Supplier One: Item Management Deep Dive

[00:00:00] Peter: Today, we're going over, Supplier One item management. We're going to do a deep dive into that particular functionality of Supplier One. it is Item 360's replacement. but Allie will be getting into all of that here in a little bit. This is us, Peter and Allie. We are on these webinars fairly often. 
 

Our job is to create educational content for suppliers, not just in Walmart, but in any of the major retailers. if you have questions about things, if there's things that are really troubling your mind or your team, things that your team is just, expressing a lot of colorful frustration with, feel for example, let us know. 
 

We would love to cover, we would love to try to take some of the pain out of that process by doing that research for you and your team. But yeah, that's who we are and that's what we do here today. Specifically, again, we're talking, we're going to do a kind of high level intro to Supplier One, but then we're going to be spending most of our time just talking about the item management side of things within there. 
 

So items and inventory, and then we're going to look at tips and strategies, like what's the best practice for how to Use this platform to save time and hopefully, save money to avoid, some of the kind of common pitfalls of, item setup, item management that can result in revenue loss. 
 

And then we'll look a little bit about, a little bit at, talk a little bit in, higher level terms about what is the future of Supplier One. It seems to be growing, it seems to be on people's minds, its functionalities seem to be increasing, and now that Item 360 is going away, what does that mean? Does that mean that we should be worried about other apps and retailing going away? 
 

So we'll talk about all that towards the end, and then we'll have a Q& A. All right, these are the questions we get most often. Will we be getting a copy of the slide deck? Absolutely, you will. All of our slide decks now live online as well, so you can download those in your free time as well. But we'll be sending them out to the email that signed up for this webinar in three to four business days, as well as a recording of it, which we'll upload to YouTube as well. 
 

And then another question we get, or just a kind of common confusion that we have a lot. What is the difference between the chat and the Q& A section? The Q& A is for more formalized questions. If there's a question that you want to ask there that you don't necessarily want everyone to see but that you want Allie and I to save for the Q& A section, for example, that's what that's for. 
 

The chat is public and that's for our conversation starters. So if we ask a question about what's your experience been like with this? How do you feel about Item 360 going away? All of that will be, dealt with in the chat. So, if you have a more formal question that can go in the Q& A and in the chat is for, more kind of like regular, conversations. 
 

SupplyPike is our parent organization. SupplyPike is really about helping suppliers avoid revenue loss, win revenue loss back whenever it's been unjustly taken or whenever it's been taken by a fault of the retailers. which everyone knows we call disputing most of the time. And then we've also been expanding out into basically what we call the get better side of things. 
 

How can we help suppliers with compliance, improving their supply chain so that they don't, so that they can avoid shortages, altogether or, in a more, efficient manner. So that's what SupplyPike does. If you're curious about that, please, we'll have our emails at the end. 
 

Please send us an email. SupplyPike is, basically for everyone is, how I would like to say it. Everyone has deductions. most people have invalid deductions. Some of them are pretty costly. So SupplyPike can help automate all of that and do it pretty quickly. And then we are SupplierWiki within that, and I already mentioned this, so we'll go over it real quickly. 
 

We're just here to create free educational content for all of you. So whatever your pain points are, whatever your questions are, let us know whenever you see our emails at the end. You could also submit it into the chat or the Q& A as well, and we'll see that too. but yeah, that's what we do. So take it away, Allie. 
 

[00:04:26] Allie: Yep. Let's get into today's content. Like Peter said, we are doing a 30 minute webinar, so this is something new we're trying. If you love it, let us know. If you don't love it, let us know. you won't hurt our feelings, but we're trying to experiment with what makes sense for busy suppliers. That being said, Peter also mentioned all of our slide decks, all of our slide decks live on SupplierWiki, and you can go and download those at any time, whether that's an upcoming webinar, Or one that has already passed. 
 

So he'll send that link to our beautiful page that has every webinar that we've done, up until today's, and you can go and download those. But let's get into today's content. Let's talk about what is Walmart's Supplier One. So essentially, just to give some context here, Supplier One is a program that's launched late in 2023. 
 

