1.23.25 What's New in Scintilla 

[00:00:00] Peter: Today, we'll get to business now. We're talking about Scintilla. that official rebranding hasn't taken place in the app yet, but it, we're assuming it will, probably pretty soon, according to Walmart's last word on that issue. So Luminate, Scintilla, the report building app. for Walmart is what we'll be talking about today with a little bit of a special emphasis on updates. 
 

so how is the app being built out? What are the kind of changes that they're making in Basic and in Charter and, all that. So, Allie will be leading us today, which is really exciting. And, yes, we're on a lot of these. So if you've been here before, you probably recognize us and are a little tired of, hearing our voices, maybe, maybe not. 
 

But yeah, this is us. We're on the SupplierWiki team. I believe our next slide is more on that. So what we're doing is we're just trying to create a library of resources for suppliers. today we're just talking about Walmart, but we really cover a bunch of different topics for suppliers and the retail industry. 
 

And the, a big part of what that means for us is just, is just pumping out a lot of content. So articles, webinars like this one. We do a lot of eBooks, cheat sheets, which are more kind of helpful, almost like a one pager type of thing that you could keep as a resource, on your desktop or wherever. 
 

So that's our, what we do here on the SupplierWiki team today to get into the agenda a little bit in a little bit more detail, not too much. we're going to go over, report building in Basic, which is just about all that you can do in Basic. And then we're going to go over at a high level, the apps and reports and Charter. 
 

So if, if you're here and you're, and you're asking yourself this question of, do we want to make the leap into Charter? Do we want to kind of make that investment? We should be covering some stuff that will be kind of relevant to that decision. Of course, we're not advising anyone one way or another, but just to give people a little bit of a sense of what Charter is for, what kind of insights are it's designed to build out as opposed to the report builder, how it has improvements on the report builder and what sort of visibility you have into all kinds of, metrics through that. 
 

So then what we're going to do, and this is maybe a little bit more of the focus or a little bit more of what makes, today, different from other Luminate, webinars that we've done in the past is we're going to be going over the updates. it says fall 24 updates, but we added in a January one for Basic, just this morning, actually. 
 

So, that will be covering, at a, at a, high level two, and then we'll go into a live Q and a, just like we normally do. speaking of that, how do you ask a question? well, we have two, main avenues for that. The, for questions, really the Q& A tab at the bottom of your, of your Zoom will be most helpful for that. 
 

You can put those in there and then we'll tee them up at the end. If there, if there are any or if there are a lot of those, then we will try to kind of sprinkle them in throughout as we go. especially if there's a more, particularly relevant question, for an earlier slide, then, we'll get that in there too. 
 

So. If you have any questions, make sure to get them in, before then, before the end of the presentation and then we can go over them there. The chat, as, as you know already, is a little bit more for the, like, public discourse side of things, so if we're asking y'all a question and, and you want to engage in that way, then the chat is useful for that too. 
 

I'll also probably be putting some articles and other resources in the chat as we go through just to, Just to, put a little icing on the cake. If there's anything you want to dive a little bit deeper into, then, I'll be providing those through that channel as well. And then a question that we get pretty often in these webinars is, will we be receiving a copy of the slide deck? 
 

you will, it will go to the email that signed up for the webinar. So, if you're sharing with someone else, or if you're in a conference room, just know that. You can access it through that. Usually takes about three to four business days for us to get that, out, but along with that too will be just a recording of the webinar. 
 

So we, all of our webinars live on our website. the recordings of them do. So if you want to watch a different webinar that we did, maybe one that's exclusively about Charter or Basic or something like that, you can go and you can check those out there as well. So all of our slide decks also live on the website too. 
 

So. if there's anything that you're looking for, it should be there. You should be able to find it. SupplyPike is our, is the organization that is, that the SupplierWiki team is on, and SupplyPike does, essentially, automated, revenue recovery for suppliers and major retailers. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to figure out with deductions, with compliance fines, where's that money going, so that we can have more accurate reporting, for the organization as a whole, but also so that you can, win money back, that, was lost to invalid deductions. 
 

So we do a lot of, validity, as well in the app too. So we won't be talking very much about it today. We're really just talking about Luminate. so we won't do a little, product preview at the end or, or something like that, but if it's something that you're interested in, of course, you can put that in the chat or in the Q and a, and our emails will be at the end too. 
 

