What are Walmart's Scintilla Updates 

[00:00:00] Bekah Tatem: We're so excited to have you here today. Today, we are discussing what are Walmart's Scintilla updates. so let's get right into it. First off, just going to introduce you to your hosts today. So my name is Becca Tatum, and if you tune into webinars frequently, I may be a new face because this is actually the first webinar that I'm hosting. 
 

So Very excited to be with you all today. and as host, I'll just be monitoring Q& A, so if you drop in questions, and then I'll also probably be sharing some resources in the chat throughout, so be on the lookout for those. And then we also have Peter Spaulding joining us. Peter is our senior SupplierWiki writer. 
 

He spent a lot of time researching and writing about Luminate, so I'm excited for the insights he'll bring you today. And then, as a team, we're SupplierWiki. We provide free educational content to suppliers, so if you've been on our website and downloaded an e book or watched another webinar, that is us, so we're excited to bring you more content today. 
 

For our agenda today, we are going to start with report building in BASIC. don't know if you call it Luminate or if you call it Scintilla yet, but most of today will just be referring to BASIC and Charter. so we'll follow up with Charter apps and reports and then go over some updates and release notes about, Luminate, what's been happening, what may happen in the future, and then we will wrap it up with a Q& A. 
 

And just a couple of questions we typically get throughout webinars. I want to go ahead and address them now. first, will you get a copy of this slide deck? The answer is absolutely yes. within three to four business days, you can expect to see it in your inbox. also with the recording of today's webinar, if you're not able to catch the whole thing. 
 

And then, what's the best way to ask a question? there's the two different features in Zoom in the chat, that's a great place to just drop insights, chat with the rest of the group, and then there's also the Q& A feature. If you put your questions in there, I can see them easily and then get them queued up for Peter at the end during our Q& A. 
 

And then just lastly, briefly, what is SupplyPike? we are a platform that helps suppliers get paid and get better through, deduction recovery. we work with a lot of really great suppliers, some of which you'll see their logos on here. if you're not working with us yet, we hope to in the future. 
 

And with that, I'm gonna hand it off to Peter.  
 

[00:02:34] Peter Spaulding: Thank you very much, Becca. So exciting for your first webinar. Many more to come, hopefully, in the future. Okay, so today we're going to be talking about Luminate, the, there was an announcement at the, I think it was, the supplier growth summit or something like that, earlier, I think in October. 
 

so we want to just call this out.Basically, with Walmart's language that they use around changes like this, sometimes suppliers get really nervous that it will be a big change. with good reason, right? Because DSS going away was this enormously difficult and painful process for a lot of people. 
 

Luminate is a completely different,application than DSS. There was a lot of difficulty with that transition. As far as we know for now that this rebranding of Luminae is really just a rebranding. There, we, there are regular updates that are coming out every month and we'll go over those. in the last section today, but this has been the announcement is just Walmart is just rebranding Luminate. 
 

We're just changing the name. not really totally sure why until I think most people agree is a weird name, but hey, Luminate is too. So we're not here to, we're not here to talk about that. we're going to go over basically just some kind of. Some basics in Luminate, Luminate basic, Luminate charter, some essential information if you haven't been using Luminate a lot, that will be helpful, but I'll try to pass through that pretty quickly because I think a lot of you have been on some of these webinars before you've seen some of our earlier Luminate webinars. 
 

I just want to let you know that there is a lot of Illuminate content out there on SupplierWiki that you can check out if you want something that's a little bit more, slower paced or focusing a little bit more just on BASIC or just on Charter. So you can go and explore all that if you want as well. 
 

So what we'll be doing right now is going over a little bit of BASIC. So all that you really have access to in Luminate Basic is the report builder. There's some limitations on that as well within the report builder, too. So Luminate Basic is really it's going to be bare bones report building. 
 

and it'll be basically just for getting the kind of surface level visibility into your report.in store Ecom performance and stuff like, in stocks on hand and, some OTIF metrics as well. So that's pretty much it.that's really all that you're going to get in basic. It's going to be, it's very difficult to be a large supplier in Walmart without charter. 
 

So a lot of larger suppliers are going ahead and buying charter. We're not going to give too much advice about whether that's the right business decision for you or not. But as we talk about it and as we dig into what these things are, especially in our charter section after this, hopefully you'll get a better idea of, what it is and if it's the right decision for you. 
 