It was announced by Walmart. They were early adopters on this new platform called Supplier One. And the goal of this, taken straight from the documentation that Walmart has outlined, is to streamline some of those siloed features within RetailLink, so it's able to have a universal system to prioritize some of that supplier action. 
 

And Supplier One's objective is essentially some of the concerns that suppliers had of, there's a couple different applications in RetailLink, that they're having to access, that would make sense to have integrated, to have overlapping in the same platform for that supplier action we were talking about before. 
 

and some of the, whispers which we'll address here is that there has been a concern that some of these RetailLink apps will be replaced, because the functionality, that we'll talk about later in today's conversation is being mirrored either similarly or exactly. and sneak, sneak peek, into what we'll talk about. 
 

Item 360 is one that is being transitioned into Supply1 and Item360 will no longer be a functionality that suppliers use. what we've seen, again, from what Walmart has said on their website, in their help docs, is officially Item 360 is going to be moving away, you'll be using Supplier One for all item management, but that, Functionality for Nova and Apis will be continued to use and will not necessarily be replaced at this time. 
 

So we'll get into that conversation, but we want to give the larger news updates here at the top of the hour. So is the, question I see in the chat, and this is the one I want to address here is, Supplier One in RetailLink? Yes, they are in RetailLink in the sense that you can log in through that. 
 

We'll show you how to do that. But we're talking about them in a secondary platform, because RetailLink has apps within it that have one functionality. So that's how we're having that conversation. So initially RetailLink is Walmart's current supplier platform. It's the one stop shop for most of the essential supplier performance or any of the action you're needing to take as a supplier. 
 

You would go into RetailLink. The caveat there is if you are disputing any compliance fines or paying through for the fuel management fees, that's actually going to be in the High Radius platform that is outside of RetailLink. And if you have questions about that, we'll be happy to send you some resources in the chat. 
 

but that's mainly going to be for the Fuel Management Program, which used to be Collect Pickup Program, if you remember those days back in 2022 2023. and then OTIF, On Time and In Full Program for Compliance, and then the Supplier Quality Excellence Program, or SQEP as we like to call it. So those kind of live outside. 
 

Supplier One You can, and I'll show you how you actually access that in a second, but it is a concentration of some of these tools in RetailLink in one place, and we'll talk about what those are, but high level. It's going to be your item maintenance and setup. It's going to be some of the returns information, some deductions information, some PO management information, and it seems to be that they are continuing to add more functionality, as we're monitoring that. 
 

We'll be sure to update you if there are additional functionalities that are added. So how do you actually log into Supplier One? This is a question we get pretty often. So we'll send this link here in the chat to Supplier One. Walmart. com. That's how you would access Supplier One. Um, and you just log in, regular MFA for retail link, so you'll have to do that. 
 

so it does live within that organization, but it, you do have to access it separately. So we'll send you that link, and if you haven't logged in before, it should be the same login that you have for retail link. and we wanted to ask this question in the chat, get some of the conversation going around Supplier One, and just ask you guys if you have had experience In Supplier One, have you enjoyed it? 
 

Have you seen any bugs? Has there been any issues that you just want to, bounce off another supplier? Drop those in the chat. And if we see some of those come through, we'll go ahead and, address those. all right, let's talk about what Supplier One's main features are. So, witSupplier Onene, they're, this is the features the last time we presented, and these are the notable features that we wanted to cover. 
 

I'm not going to spend too much time on these, because Walmart has already changed the way that this functionality is built out. But essentially, you'll see, when I switch to the next slide to show this, we've got order management. Which is that duplicate of Nova, Item, and Inventory, Claims and Returns, Scorecard, and then Payments and Charges. 
 

as I change to this, you'll see, Order Management is similar to Nova functionality. Items and Inventory is still that duplicate item, 360 functionality. And then there's just a larger tab called Performance. And that looks like it's really bucketed, if you, if I go back to this other slide, the Returns and Claims, Scorecard, and then the Payments and Charges. 
 

And under that, we've got the Returns and Reporting. and trends, we have just the larger scorecard on some of those, deductions, areas, allowances, payment history, and then there's a deductions tab, which does break down itemized what types of deductions that supplier might have. So these are the kind of the main ones that we would focus on today because we're, we have 30 minutes. 
 

