple of days. This type of webinar that we're doing is modeled off of our VendorVille newsletter. If you're not a part of that, I highly suggest going and signing up. 
 

Peter can send a link to signing up if you're not a part of that. What we've been doing is sharing retail news that we see, and then we'll typically dive into a topic that is pertinent to retailers, and I'll cover some of those. We have webpages of all of the VendorVille content that we publish, but if you want to get first to the source of some of that content, signing up for the newsletter is the best way to do that. 
 

you might see some of these headlines in that newsletter, coming up this week or from past newsletters. big thing, Walmart has completed the acquisition of Vizio. Vizio owns TVs, primarily, is what you may have seen, but they also own a lot of other things. Namely, they refer to it as Customer Entertainment Experiences. 
 

So this is going to be plugging into Walmart Connect, which is the advertising business at Walmart. So I'm interested to see, as well as I'm sure some of you else are, is understanding how this partnership is going to flourish and what that's going to mean for those who are using Walmart Connect. So we'll be keeping an eye on that. 
 

Makes sense. Best Buy is launching scheduled partial delivery. So that's, again, something that is going to be more of that last mile that's been very, key for retailers like Walmart, Target, etc. so there's going to be more of that coming in Best Buy so it makes sense for them. And then last headline we wanted to call out, that's come up in the last couple of days is Walmart is closing their New Jersey Sam's Club Fulfillment Center and that is going to be relocated to other facilities within the Retail Fulfillment Network. 
 

Namely, there is a New Age DC that is coming up in Pennsylvania. If you want to read those articles, Peter can send those links in the chat. But that should be interesting to see how Walmart has continued to invest a lot of their dollars and a lot of their Tech into fulfillment centers. That's been something they've been talking about for years. 
 

So this is continuing to unfold. Alright, we're going to get into changes for Walmart suppliers. This is probably going to be our media section. And fair warning to Peter and everyone else, I'm going to be sending a lot of resources because SupplierWiki already recapped a lot of this information. Really, we want to cover it now for you guys, so you're able to see what you missed, send these resources to your colleagues who this may affect them in 2025, or even today, and then just do that roundup of all the things that have gone on. 
 

All right, here's just the Too long didn't read summary of the major changes that happened at Walmart. The OTIF program had an update, so there is actually a reduction in the goal amounts, and we'll get into those numbers specifically here in a second. SQEP program continued. We saw some effects with the changes to ASNs, which increased ASN fines on the SQEP side. 
 

But Phase 4 is still pending, so that scheduling and transportation has not rolled out. And I don't know, we've been tracking SQEP for a while. That's in 2022 or 2021 when it launched. And SQEP still has not launched Phase 4, so that's still pending. But the other phases are continuing to be iterated on. 
 

The Collect Pickup Program changed to the Fuel Management Program, and it was actually a reduction in the fees that are, collected from suppliers, which is great, but we'll talk about what that means. And then settlement disputing went away in, I believe 2023. There were some suppliers still getting settlement disputes in 2024. 
 

It's really on a case by case basis, but this year was the year of suppliers learning how to use the mass dispute creation tool and learning how to dispute manually in APDP, Walmart's disputing portal for AP deductions. And then the other big update, probably the one that is still affecting suppliers the most, is DSS is sunsetted. 
 

It is gone. I don't believe there's any reports that have functionality anymore. So I don't think that anyone can use DSS and now it is gone. All transferred to Luminate BASIC, which is the free version or charter, and Luminate is getting a name change and it is being called Scintilla. We just did a webinar on this, so you can go and look at the slide deck, and get signed up for the recording. 
 

Peter will send that link if you want to see the updates that happened in Scintilla. There's not a ton yet, but we are anticipating in 2025 with the name change, the rebrand, there will probably be some updates. So stay tuned for that. We'll be keeping you guys updated too. And then SupplierOne. 
 

SupplierOne is a new platform. It launched and it cancelled out some of the functionality on item 360 and has transferred in some of the other applications. So we'll get into that in detail as well. But really a lot for suppliers to keep up with your day to day. So pat yourselves on the back because you've really been through the ringer. 
 