So you can talk about that. so you can reach out to us that way as well. One little shout out that I like to have too, is just that, one of the things that makes supply Pike great and exciting is that. We are in so many different product categories and we work with so many different suppliers of, of all shapes and sizes. 
 

So we really do get to hear from people who are, who have so many different varieties of experience in Walmart or in other major retailers. So, we like to curate content that is relevant for the, the big players and the small players as well. so, that's, one thing I always like to call out here as well. 
 

And with that, I'll hand it over to you, Allie. 
 

[00:06:37] Allie: Awesome. Thank you, Peter, and thank you guys all for joining. We appreciate when we get to learn and grow with you and learn especially about things that are happening in the retailers like Scintilla. Peter's going to be dropping some links and sharing some resources as well. 
 

He mentioned our webinar library. I have lost count of how many webinars we have. I think we're up to six or seven hundred. So if we are not covering something today, of course you can almost always email us, but we've got lots of resources on SupplierWiki to check out. So let's get into it. late 2024, Walmart did announce that Luminate was going to change its name to Scintilla. 
 

If you want a little vocab lesson, at the beginning, it's a noun and it essentially means a small spark or a small amount, and they go into kind of why they've changed that name. But it's important for us to call this out as SupplierWiki because There's been a lot of change that's gone on, especially when it comes to reporting tools and some of the supplier portal access that's been happening. 
 

So we do have webinars on supplier one, which has, integrated things like Aspen and item 360. Today we're focusing on Luminate, which is now Scintilla. But if you can remember 2023 and 2024, we were transitioning from DSS to Luminate. So wanting to just make sure everyone's aware, Scintilla and Luminate are the same thing. 
 

We'll get into what those updates look like, but there haven't been any announcements again of that name changing from Luminate to Scintilla. So we'll keep you updated if it's really just a name change or if there's going to be significant changes to the platform and how users are Using that in their daily operations, but for now it's a name change that we're waiting for them to update, on that platform. 
 

Alright, like the agenda said, we're going to talk a little bit about report building in Basic. I'm going to go through this pretty quickly, because it is a helpful review and there have been some updates. However, not everyone has been using, Luminate as much. With the transition from DSS, there were still some people holding on to DSS, which I totally understand. 
 

It's familiar, and there are some suppliers who have been working in that for 20 plus years and have perfected their perform, their reports. However, we'll cover some of this report building in Basic today, but I'm going to go through it pretty quickly because we have resources on this. We have a whole webinar dedicated to it that Peter will share in the chat, and we also have some article resources that can help you as you're building your reports. 
 

Alright, what do you need if you're going to build a report in Luminate? And I'm going to be referring to To, Scintilla as Luminate for the time being, just to simplify it because it's currently labeled as Luminate. But we'll all just keep in mind that update, that name change is coming. What you'll need to rebuild a report from scratch is a dimension, a metric, and a filter for time. 
 

This should feel pretty similar to DSS, as well as some of the other reporting tools. Lots of suppliers use IRI and Nielsen, and this is similar to what you need. You need to have some inputs so you can create an output. How do you pull those reports in Luminate? It's really easy. Honestly, I, what I do like about Luminate is that it's really hard to mess up. 
 

It's not a lot of things you can click into. The UX is really easy to understand what is actionable. So there is a left drop down in Luminate and it has a support tab that includes instructions for pulling reports. And the most helpful reports are going to be that vendor scorecard and the dataset overview, as well as sample reports. 
 

So, those will have some reference to like for like and DSS. but again, as we have this conversation, Luminate was built out to include e com data to be more, Overarching in what the data is being pulled. So you don't wanna have your old DSS report pulled up and looking at your new Luminate report and assuming that they're gonna be apples to apples, it's going to be different. 
 

and that's actually listed in some of their documentation as well as an article that we have about, aliases and on Luminate and how they're pulled from DSS. Alright. Like I referenced before, you're in a report builder. You can go to my reports in this case. We're, let's say we're a new supplier, we've built no reports, so you'll go over to that new report button and click that. 
 

So once you select that button, really easy, it'll ask you to choose a data set. So it's really trying to drive, what you're able to do. So there's data sets here, you can select those, but we'll go ahead and select report. These are kind of templatized for reports. You'll select vendor scorecard. And then that's going to allow you to then start building that, that vendor scorecard out, which will have most of the data that you're looking for. 
 