We're going to focus on, The one that's been around the longest and the one that is having immediate impact on suppliers which is the Items and Inventory, so we'll talk about that for the rest of today. But we also wanted to include, there are a couple other tabs, if you go to the left hand side of Supplier 1, you can look at that outline. 
 

And you can see that There's a Demands and Forecasts, there's Apps and Integrations, and then Growth Opportunities. So those are new tabs that have come up, if you want us to talk about those, we can certainly talk through those a little bit, or we can have those prepared for the next time we talk about Supplier One. 
 

So like I said, we're going to be focusing on Item360's kind of duplicate functionality, but Which is now going to live in Supplier One as items in inventory. And, Supplier, or rather, Item 360 will be, sunsetting by the end of June for U. S. suppliers. So we'll talk through kind of those implications too. 
 

Another quick question for the chat is what, just asking about what I said previously is what areas in Supplier One you'd like us to cover in detail next. Obviously, we talk a lot about performance and deductions, so we'll be covering that in the future, but if there are other ones you want us to cover, let us know. 
 

We'd love to talk through them. All right, so as I said, we're going to be focusing on the Item 360 compared to the Supplier One functionality. And this is essentially our way of explaining that. So you can follow me here. This is the old bar, the left hand side navigation for Item 360, as you can see. 
 

Then we've got the Walmart supplier one navigation, and you can see we've got here home, same, Activity Manager is going to look more like Submissions Manager. Catalog is still Catalog, Setup is still Setup, and Maintenance is still Maintenance. what's really nice, and you'll see this through line through our conversation on Supplier 1, is that it is quite similar in terms of just navigation, and from the suppliers we've had conversations with, there's not as many issues or, confusion because it's really Feels like for and has very similar functionality, if not exact. 
 

Really, it's just more of an update on UX and some of the minor features, which we'll talk about as we go on. Alright, let's get into the items and inventory, what these, tabs look like and what these pages are, built out to look like. Items and Inventory is just that larger, think of it as Item 360. 
 

It's where you're gonna view, set up, manage, track, your items and larger inventory. So whether that's your, individual item that you're setting up, or, additional, Palettes or Displays is where you'd manage that. And like I said, it's meant to be a duplicate of Item 360's functionality, and it's built out the same ones. 
 

Just remember that SubmissionsManager is ActivityManager from Item 360. So pretty easy to remember. All right, Catalog is going to feel pretty similar. There are two product views, so you can see products by DTIN or UPC, and this is going to give you information on content quality and insights. What does content quality and insights mean? 
 

If that's unfamiliar to you, go and check out our, webinars with OneWorldSync, they covered a lot of this information, but essentially content quality. Think about the details on, walmart. com. Since we're talking about Walmart, where you have item pictures, you have rich media, you have your product descriptions and the details that go in with that. 
 

Content quality is continuing to be important for retailers as well. Their consumers, your customers, continue to shop online for research or they're buying it through pick up or Walmart Plus members can get items delivered. So content quality is really sometimes that first time, second time. Customer is interacting with your product, or maybe they are shopping online beforehand and then they go into the store later and pick it up because they know exactly what they want. 
 

So it's really that first impression and can make or break, a sale or, moving on to a competitor. It's also on the products sorted by GTN and UPC. It's going to show Walmart. com published status, so if those products are live or if they're drafted, and then those unpublished reasons. So that we'll talk about those more, if people are interested, as well as customer reviews, which makes sense, that kind of goes under and supports content quality as customer reviews can make or break, how your product performs in a particular retailer or at a larger scale across multiple retailers. 
 

The second view that you can see your products in is item configuration and hierarchies by Walmart item numbers. So this is going to have information specific to department and fine line, it will have supply item status, it will have the replenishability, They'll have BuyingRegion, and then those Assortment and Shippers. 
 

And here's an example of what that product view is going to look like. As you can see, you can scroll, to the right hand side. But this is the view from the GTIN slash UPC view. So you would get the GTIN, the product name, where it's available. The content quality, which then you can click in and Walmart can give you insights into. 
 