These are a lot of challenges or things you have to pivot around. So great job guys. If no one's telling you, I'm going to tell you. Alright, let's get into the compliance updates. We started talking about OTIF compliance updates, but what actually happened? this is just a timeline of what's happened, in the last couple years. 
 

I do feel like in the retail world, especially as a supplier, and especially as a Walmart supplier, it's good to have this context because there has been a lot of changes in the last couple years. If you are a new supplier, it may feel like it's just always changing, and that might be the case because it's been updating for a while. 
 

We're going to go back to 2017 when OTIF launched. That program has continued to build out, and the goals haven't changed that much, but they did this year, so we'll talk through that. And then SQEP, which is essentially like a sister program to OTIF, launched and is continuing its, So they're making updates, they're tweaking how they're tracking things as their DCs are updating, and rolling out those phases as needed since 2021. 
 

So like I mentioned, OTIF, the OTIF program, which stands for On Time and In Full, That compliance program updated February 1st of 2024. I know, it does not feel like it's almost been a year ago, but it has. And Walmart actually relaxed their OTIF goals. They brought down that 98 percent to about 95 for the total goal, which is surprising for Walmart. 
 

they typically have high expectations, so they relaxed that. and then they moved the charging from monthly to quarterly, so it's actually a little bit more manageable for suppliers to then go in, understand their disputes, and then either dispute them or accept those fines from the compliance issues. 
 

All right. These are the new on time OTIF goals, and I'm really going to just break down the simple, high level OTIF, what that means. But we do have content on OTIF at Walmart. We've got articles, e books, webinars, so you can go and explore that. Peter will send some of our more recent ones that explain that, if you are completely new in that program, is something that you're not aware of and want to learn more about. 
 

we'll start with ONTIME, so that is the first part of that acronym, and what does that mean? when you're delivering with any supplier, especially Walmart, you need to have your delivery there just in time. You can't send it too early, because there may not be space in the DC for you, and it may not be slotted, because everything is working, very succinctly, and you obviously can't send it late, because there's an expectation, there are trucks coming in to then, you know,CrossDock and take them to stores, whatever the situation is. 
 

There's a lot of moving parts and early and late deliveries are going to lead to congestion and then it's going to lead to compliance issues on your side as a supplier and getting compliance fines. what are the expectations? Walmart expects for you to deliver to DCs on time if you're prepaid. 
 

prepaid versus collect being Walmart freight is or someone is representing Walmart. You are getting all of your stuff ready to be picked up. When it comes to prepaid, you are asking a 3PL or maybe you have your own logistics or freight vertical within your business. You need to be delivering to DCs on time. 
 

So even if someone Let's say C. H. Robinson is representing you for prepaid. If you're not, if they're not getting to the D. C. on time, it's still your responsibility to work with them and to own that fine. So the goal is to 90 percent of the time be on time to delivery. So that has actually lowered. I believe it was 95. 
 

In the past, and that's lower to 90. And then for our collect POs, so that means that Walmart Freight or someone else is representing Walmart on behalf of their freight business, is making sure the supplier has routed or confirmed the POs on time. And ensuring that the POs are ready for carrier pickup. 
 

it's like when you were, if you ever rode the bus at school, if you didn't have your backpack, and you didn't, you weren't ready to step on that bus, and you weren't waiting at the stop sign, for the bus driver, you were not on time, you were not ready to be collected and taken to school. It's the same for our PO, our collect POs. 
 

That is staying at 98, and that makes sense because typically that means you have less responsibility in getting there. There's a couple less steps when it comes to delivering that on time, versus prepaid, so still higher, and that's something that you can collaborate with Walmart. If it's their responsibility, it wouldn't impact you, in a compliance fine. 
 

All right, I spent a lot of time on The on time part in full is really simple. Essentially, Walmart expects to receive 100 percent of all their ordered cases. But of course, this is the real world and this is the supply chain world. So we understand that there are mistakes happen. There are issues. And, the current goal is 95%, And that's what's been changed. 
 