A lot of larger suppliers too were Walmart reached out to them to say, hey, here's why you might want Charter because, Walmart wants everyone to pay for Charter too, so.yeah, just a little bit of kind of background there. But basically, the bare bones of a report that you're building from scratch or of any kind needs a dimension, a metric, and a filter for time. 
 

Some of those have kind of automatic settings on them, the time filters, and it'll change depending on what kind of report you're wanting to pull. but, yeah. I want to call out the, some really big ones. The vendor scorecard. Very similar to the scorecard in DSS. at least from the last that I heard. 
 

let us know for sure if you, if your vendor scorecard in Luminate looks different from how it did in DSS. My understanding is it's all the same kind of essential information that's there. That one's really big, obviously, just for understanding how are we doing in the category, how are we doing, with our buyer, and for, creating those clear lines of communication between the buyers and the suppliers. 
 

So,that one obviously super important. It's going to be the first or one of the first ones that you pull. And it's not just for Walmart either. it's really helpful for suppliers too. And for the whole supplier org, depending on how big a part of the, Walmart business is for that particular org. 
 

there's a lot in there and we're not going to spend too much time on it, but. We could. We could do a whole webinar just on the scorecard.if you have Luminate Basic, it should look a little bit more like this. This is your report builder app. there are other apps in Luminate Charter, and your visibility at the very beginning of getting into Luminate with Charter will look different. 
 

You'll be able to pick from ShopperBehavior, ReportBuilder and, Customer something. I can't remember. we'll see it here in a little bit. But this one, whenever you're logging into Illuminate Basic, it's just going to take you right to the ReportBuilder and, should land on my reports, depending on your settings and all that. 
 

So there normally, in this one, there, there haven't been any reports pulled yet, but normally you'll see all of them down there. And then you've got your new report over there, which is Where we're going to start. Once you select a new report, you're going to have two different kinds of sections. Your dataset. 
 

This is an older kind of layout, or the screen is maybe a little bit different. Now you've got three columns, or most should have the visibility into those three columns. And you wouldn't have to scroll down as much. but your dataset is going to give you a good idea of what the intention behind Luminate really is. 
 

And this is something I've liked to talk about a lot over this last year is, DSS obviously was old. It's really old software from the 90s, basically. And it's, it needed updates. It wasn't as accurate as it was in the past. This is what Walmart is saying, but Walmart also wants suppliers to focus on different things. 
 

And a part of that is, is business related, but also, having to do with Omni and renewed emphasis on Omni that everyone is doing right now. and that really like really detailed and granular visibility that Walmart has, that Walmart can offer to these organizations,through Luminate. 
 

So you can get a sense of why this change really happened based on the data sets, because those will, those are nudging suppliers in different directions for what they should be looking at. And again, depending on your relationship with your buyer or your relationship with Walmart, whatever that business relationship looks like. 
 

there are some data sets you may have to be more familiar with than others. But we're just going to go into reports for now and look at the vendor scorecard. 
 

So this is essentially the meat and bones of it. It's all set up. to run like this right away, but you can customize it too. So there we have, store sales, comp store sales and dollars, POS sales and dollars, POS sales and units. And then you've got your AUR there too, store returns as percentage of POS sales. 
 

So that's the visibility there. That's the main thing. there's a lot more in that, too. But you have, you have 30, bits of data, and there is a lot of customization that you can do there, too. I think you'll be able to have more customization, freedom with Charter as well. again,It's just what Walmart wants everyone to pay for charter. 
 

And so they're going to, they're going to make it very beneficial. so the high level, the filters that you're going to want to have here for your vendor scorecard, obviously your vendor, your brand, your category, your item, and you can get really granular from there as well. and Customized to, but if you want to, if you want to be able to just look at one particular category, you can't use the, you can't use the nine digit vendor number. 
 

I don't think, but you have to filter by category and use your six digit numbers. So that's,unless they've updated that from the training that I went to. So just another kind of call out. You can. You can look by category. You just might not be able to, you might not be able to, it'll feel different from DSS. 
 

Whereas in DSS you could just put the nine digit number in and pull for that. Okay. so once you've got all of your customized, your filters in and everything like It will take you to this page where you can name it. You can add a description if you want. And then you can set that to run continuously or run once. 
 