Hey, your item description is too short or your rich media isn't uploading correctly and it's creating bounces from the page. If it's a variant, item IDs, and then just additional information, but you can see here. You've got that status of what's published, what's unpublished. You can then click on that eye and figure out the unpublished reason, if any actions that you want to take on these particular items that are listed. 
 

And then what's nice is you can save just to talk through some of the general functionality of the catalog. You can customize that, so like the attribute finder from Item 360, if you're familiar. You can save your default catalog view to the different view that you'd prefer, whether that's Walmart item number or the GTIN. 
 

And then you can filter. see the, why you're having a poor content quality score. And then you're able to edit imagery, have a DSV export, export some of these insights that are built into content, and then be able to edit that and then have a basic report where you can just have all of this at a high level view, because as you can see, we've got about 25 items per page, but. 
 

There's about 350, pages of item information, so quite, quite a lot. So it's a lot easier to manage when you can download those usually. All right, and then here's it, here is the same catalog, but from the other view, through Walmart item number. And you're seeing a little bit different information here. 
 

You've got accounting department and fine line. This is more in the, viewpoint of Walmart, maybe. With the buying region fulfillment method, the effective item date, and additional information. So you can see that most of these are active here. Alright, let's move on to the setup tab so you can complete pre-setup submissions. 
 

So item quotes, shipper quotes, GDSN publications or proposed items and create item propo proposals, items, shippers, or multi box items. So just to call out, um, Supplier OneSetup has not, supported assortments and import shippers for GM, for pharmacy, and, fees, so use your current process. Walmart has been releasing updates. 
 

and you can toggle into some of the help docs for SupplierWan if you have particular information, questions about either your category or the way that you're shipping, etc., if it's for an assortment import shipper or some of the others mentioned here. So again, item setup, to me this looks very similar to how it was outlined in Item 360, Just to walk through some of these, they've made it really easy when it comes to the functionality of this application to have a high level view of the GDSN publications you have, supplier quotes, and your proposed items. 
 

And then for setting up new items, choosing the correct way to set that up. So this will really filter the process and build out a workflow specific to if you have an item, if you have a new item proposal, a shipper or multibox. 
 

All right. I'm going to go through this a little bit quicker because I know that we have, some time for questions at the end, but essentially this is the maintenance tab. It's going to be familiar to anyone who used maintenance tab in Item 360. It's almost identical in terms of functionality. Again, the information is broken out on what is exactly the workflow that you need to do. 
 

So you can choose from these. six workflows, and we'll be updating you if there's additional workflows in there as well. You can also use that attribute finder there as well. And then again, this is maintenance. So this is where you can view that basic item info. If you don't want to use the catalog, you can view those different ways. 
 

you can have set site dates and details, compliance and regulatory attributes. This is where you would be updating any attributes, and doing maintenance on your items, for whatever specific reason. Again, these are for the item configuration for supply chain, so these are some of the things you would do there. 
 

The cost feature currently has it for e commerce items and store shared items, and then again, it's going to apply to all departments except for imports, store payroll, pharmacy, and fees. And then DSV inventory makes sense for DSV, items and DSV facilities. And then, this is the imagery feature, allows you to upload, manage items for your catalog. 
 

And then, same with the rich media feature, that's going to be for your videos, for 360 spin images, etc. And then, submissions manager, just to cover this high level, that's going to be containing any submission types. So you can actually see if you've submitted anything, where the status is of that, and if you need to take any further action. 
 

So there's three tabs within that. You've got your maintenance, your setup, and your ship mode for Submissions Manager. and you can, sort through those depending on what type of supplier you are. and again, if you need to take action on a submission, you should receive an email from the Walmart Supplier One link. 
 

Um, again, if it's not going to your email. You can then figure out through help docs how to set that up, particularly to go to the correct person's email, who that should be going to. And then here's a little look of what the submissions manager would look like. you can see who it was submitted by, the supplier, and then that status. 
 

So if Walmart needs to take action on it, it's complete. And then it would have also a supplier action if there was something for them to take action on. And then this is what that, that update request would look like, how you could fill that out, what's required, for all of those details. 
 