So what is Walmart's expectation when it comes to infall? They expect suppliers to fill orders to the exact quantity ordered 95 percent of the time. There are issues where you may get a compliance fine and it's actually not your risk, your fault as a supplier. It would be an invalid charge. You can dispute that. 
 

We'll talk about that a little bit as well. But you can see that in some of our other content. You can also see with compliance charges that this might bleed into some other programs, like getting a deduction for a shortage. When you walk through the expectation of filling orders to the exact quantity ordered, there's a couple ways you can mess that up. 
 

Whether it's Walmart's responsibility to address the issue or the supplier's. That could be you're not filling any of the orders, you've only filled some of the orders, it's a shortage, or you've overfilled, that would be an overage. So you can see how this bleeds into AP deductions. All right, and then here's a quick overview of OTIF tools. 
 

There's two different places for you to start working on your OTIF compliance issues. First is in RetailLink. You go to the OTIF dashboard. It's been around, I believe, since 2017, and they've continued to work on that OTIF dashboard, so it's got a lot of metrics in there. It's visibility to your OTIF data. 
 

I believe it's still on 13 weeks, so it can't go back completely. but essentially, you just work through. through that, that data on the OTIF scorecard and use that, when looking at your OTIF fines. And then if you're going to actually dispute an OTIF fine, you log into HiRadius. It's a separate login. 
 

We can send you that information if you don't have that, but it's HiRadius representing Walmart as a dispute portal for both OTIF fines and SQEP fines. You can do those in the same place. You cannot dispute. AP deductions in high radius. That is an APDP, which we'll talk about here in a second. All right, like I said, we're going to talk about deductions and fees. 
 

So before we talked about compliance fines, those are fines that you can dispute. You can say, hey, these are invalid. I want to actually not pay for these. They're typically not auto deducted, so you're saying ahead of time, hey, please don't charge me for these. Or if they are auto deducted, you're going back and saying, hey, please repay that amount of money to me, because this charge was actually invalid. 
 

When it comes to deductions and fees, we've paired these together because they feel like you can dispute both of them, but you actually can't. You can dispute deductions, However, you can't dispute fees. So this is Walmart's specific language. If you hear deductions, fines, chargebacks, you can dispute those. 
 

Fees are something that is not disputable, and there's not an actual particular portal for those charges. So we'll get into what that looks like. We're going to start with the fuel management program, and I want you to keep that word fee in mind. The fuel management program. A lot's fees, so these are non disputable. 
 

And this is for collect suppliers who use Walmart Freight in the US. And if you're familiar with the Collect Pickup Program, it is essentially feels very similar to that particular program. we'll get into the timeline here. if you were with us back in 2022, we were talking about the Collect Pickup Program. 
 

And that was something that was rolled out just before 4th of July. Essentially, it was saying, hey, suppliers, because of fuel costs and because of some of the other things that we're seeing in the transportation industry, we're going to be charging these, you need to share, the EDLP cost for customers. 
 

And this is a part of that. And that went into effect August 1st, 2022, for all Collect suppliers, and there were some issues with fees and the fees charged. There were some errors, and it was two parts. There was a percentage for your department. And then there was a, an amount for the amount of fuel that you are using, essentially. 
 

that's now changed. So in February 2024, the Collect Pickup Program was replaced by the Fuel Management Program. And essentially they got rid of the percentage, for department. So that's no longer being charged.I didn't see, I haven't seen any reason why they changed that, and I don't think they spoke to it. 
 

I know there were a lot of issues with how that was, actually rolling out and being charged to suppliers. It's also changing on a monthly basis, so it didn't seem like a attainable thing to ask suppliers to, Hey, you're going to get this percentage that we're going to take from your cost of goods, each month. 
 

Figure it out. That's really hard when you're planning with the razor thin margins that suppliers know that they're working with. so the fuel management program is what has replaced that. A couple things to take away. Why? Why is this something that Walmart's doing? It's the same as the CollectPickup program, and actually we do have articles on this showing in detail. 
 