And you can pick your formatting, whether you want that to be CSV or Excel. all of that pretty straightforward as well, too.When you have Charter, you'll see more of these options down below. So we're still just going to stay in the Report Builder, but if you have Charter and if you're looking at it from that perspective, it won't take you straight to the Report Builder. 
 

you're going to want to look at it in the top left hand corner nav. So you just pull that down. It'll have a Walmart Luminate landing page, shopper behavior report, builder, and insights. And this, is all subject to change. it could have changed already since then. Obviously, Walmart Luminate was released long before the app was actually finished, basically. 
 

All of this stuff is up in the air and changing. And, we've seen different suppliers come in with very different looking interfaces. So take all of this with a grain of salt too. Here's another look at the data set. This is the three column view that I was talking about. That, enhanced is either, it's an update or you can have better customization with charters. 
 

but these are the big data sets. These are the points of emphasis that Walmart is making with the transition from DSS to Luminate. is, your store sales and inventory, and then OmniSales, right? This is the emphasis. This is the new kind of direction that we're going in. But these categories of datasets are very different from what you had in DSS. 
 

And learning this is like learning a new language where you've just got different building blocks that you're working with and you have to try to build the same building. my what I've been recommending to so many people is to just get in there and to start running these and to try to familiarize yourself with, with the new layouts. 
 

A lot of it is, there's a lot of the same information in here, but it's not always easy to find. we're going to look at the Store Sales and Inventory dataset. Super important, fundamental stuff.the,what we have here is, different sort of ways of customizing this as well. And then you can also build a report in this dataset from scratch too, which would be even more customizable. 
 

So within the dataset, we have. More visibility into what Walmart is looking for and to what their particular kind of vision is for this. We have a rough DSS equivalent. This is something I was really hesitant to do because There, like I said, it's a new, it's a new language. There's new building blocks. 
 

Not everything has this one for one relationship. but obviously your store detail report in DSS and the company summary report are going to be pretty similar to this one. So the, online pickup and delivery visibility you have, returns, and then your markups and your markdowns. These are the really important kind of, pieces of this as well. 
 

As well as inventory and pipeline. OmniSales is broken down into the 13 week trends and year over year. 
 

there isn't a very obvious DSS equivalent.but yeah, you can compare with Walmart. com sales summary and sales margin and company summary as well. It's the rough comparison.equivalent there for DC metrics. I'm gonna go through these a little bit quicker. again, the best way to learn, what all of these are and how to use them and how to get the most out of them is to just go in there and build some reports. 
 

but with this one, we're, with all of these building a report from scratch can be helpful, though a little bit, maybe it won't give you as good of a sense of what this is actually for, what Walmart is actually looking for with these, but, Yeah, you're, this is your supply chain templates equivalent in DSS too. 
 

DCMetrics. Let's just see what we got there. And then your store demand forecast, dataset we wanted to call out as well. And look into that. Again, we want to recommend, you may want to build a report from scratch. so that you can play with the timeframes a little bit more. And again, it's related to supply chain. 
 

Yeah. And you can look in, you can look at it, category, obviously, and subcategory too. I want to call that out too.the, these are your three main apps, I, or excuse me, these, reports are available in a curated form, in, in these different applications when you have Charter. we'll explain a little bit more of this later. 
 

I don't know what that's doing in this section. Okay, Charter. 
 

shopper behavior, this is the, this is where the rubber really meets the road in terms of can you make your money back in Charter? Is, you can look at a lot of, you can get a lot of insight into your, what your shoppers are doing in Ecom and what your shoppers are doing in stores. these reports are designed to address performance, trends, and profiles. 
 

How can you learn more about how your product is performing, how can you follow the trends that shoppers are, are following if you have, some seasonal stuff that you want to keep your finger on the pulse of that. Also, who are our shoppers, and what are the sort of things that they're doing while they're shopping? 
 

How can we use that to,to make some more insights from that as well? So,in the performance section, the key measures table is something that we like to call out. You've got your product group names there. And then you've got your percent changes on the right hand column, too. this is, this is the table in Shopper Behavior Performance Report that's trying to give you insight into performance at the item level, right? 
 

That's what this breakdown is for. And you want to be able to, you want to be able to know whenever you're having a sharp drop off in performance. And that's what, That's what the key measures table is really there to help with. And then if you want to look at your KPI trends over time, and again, you're going to want to keep that timeframe flexible. 
 

If you want to look at,weekly or monthly or quarterly,and use that to track out liars so you can keep ahead of your performance. 
 