And I'm wanting to save time for Q& A because I know we have some questions. So I'm going to just skip through this and talk about tips and strategies to navigate Supplier One. So the first thing is utilizing Supplier One dashboards. The Home tab gives you a lot of critical insights. You can see some of the ways that the application even prioritize what your tasks should be. 
 

So paying attention to those, and then making sure that you have your score, setting that threshold of where your team wants to be at, how you want to improve, and creating a hit list of what you need to do, whether that's going after some of those poor content items and making a game plan, or if you've got a ton in average and you want to take more from good to great, or rather in this, it would be from average to good. 
 

Making the most of the filters. So there's a lot of information when it comes to items in general, when it's managing your inventory for setup or maintenance, make sure that you're familiarizing yourselves with the opportunities for slicing that data and looking at it and then just seeing what Workflow is best for you when it comes to filter options. 
 

And then with any new Walmart application, take advantage of the support. So you'll see that the chat bubble at the bottom is there for asking questions. You can manage those tickets within the help documents and Supplier One has an extensive amount of documentation for their features. So go check that out, in their article section as well. 
 

All right, we covered this a bit at the top of the hour, but wanted to show, here's from last time we did this at this conversation. These are the past updates of Supplier One. As you can see, we'll skip over this. You guys will get this slide deck. These are some of the new updates that have been released on some of the features to come, which are exciting. 
 

And then another callout that Walmart has included, which we find helpful just to see with this documentation, when there's a lot of features, you start to say, okay, this feels similar to other features. areas of RetailLink. are these applications going to go away? as for now, Walmart has officially said Supplier One is not a replacement for Nova or APIS at this time. 
 

If that changes in the future, come check out SupplierWiki. We'll be trying to document that as much as possible and give suppliers a, path forward. All right. Last thing that I'll call out here, cover this, is that Item 360, Walmart is directing suppliers to stop using that by the end of June. 
 

So go ahead and just make sure that the functionality is operating correctly on Supplier One, that you don't have any missing information, because by the end of June, Item 360 is going to be, not used by Walmart for managing items or setting up items, and you'll be pointed to Supplier One specifically. All right, I talked a mile a minute, but I'm ready to talk through some questions. Peter, I know we have some in the chat and we can stay on a little bit longer, for these.  
 

[00:27:53] Peter: We've got some great questions here. So first one I want to start off with is Supplier One, can Supplier One be used, to look for overages slash shortages? to dispute OTIF, shortages, and SQEP. Just a few questions in there. Yeah, from what I have seen,  
 

[00:28:08] Allie: I think that there is a case to be made. when it, and I, believe that some of that information is only going to get stronger. So if you go to, let's say, The performance tab and look through that. 
 

You get a little bit more information about your returns. Could be really helpful for, some of those deduction disputing or understanding root cause. there is payment history, which is similar to APIS. So if you're looking at APIS and you're pulling any information, go in Supplier One and look at the payment history side as well. 
 

that's a little bit more for deductions. So what I'll say just to answer the question directly, I'm seeing it having a little bit more functionality for deductions. You may be able to pull some information in Nova. Let's say, Walmart said, you didn't send me this PO. in full, but you look on Nova, or you look on the, order management for Supplier One, and you're seeing a different story. 
 

Yeah, I would just say, again, to answer directly, there's opportunities here. I think as functionality continues to get built out, there'll be even more opportunities. If you're digging into research, I would say this is an emerging area to see if, Is this data helpful for disputing? Is, is it different than documentation in other areas? 
 

Is it like for like in Nova? Is it pulling the same? Should it be pulling the same type of information? and then seeing how you can add that into your particular, deduction or disputing workflow, whether that's compliance or AP deductions. We'll be keeping an eye on that to see if there's something, but currently that's not anything we're pointing suppliers to using when it comes to disputing, but it's interesting. 
 

[00:30:10] Peter: Yeah, I think I would summarize by saying that in that performance tab you can, you can have a lot of visibility into deductions, and OTIF performance. Not so much SQEP. I don't think that any of that is visible here. so what that means is all really interesting. I thought that you could dispute AP deductions in Supplier One, but the more I poke around, the more I'm wondering if that even is an option. 
 

So yeah, all that. Another quick question here, 
 

First one, can you save items in maintenance as a draft if you don't have all the info?  
 