What's the same and what's changed and Peter can send that. I'm making him work in the background. it's essentially just the extra costs to offset suppliers that should be taken into account with the transportation industry and then talking through. Collect versus prepaid. We have this conversation a lot with suppliers. 
 

Typically, you get to a point where you're doing a mix of both. there are some suppliers who are all in and collect. Some are doing all prepaid. They all have different benefits. There's not a wrong answer, but there are benefits and drawbacks that are going to be pertinent to the type of business you have, the type of product you have, the type of budget and cash flow. 
 

There's lots of factors to consider. This is a great place to start with the fuel management program and say, hey, we're going to get these fees no matter what. Are we baking this into our cost? Does it make sense to stay collect? Would it be better to work prepaid? What's the cost to working prepaid and shipping that into Walmart that way? 
 

Really just an analysis. So consider this when you're thinking about if you're changing how you're going to be doing, transportation. All right, now we're transitioning into deductions. reminder, we're talking about fees. Those are really not disputable unless there's just an obvious glaring issue, and there's not a dispute process for that, so it's going to be by email. 
 

When it comes to disputing your AP deductions, A huge change happened. Settlement disputing, which was essentially Walmart reaching out and saying, Hey, you have this bucket of deductions. We're going to say that 40 percent of these are valid, and we're going to take this chunk of change for what that is. 
 

And 60 percent of those are invalid, and we're going to pay that back to you, or not charge you for it, depending on where your deductions were. That's no longer, a practice of Walmart's that is mainstream. They have this year done that kind of on a case by case basis to catch up with the amount of deductions, claims that they were working with. 
 

So we have talked to some suppliers who had settlements with Walmart even in this last quarter. so it's still something that's going on, but it is a Walmart initiated initiative. It's not something that's initiated by suppliers, and they are directing suppliers to use APDP. what is that? The Accounts Payable Dispute Portal is a application within RetailLink, and they have a feature called Mass Dispute Creation, and essentially what you do is you click a bunch of the deductions that you want to dispute, and you hit send, and you can send about 500 at a time. 
 

At this time, you can't attach proof documentation to all those claims. So it is a little bit more like throwing spaghetti at the wall, seeing what sticks. And then there are deductions that may get denied that you would want to go back and manually dispute individually. So we recommend suppliers try, if you're not a customer of ours, you can forego this. 
 

But if you're wanting to do this manually, You can try mass dispute creation and then go back in and dispute manually the rest of them that come back as denied because you can actually dispute with Walmart. I think up to 3 times is the number that we see. There's not like a hard and fast rule. But when we work with suppliers, you can typically dispute about up to 3 times and you'll get a lot more. 
 

bang for your buck if you're doing it that way. All right, so just to show you some of the changes that have happened to APDP. It launched in 2021, which feels like so long ago, but it's really not. It replaced DirectCommerce, so if you see that name thrown around, that used to be the platform that they were disputing on. 
 

There's no more historical data that needs to be pulled from that typically, and that's just to have a better disputing process. Then in October 2022, the announcement of settlement disputing was ended. They started phasing that out. The phasing out process has gone longer than six months, but this is the official timeline from Walmart, and then all suppliers have moved to disputing individually, and there are still suppliers that are working on understanding how to individually dispute and finding best practice for that outside of settlement. 
 

All right, just a couple more things on mass dispute creation. It sounds like a like for but again, it's not. It's more individual disputing, so finding ways for your team to dispute faster and more efficiently is key. If that's with SupplyPike, We can send a link so you can see what that looks like disputing with Walmart. 
 

Peter will send you to our product page, but we're going to keep focusing on changes for Walmart suppliers, because I feel like the biggest changes this year have been in apps and platforms. There's been a lot of investment from Walmart. on their tech and what they're doing within their apps and platforms for suppliers. 
 

And that has really changed a lot of the ways that all of y'all work. And I've heard it from suppliers. I've seen it in some of the conversations, the frustration, and the curiosity that it's taken this year to adapt to those. We're going to start with supplier one. Like I said in the beginning, supplier one essentially rolled out as a platform that didn't have a lot of application in it. 
 