And then on the far right hand side, there's available filters. So then you can take that vendor scorecard and pare it down, drill down into the data and get to what you're, you're looking for. There's a couple filters in the vendor scorecard, and that's how you can build those different reports. The notable filter levels are going to be vendor, brand, category, item, and then there's additional granular details. 
 

And then you can also see these, these filters here. So you can see some of the data in use, you can see store sales, additional information like returns, POS sales, etc. And then when it comes to creating a report, so it's going to be entitled, you'll want to give it a report name, especially to what you've drilled down into. 
 

I would consider Depending on how your, Luminate account is billed out, making sure that you're kind of standardizing those names within your company, or within your team, at least, on how you're naming those, but it does give you an option for a description, and then you can export those. 
 

Alright, and then other Basic reports. These are going to differ. between Basic and Charter, and it will, it may, vary from supplier to supplier. So just keep that in mind. This may be helpful if you're not seeing a report that you have to consider why that would be, and then talking to, your Walmart Data Ventures member that you've, you've been in contact with about Luminate. 
 

So again, these are those data sets that you can build from. You'll see a lot of similar ones that came from DSS or feel similar to what was in DSS, such as store sales and inventory, store demand. Forecasts, etc. So, lots of stuff in there. I think another thing that's helpful is there's lots of data in Supplier 1 as well that you can go pull, such as your OTIF scorecards, item data, they've got some data on order management, which is similar to Nova, you can also pull. 
 

information from Nova. That's been one of the biggest frustrations we've heard from suppliers is that I don't have all the things in one place like I did in DSS, or at least I knew where they were. so you can find some of the information that you're looking for in Luminate specifically, but also getting a different viewpoint in supplier one, Nova, and some of the other scorecards that you have access to. 
 

So you've got your stores, your store sales and inventory data set. That's going to help with store item level. And here's some of the details within that. So they do have quick reports, which Basically allow you, once you've clicked into that, specific data set to then build a report that's specific to a question or an action that you would want to take. 
 

So we can just focus on, let's say we were going to want to build a report to track total store item returns. So we're focusing on that. there's just leading questions, but again, you can build a report from scratch as well. So here are some of the information that you'd have access to. One thing I'll call out is online pickup and delivery. 
 

That is a little bit more verbose in terms of the data that you have access to versus DSS. And then another call out is that rough DSS equivalent. If you were using the in, sales margin, that's going to be the company summary report or store detail report. So it's nice to have one that's, more of a like for like, then if we were to click into Omni sales, again, you'd have your Omni sales data set. 
 

There's some more leading actions for you to take. And there is a huge emphasis where there wasn't as much in DSS on Omni channel because there's more accurate data that they're able to pull from. And they're pulling from. different channels, whereas Econ was a little bit, more fuzzy in DSS. And then, when it comes to a rough DSS equivalent, there's not really one that's available. 
 

but what you can do is compare Walmart. com sales summary, with that sales and margin to company summary. So that's kind of what it was before it was broken out. Now you can see it all together, which is a little clearer picture for your business. Again, DC metrics, you can click into this, more actionable questions that it's, providing you, you can see some of the templates and supply chain. 
 

I will also take this time to just call out that a lot of the details from Aspen have, are migrating to, Supplier 1, we've seen that call out, And we'll, Peter can send the, newsletter that we covered that on in VendorVille. But essentially that may be another resource to kind of look at what data is available in supplier one for some of these DC metrics as well. 
 

Store demand forecast, again, going into that, very similar. I'm going to kind of pick up the pace here because I think y'all are getting the picture of, when it's, if there's a DSS equivalent, and again, some of these leading questions are really clear in terms of what you're going to be getting when you click through and build that data set. 
 

And then, when it comes to Charter, these are some of the things you won't get in Basic. And again, I'd recommend going and looking at the Data Ventures website, seeing the, stock. Some of the details on shopper behavior, channel performance, customer perception, those details, if you're interested in that, as well as just getting in contact, if that makes sense for your company. 
 

All right, let's talk a little bit about the Charter apps since we're already on the topic. So, If you haven't, if you haven't dived into some of the Charter applications, these are going to be enhanced insights specifically on customer behavior and perception, giving you real time data into what are your customers wanting, and being able to have actionable insights. 
 

Again, this is the non free version, Basic being free Charter being paid. so. This is something to talk about with your team strategically on what makes the most sense. So, it's going to include reports that are not available to Basic subscribers, and it's really going to be more detailed customer information. 
 