[00:30:55] Allie: as you can do it on supplier, sorry, Item 360, You could do that. you could save it as a draft and come back to it. So I would just check in the documentation if that is still something that you can do within Supplier One because I haven't particularly seen that functionality. 
 

What I would say is for a couple of Walmart's applications, anything you save in drafts can be deleted in a certain time frame. So I would also search for that. I haven't. I know you can save things from Item 360, like I said, and the functionality has been similar throughout. So I'll say yes. but I'm not seeing that. 
 

I haven't seen that in my, research currently. 
 

[00:31:50] Peter: Okay. Yeah. I was thinking the same thing there too. Sarah has a pretty, broad question. One that we probably can't give too much 3P sellers are dragging down our content scores. How can we address that issue? 
 

[00:32:17] Allie: When it comes to content quality, what you can manage on Supplier One is where my purview would be. I think it's interesting to see, what are other suppliers doing out there, having a conversation about that at a larger level. If it's 3P, maybe that means, digging into what, are the external sources we can pull from, but I don't feel like I have a great answer on that since that's not usually my area of expertise with 3P. 
 

But, we'll look into that, Sarah, and see if there's, something for SupplierWiki to work on there.  
 

[00:32:53] Peter: yeah, for sure. and then, another question, a bit longer, is there a way to give access to a third party vendor to upload images? and marketing copy for the product details without them having access to other information, including product list prices and financials. 
 

Another great question. 
 

[00:33:18] Allie: so I know that through, the third parties, there is ways to upload and have like kind of that syndication. I don't know specifically for what access you can control, on. Supplier one specifically, so I don't have a good answer for that. apologies. When it comes to how you could get a third party access, I know that if you use something like OneWorldSync, you can upload, or one of their competitors, you can upload all of your images there, and it can actually deliver those images to all the retailers you need them to do I'm not necessarily having to give them access to the portal. 
 

So that's the solution. I'm familiar with. I don't know if that's the best for your business. So I'd continue to look into that.  
 

[00:34:18] Peter: Yeah, that's, I was thinking the same thing on the Walmart side of things. I don't know of any way of actually, Doing that, it might exist, but I'm not totally sure. But yeah, a third party would probably be able to give you, to give someone that you're working with, another third party would probably be able to be helpful to give your third party a way of accessing that data or doing that work behind the scenes without having access to the whole the, of the Supplier One or retail link that your business is operating in. 
 

[00:34:47] Allie: Yeah, and it's a good question to ask because usually there's Walmart has really specific outlines of how they want you to work with third parties, so I would dig into that specific instance and see if there's documentation on that.  
 

[00:35:00] Peter: Awesome.  
 

[00:35:01] Allie: Peter, I would just say I'm going to share if, others haven't accessed it or you haven't shared it in the chat, the help docs for Supplier One, the Getting Started area. 
 

Everyone should go check that out if they haven't already. and I'll just let you close this out here, Peter.  
 

[00:35:19] Peter: Yeah, great. so much wonderful engagement and exciting conversation, with this one. so that's great. We got, we've been posting a little bit about some of our other content, but definitely go to SupplierWiki. 
 

You'll get this slide when, when you get the email. That SupplierWiki hyperlink will take you right there. we got questions about OTIF and SQEP and deductions, and we have a ton of content on that we've been building out over the last couple of years. Got a huge library of resources for you and your team. 
 

So definitely go check that out. And then here are our emails again. You'll be getting this later. but if you want to take these down now, just for future questions, or if you felt like, you wanted to follow up with a different question, we can go and we can do more research on our own. we have that capacity. 
 

So if you have whatever the questions are, whatever lingering questions or thoughts that you have, any insights or like a personal kind of anecdotal, story about your supplier, one experience, whatever that may be. Definitely, send us emails. we would love to see that. If there's any other, as I mentioned before, ideas that you have or pain points that you have, you can let us know that way too. 
 

It'd be really great.  
 

[00:36:37] Allie: Yep.  
 

[00:36:38] Allie: And with that, thank you guys for sticking around, asking questions, engaging with us. We appreciate it and we hope to see you at another webinar.