First it was just items in inventory, which is essentially the duplicate functionality of item 360. Now item 360 is being sunsetted and that is not the application that you're supposed to be setting up items in or doing maintenance in. And that was really the first, That was the first application within SupplierOne, and when you look at this picture here, this is actually from SupplierOne, their side tab. 
 

It was just Items and Inventory, and then Reports, Performance, and Forecasts. They've added it here, so I'll walk through this. And I would recommend, if you haven't yet, If you haven't touched SupplierOne because you thought, oh, this is just item management and I don't have to work in that, there's somebody else on my team, go in and look at it. 
 

It's definitely worth taking a look. I think, this is my tinfoil hat, so don't take this as, the,end all be all. But I imagine that we'll see more, investment in this and possibly more applications in RetailLink moved over to item, to SupplierOne. So order management has similar functionality to Nova. 
 

It's not a like for Nova still is the application you should be using for order management, but We're going to be keeping an eye on if that's changing, and if we see Nova going away, but you can look up POs, and understand that you just can't execute changes in order management. 
 

Then ship point management, if we're scrolling down. That is new, that's been added in the last, in this quarter. It's essentially Aspen. So I don't know the rollout or the sun setting for Aspen, but that's what it's been compared to. So if someone wants to drop that, I think we have an article on it. I know we wrote a newsletter on it and that is on SupplierWiki. 
 

So you can go and look at that. The details for that. And then Payments, that's going to have some like pretty basic visibility on deductions data and info. It is a helpful starting place, but again, you can't dispute, maybe a tab that you want to have open though when you're doing proof documentation in APDP. 
 

So that's a good consideration. And the Reports, it's just a ton of different reports that suppliers have used. You may want to go look at this if you have been struggling with DSS being gone, and Illuminate being your one reporting application. There is some stuff in here that may be helpful and may be a like for so I'd recommend that. 
 

And then performance, this actually links to a lot of the scorecards that are already in RetailLink, like OTIF, Scorecard, SQEP, Scorecard, the ASN Scorecard. So it's all in one place, and when you click On, some of that data, it actually takes you to those scorecard pages. So it's just another, quick links that you can use, and those scorecards are aggregated in one place, which is nice. 
 

And then Demand and Forecasts, Daily Demand, Inventory Record. So again, really helpful stuff, really quick to, just look at and be able to use. curious if anyone's in the chat, if you've used it or have a helpful feature, please mention it, so some other suppliers can learn from you. Okay. We all know about this. 
 

If you don't, where have you been? Walmart replaced DSS with Luminate in 2024. This rollout time changed several times. It was supposed to be Q1, then it became Q2, and then they slowly Discontinued some of the applications or the reports you could pull in DSS. So this has been a slow burn, but it's a it's like a breakup a little bit where we were losing DSS. 
 

And if you've been a supplier for many years, it truly is a breakup. DSS has been around since like 1997. Discontinued some of the applications or the reports you could pull in DSS. So this has been a slow burn, but it's a it's like a breakup a little bit where we were losing DSS. Yeah, it will be missed, and in some ways it won't. 
 

But, suppliers essentially have two options with Luminate. You can go use the Basic, so their required unpaid service, and then the Charter, which is the optional paid service. And if you haven't seen what those look like, We have webinars on them. Peter actually just did one last week, I believe, so that recording will be up here in a couple days. 
 

So you can go sign up for the webinar still, and you'll actually get that recording sent to you. SupplierWiki tip. I'm going to skip. The question for the chat, but if you feel,feel like you want to share if you've started using Luminate and if there's something helpful, please share that about Luminate or SupplierOne. 
 

I'd love to hear that. So what was lost? Some of you already know what was lost and you can feel that, but essentially some of the flexibility of report building and DSS.like I said, there's been a big adjustment for suppliers who have used DSS, in the past, had beautiful reports built out that they knew how to pull, and now they're pulling them in Luminate. 
 