So, if that makes sense for your business, this would be something worth considering. So, some of the things that it's designed to do is isolate customer behaviors. That's going to have an impact to sales trends over time. So, if you can understand that, big percentage of your Persona that you're looking at is interested in one particular project product that can help you work with your buyer to then understand how you break out your assortment for shopper behaviors. 
 

You can get some of those trends and you can see on a pretty granular detail to weekly all the way to that rolling contribution chart as well as quarterly and monthly to see kind of those customer behaviors and the seasonal changes that may happen. To then inform some of the decisions you're making when it comes to forecasting and assortment. 
 

So, really helpful, especially if you are in, all of Walmart's stores or in a large majority of them. That data can be really helpful to driving some of the decisions you're making. And then, here are some of the shopper behaviors that they, measure. So, very, similar to other shopper behavior, personas, breaking out by age, gender, and then income as well. 
 

Channel worth. performance. This is going to be, in the report builder. So kind of what we talked about before. so it'll be custom attributes that you can use in that regular report builder. It's just enhanced features. And that may include those in store and online, data from high level, like channel, where are they coming from to granular, granular details like that item level. 
 

So, helpful for understanding what's performing, where it's performing, and who it's performing with. And then, this is kind of what that dashboard looks like. Again, this is essentially what they've got on the, Luminate Charter website. It shows you exactly, kind of, more dashboards and data built out for you. 
 

So, not custom data, but actually. Built out dashboards that can help understand, where your customers are at, where they're shopping, etc. Customer Perception, wanted to call out here, it's not necessarily an app like the other two features of Charter, but more of a service, so it provides, opportunities for suppliers to conduct that primary research with customers. 
 

If you've worked with or heard of brands like, Real Bazaar, It's really just that, that voice of customer research that happens. you can actually build that into your specific Walmart customers, which is. possibly a helpful tool. It also includes with customer perception, those customer surveys. So you can get voice, get straight from the horse's mouth, what your customers are interested in, through surveys or that, more service option, which can be more of that qualitative data. 
 

Awesome. We're doing great on time, I'm going to get into the fall 24 updates and release notes, and we'll collect questions for the Q& A as well. So where can you find these release notes? I think this is super important for any supplier who's using Luminate because as Luminate came out, or Scintilla as it will be known, in the future, there were a lot of updates and those started to kind of shrink as time went on. 
 

We're seeing that trend. Switch a little bit. and we'll talk about what that looks like in January. But if something new is coming out with any product release, typically there's a lot of information and context that's added, helping users understand what's going on. So you can actually click into that by going into Walmart Luminate, going to Resources, and then clicking Release Notes. 
 

We've seen, typically, every month, Luminate releasing a note on updates that have been pushed through. And they're going to be ordered by month, so you can then see what's going on. And now that we're in a new year, they'll have a new year tag as well. So you can see the 2024 updates, 2025 updates, etc. If you're new to using Luminate, Or you kind of jumped in mid year and started using it as DSS, a lot of the reports were sunsetting. 
 

It may be helpful to review these previous release notes to give context to, some of the things that have changed because while these release notes have been updated. There may be documentation that has not been updated, so this is really helpful to then see and compare and make sure that you're using the most up to date resource. 
 

Again, these are going to differ based on if you are in the Basic version of Luminate or Charter, so just keep that in mind. And these were being released monthly up through October. We then saw those slow down in the end of the year, which makes sense. but we are seeing that the January one picked up and wondering if we're going to see more monthly cadence on those updates in 2025. 
 

So here's what happened in Basic in September, 2024, there was the new vendor performance scorecard for category managers and SSI metrics, and then some enhancements. So you'll see this pattern of new enhanced and resolved essentially. Walmart Luminate is letting you know, here's what's new. So it's just been rolled out. 
 

What's been enhanced and resolved? The difference between enhanced and resolved is, resolved is tackling some of those bugs or issues that have been reported by suppliers or discovered by the Data Ventures team. And then enhanced is just building out those features. So, it's a great call out that if you see something that is incorrect or isn't making sense, they do have a support line, you can report that, and you may have solved a problem that other suppliers are having as well. 
 

So, I'll kind of skip through these and I'll land on some of the ones that may be a little bit more important, as well as Peter may jump in if he has any. Callouts as well. All right, here was the January release notes. As you can see, there's a lot going on here, and I won't go through all of these, but it's worth looking at. 
 

And again, you'll get this slide deck, and this is on the resources page in, in Luminate. But essentially, there's a lot of new things that are launching, and I really do like the language that they've used here of what this means for you. That's really clear and helpful to understand how that actually applies, to your day to day and using it. 
 