Another thing I want to call out that we have heard the Luminate team say is, is don't compare old reports from DSS to Luminate. The way that they're pulling in data is different, so spend your time digging into how is Luminate pulling this number and understanding that, because what you'll end up doing is comparing apples to oranges if you're looking at a number from DSS and a number from Luminate that should line up. 
 

not in every case should they line up, so go and explore that depending on what report you're building. And then what was gained from The transition from DSS to Luminate. So there's more performance visibility, especially focused on Omnichannel and com. I know it was really hard to pull and DSS some of that information, and to parse that out. 
 

So suppliers, have a better insight into shopper behavior, especially if you're looking at, charter. There's a lot more information on the customer when it comes to baskets, assortment choices, categories, and you can pull customers. I haven't. worked with any suppliers who have used that, so I'm interested to know how that works. 
 

Again, that's a part of Charter. so you can build out insights that way, and what was mentioned, go check out our content where we've compared what's basic versus Charter if you're interested in that. and the biggest update that we have so far is Luminate's name is changing, so on October 1st. 
 

The DataVentures team, which is in charge of Luminate, Connect, etc., announced Luminate will start to be called Scintilla, which I believe is Latin for a small flame. If I read that correctly, someone can correct me if I'm wrong. And that's expected to begin in 2025. So if you log into Luminate and it's called Scintilla, you're still in the right place. 
 

And again, here's my tinfoil hat. Here's what I'm thinking as I look at this, and I wonder if anyone else is thinking the same. When there's a name change or a rebrand, I assume there's going to be changes and updates, and this is the beginning of their roadmap for this product, so I'm interested to see what those changes will look like. 
 

And of course, if you're subscribed to the newsletter and you're coming to these webinars, we're going to keep you updated and pull out the information suppliers care about, as we see those changes coming. All right, so much time on Walmart. I'm going to breeze through Target because really I want to just make y'all aware of what those changes are, and then we'll get into some of the other retailers. 
 

All right, so essentially, there was a lot of changes to OTIF programs, Walmart being one and Target being the other. They also dropped their on time information. on time and fill rate fines from 5 percent to 3 percent of cost of goods sold. And there's a lot of changes to this program. We actually worked on some content that we got to, talk to the actual team in charge of the compliance program. 
 

And this is something that they talked about having, a focus on making suppliers. Life's easier. And so I highly recommend if you have anybody on your team who is doing target, working on target compliance, to go review the deck that we built out covering all of these in detail. So I'm going to cover them really fast. 
 

Fill rates now assessed at item level rather than PO level, which can affect, how you're actually getting those fines and the visibility you have. Fine rates are going to be given based on fill rate original as to the revised amount. So this is actually a return from pre COVID, so it's undoing some of the strict, standards that were established. 
 

during COVID and how that affected supply chain. Prepaid suppliers move a window moved from two days early to one day before or after, so an update to MABD. And then collect suppliers have new on time release and supplier pickup adherence. And a lot of this rolled out, in Q3, so I'm switching over to the updates and announcements timeline, and it's going into effect in Q4. 
 

either Q3 or Q4. So this is going to be an adjustment that you're having this trial period now, and in 2025 there will be more adjustment that's coming from these changes. Like I said, Fines actually dropped from 5 percent to 3%, and the fill rates remain the same, but 100 percent on time is a little bit higher than Walmart's, and then the fill rate is actually, I believe, on par with Walmart's now. 
 

interesting to compare the two. And then I talked about, instead of P. O. level, fill rate is going to be at item level. This is actually I think helpful to suppliers in understanding what is happening with their supply chain, what's happening with their items, and then you're doing less analysis on the supplier's end of digging into that P.O. and what happened with it.  
 
Fill rate revised to fill rate original. Again, if you were a target supplier pre COVID, this will feel like a return to normalcy, so that's something that they wanted to update. and those Revisions will continue to be made and monitored in ShipIQ. And then the on time arrival window, that's a prepaid standard. 
 

It's continuing to, be just that shorter window. So the one day before, day after, or day of or day after. so it's a little less flexible, but again, that's what it has been in the past. And then new collect finds, so there's the on time release and then the supplier pickup adherence and that began in August 4th, 2024 and it's tracked in ShipIQ. 
 

If that's something that you've seen in your team, you're like, huh, I didn't know what those were. We should probably look at those. We're going to break them down here for you now. So essentially, the on time release is, if it's, if you're releasing that, PO, we'll just use that, even though it's at item level. 
 

It's less than 100%. You're going to find 1. 5 cost of goods on the units released late and missing. And for SPA, the supplier pickup and adherence, if it's less than 100%, it's again that 1. 5 cost of goods for those PO locations. And then the threshold is a 50 minimum. So even if you have products that are, that 1.5 cost of goods sold is less than that, it's going to be at that 50.  
 
What does this mean? again, I'll go through this really fast. We covered this in the Walmart OTIF compliance, but essentially if your inventory is not ready to be picked up, you're going to get a fine. If you haven't, established that pickup appointment that's available, Or it's the, shipping location is closed and you didn't, let your, target freight team know, then that's going to be another, compliance fine. 
 

And then target adjusted quantity. That's essentially defined as when the inventory analyst has added qualities late to the PO, and then the vendor is no longer able to have that product ready. So when you're adjusting the quantity and you can't fulfill it, you're going to have a Compliance fine for that. 
 

And then I already mentioned this, initiative intention. The SPM team at Walmart wants to keep fines down without lowering their standards, but also making it easier for suppliers to connect the dots when it comes to their supply chain performance, help Target have that replenishment optimization and sales optimization, and keeping that relationship positive without jeopardizing the relationship Target has with its customers. 
 

So keep looking out for that. And the update, or rather the timeline, is for 2024 to onboard everyone. So 2025 everyone is locked in and understands these. So you still have November and December, or December, to continue to update this, work on this program, and make sure that you are adhering to these new standards. 
 

All right, we've got a couple more minutes. I'm going to do a quick jump through Amazon. Home Depot, and Kroger.Amazon now allows suppliers to re dispute shorted claims. Really great. if your initial dispute claim was denied or was only partially approved, go ahead and re dispute it at an additional time, especially those big ticket charges. 
 

Go back in Vendor Central and dispute those. even if they are, if they're still on your docket, go back through and dispute those. That'd be my recommendation, especially before their timeline to dispute is over. And then the initial dispute must be completed before you submit a re dispute claim. 
 

That makes sense. And up to 10 shortage claims can be included in one re dispute. So you can essentially claim. Manually bulk dispute with Vendor Central, but if you have more than 10, you're going to have to create multiple re dispute claims. So that's exciting. Maybe a potential to win back more money before the year's over. 
 

With Home Depot, the transportation compliance program moved from quarterly disputing cadence to a monthly disputing cadence. So make sure you're keeping up to date with that. I know some suppliers weren't aware of this change. And they were keeping it on a quarterly dispute and then they have a huge backlog and maybe they've missed some of the dates for disputing when it moved to a monthly cadence. 
 

So make sure that your team is aware of that and is disputing in the correct cadence. Trade discounts are no longer disputable. That happened this year. We wrote a VendorVille article on that. You can go read it. so that functionality is not available. What we've told suppliers to focus on is the disputes they can, go after and actually win back. 
 

And make sure that you're learning how you can prevent any trade discount issues in the future to not lose any of that money that you can't actually dispute. And then the dispute window policy changed from 12 months based on the chargeback date to 12 months based on the invoice date. only. So again, make sure you understand those windows, how much time you have to dispute claims, make sure you're going after those in a timely manner so you're not losing money on the table from a issue like you didn't dispute in the window. 
 

And that window is pretty large, 12 months, so you have plenty of time to go after Home Depot deductions. And then lastly, not a lot of changes, especially on the deduction front with Kroger, but the Kroger and Albertson's merger may have an impact on how you're disputing or how you're working with those suppliers because Kroger did it. 
 

moved to buy Albertson, so it would essentially make it the largest grocery chain in, the US. The FTC is suing to stop the merger, but there hasn't been many updates on that. I believe when I was looking into it this morning, they've slated a judge for this, this case. Otherwise, there's not anything that has, come through in terms of a ruling. 
 