And then lots of enhancements as well. You can also see there's tons of bullet points on what's been resolved. There were, several issues reported. So keep reporting those. But I think what's most important is to focus on what's new and enhanced, to understand some of the changes that are happening. 
 

And this is my theory, so, just speaking from personal experience, I would see these type of updates happening more in 2025, so, that's a call out there, I could see with their product roadmap for 2025, there being more things, for suppliers to look at both in new and enhanced. Alright, so the September release, again, lots of enhancements. 
 

They focused on, really not necessarily that language of new, re released, and, sorry, new, enhanced, and resolved, but focused on where those things were building out into. So they've changed that as they've moved on, but you can read through these as well. The ones I want to call out specifically for Charter is that Report Builder. 
 

So Category Managers. SSI metrics, tender analysis. So, again, more customization, more details that you can plug into. And then for shopper behavior, switching on units, user functions and improvements in that switching report. So, if you have Charter, that will make sense, but you may not have access to that with Basic. 
 

Okay, with Charter release notes from September 2024, these reports are still being enhanced. So you'll see that with some of the Walmart updates is there's improvement that they are making on things. Even if it's been enhanced in one month, there may be more enhancements. And some of that is UX, like the report title and duration of the Weeks, displayed in that report interface. 
 

So again, just small changes, but making this product better and better. what's really cool from October is that. insights activation, and essentially what that looks like is integrating that Luminate and Walmart Connect, which is essentially another product from Walmart Data Ventures. and if you want access to that, again, don't have a ton of details on what that Actually looks like the insight activation, but you just speak to your administrator to get access. 
 

if you already have Charter, essentially what's been released on this is it's integrating those services between Walmart connect, which does more of your ads and campaigns with Walmart with Walmart Luminate. So being able to take action and some of the data that you're seeing there and vice versa again, This is only helpful if you are currently using Walmart Connect, and the Luminate Charter, but may be worthwhile if you're spending a lot of time and resources on ads with Walmart in particular. 
 

Okay, we got through that really quickly, but honestly, great content. Happy to talk through any questions that, the team has. Peter, anything that you'd like to share as well? 
 

[00:28:34] Peter: no, I think that was great. I think, Insights activation. I'm not sure what the timeline is with that. If people are using it now already or not, but I haven't, I haven't heard anything from it since that original sort of announcement, but a really exciting thing there with, you know, integrating, Luminate and. 
 

Basically your your ads and so I'm curious what that data is is like how helpful it is for people and not but but yeah, no questions for now. So I think we'll just go ahead here talk a little bit more call out a few more of our our products, I'm not sure. Are we, or sorry, our, our content. And then, and then we can put our emails up here on the screen too, in a little bit. 
 

So if you don't have any questions right now, but you think you might in the near future, you can just write those down and, and shoot any questions that you have our way, a couple of pieces of, content that I really want to call out here that are. Really detailed guides on all of these things. 
 

we have a, a, a, sorry, a Luminate eBook called a guide to Luminate a guide to Walmart's Luminate, that you can find on our website as well. But we've covered a bunch of other sort of hot button issues, for Walmart suppliers as well. And these, four pieces of content. We've also got stuff on other, on most of the other major retailers. 
 

so go ahead and check that out as well. 
 

[00:30:11] Allie: Yeah, great call out, Peter. I hope you shared that eBook in the, in the chat as well. 
 

[00:30:16] Peter: I did not. And 
 

[00:30:17] Allie: he'll, he'll do it. I'll, I'll take over this, while Peter shares that, so he's not doing two things at once, but thank you guys for joining the webinar. Really appreciate you. 
 

Again, these are our emails. You'll get, you know, in contact with us if you have any questions or if you have something that we didn't cover that you like. to be researched or talked through. This is what we do for a living. We research and make sure that suppliers understand and have education available to them that's easy to understand, clear, concise, and free. 
 

So, again, email us. Let us know. We're happy to help. If you want to learn a little bit more about what SupplyPike does, how we help, Suppliers recover revenue from retailers like Walmart, Target, Amazon, etc. You can find us at SupplyPike. com as well, and we'd be happy to help you get in contact if you email us about our products, how you can discover if this makes sense for you. 
 

Awesome. Peter, go ahead and set that in the chat, so we'll end today's webinar. Thank you guys for joining. Appreciate it.