So we'll be keeping our eye on that because that may impact how suppliers are working with these particular retailers in the future. All right, I made it to the Q& A right on time. I know I made Peter work in the chat, and I'm ready to answer questions or even just talk about what we got into today. 
 

[00:44:20] Peter Spaulding: Yeah, I really, I was really spamming them for a little bit there as well. But yeah, we don't have any questions in yet, so definitely get those in now. if you have any of them or if there's some kind of lingering thoughts that you want to put in the chat, we'd be happy to see that as well. I think that we have our emails up here too that we can show just in case you think that you might have a question later, but you don't have one right now, you can go ahead and write those down now. 
 

Of course, we're on every webinar, so you can download basically any slide deck and you can see our emails there, too. So if you have any questions about,what the, these updates might mean in terms of revenue loss or whatever, you can definitely, send those questions our way. 
 

[00:45:01] Allie Truong: I have a question for you, and I can answer as well.

When you've just, you and I have worked on this content, read and researched about this. What do you think is one of the things suppliers should take away? from 2024 when moving into 2025. Maybe their supplier resolution, we could call it.  
 

[00:45:24] Peter Spaulding: New Year's resolution. I'm not so sure about what, action suppliers need to necessarily resolve to take. 
 

I think that the emphasis for 2024 at Walmart was more on, Helping suppliers become more compliant with their programs and making those more reasonable. I know that Target, their updates are very much along those lines as well. How can we help suppliers to keep in stocks so that they'll, their business performance will be better. 
 

Our business performance will be better from the retailer's perspective. for the next year, I think, just, this is probably just my bias from having, been in the Luminate, 
 

It seems in terms of, for Walmart, having a higher level of visibility, the kind of thing that companies like SupplyPike have been trying to do for a long time with their dashboards and, helping people do,Understand their priorities. it seems like now the retailers are really getting involved with that in a pretty sophisticated way. 
 

Luminate is really growing a lot. It's, they're, we have these webinars that we're putting out all the time now because there's new product updates that are happening every month. Walmart is rolling out new things, I guess maybe that's just from a Walmart perspective. It's how can we track performance that's omni channel and that's got, everything covered, as accurately as possible. 
 

but again, what does that mean for suppliers? I don't really know. 
 

[00:46:49] Allie Truong: Yeah. though, I like what you're saying about, the retailers, cause whatever you do as a supplier should be in response to the retailer. It's a partnership. So you want to. be doing something great for your partnership, but also be taking care of your interests in that partnership. 
 

I would say, just to build on what you've said, Peter, I think it goes back to the thing we talk about a lot. If you haven't gotten your compliance or deductions compliance. This is the time to start making a game plan to clean up house in terms of how do I start disputing these deductions? How do I start winning these back? 
 

How do I have a clear visibility of what's coming and almost get this either, off boarded from something I'm working on daily or build a different strategy because what I'm doing now isn't working? so that you can focus on that partnership, so you can respond to, okay, there's a change. I'm going to be the first supplier learning this platform. 
 

I'm going to be the first supplier making recommendations to my buyer using these tools that Walmart's rolling out or Target's rolling out. I think that's the way to win the game at this point in 2025, is making sure the things that are basic, you've got either automated, I know someone said in this chat using AI, and I know that's been the buzzword this year. 
 

Is there a way I can use AI to make this better? Is there a way I can automate thinking through those things so I can focus on some of those things that need human touch, that need some of that more strategy and detail oriented work on it? So that's my two cents. 
 

[00:48:26] Peter Spaulding: Yeah. Yeah. We've talked a lot about revenue loss recovery teams.

I think that is really, that would be a good way of kind of Creating a resolution for your team is like, how can we make this as quick and easy as possible, getting that money back? But yeah, I think that's it for us today. We don't have any questions in,yeah, we'll see you next time.