And the shopper behavior profile, this is where you're going to want to, understand who your shoppers are. by gender, age, or income. And also pay attention to sharp drop offs and spikes within those categories as well too. your regular sort of thing. Okay, for channel performance in Report Builder, you can create custom attributes to use in the regular report builder, which is essentially the only thing that you have access to through Luminate Basic. But it will give you a lot more kind of customizability in that as well. 
 

it also contains the Insights dashboard, so this is, for your in store and online data. from really high to really granular level, you can, you can look at your global filters, your summary view, and your tabular view. That's how they're really going to break it down and, we've got visualizations of that here. 
 

So your global filters is how you're going to want to start. That's where you're going to figure out the level of granularity that you want to have. Do you want to look at Omni? do you want to look just at in store? And then you've got your summary view, your dashboard, your, high level net sales units, all of that. 
 

And then you've got your tabular view, which again, is where the real granularity comes in. That's where you can look at your particular item and you can look at net sales units and a UR, for each of those as well. And again, you're using this, you're, you want to find irregularities, you want to be able to, Always know how and where you stand with your customer, in Walmart. So this, customer perception is not so much an app as a service. This is, or, we could think of it as a service. there is an interface and a user kind of platform, but it's helpful to think of customer perception as taking that shopper behavior and digging into it a little bit more, qualitatively and quantitatively. 
 

So the quote that I pulled here from Luminate is, what this, what customer perception is about is getting primary research with real customers. So this is Walmart basically saying, we can do this work for you of trying to figure out what the shopping experience is like from real customers. 
 

sometimes, sometimes in the form of really highly qualitative feedback from individual people. So you've got your whole range of granularity in that as well, which is pretty interesting. So this takes the form of customer surveys, really, for the most part. And these are, you're going to find these in the Customer Perception app, and they exist along with a range from the most qualitative to quantitative, as I mentioned before, right? 
 

So what that means is you could have really rich, really deep engagement with individual people and higher level engagement with just a really broad range, so you could get a good sample size too. and, but the, some of the sample questions that Walmart suggested, or how much would you expect to pay for X, why might you purchase X instead of Y, and then compared to other products like it, would you say that dot.

So really,they're providing surveys for you, but this is something that could also be very highly customizable, where you could look at, your particular inventory, your particular items, who are your competitors, and how are your customers, or or other customers feeling about your particular brand. 
 

pretty fascinating. I haven't heard any, user reviews of this. if you, if you have any feelings about it one way or another, I am really curious to All right. Last section here before we get to the Q& A is the release notes. This is really important to stay on top of from a user perspective. 
 

As I mentioned before, Luminate really launched before it was finished and before DSS was officially killed, for lack of a better word. So the people were using Luminate quite a bit while it was still being updated. So all of this is still growing and finishing. The updates are not as extensive now as they were before. 
 

Now it's more like fine tuning things in Charter or adding in new benefits in Charter and things like that. there's a new app,app thing that's coming, in a little bit, too, that they announced recently. a part of this is basically the upselling of suppliers from basic to charter. 
 

but this is where you find it. You go into Walmart, illuminate resources and release notes. So I've been talking about the, report pulling is the only thing that you can do in basic. There are other things too, in that resources tab that you can find, that are very helpful training videos, articles, some articles more helpful than others. 
 

I found the, customer perception articles to be. Very well written, actually, and, maybe because it's more of a, Walmart feels like they're having to make more of a sales pitch there. Maybe they've been very finely combed and well written, I thought. Some of the other ones, maybe not as helpful, but, again, that is all being updated all the time too. 
 

now they're doing these basically every month. I don't think that we got a November one yet, or maybe there was one at the very beginning of November that we cover here. I think we're just doing September and October. stay tuned for that one if there was a November. but basically, it has been every month. 
 

There will be a release notes that's put out. It could be any day of the year. but it's really important to review previous ones. We're just talking about September and October right now. Assuming that, one, you guys have been using Luminate for a while before that. And, two, that you've been following the developments of Luminate internally as they've been going. 
 

But it's really important, it's really important that you go back and read the others if you haven't already, too. And they all just live on the same, on that in the release notes page. 
 

So this is the September release and I want to use this again to just try to understand what is the intention behind this. What is the, what is the direction that these are all being built out in. And in this one I just want to highlight it's, the report builder and it's shopper behavior. 
 

And I don't think that, I think this is more of a kind of a standard month. We're going to look at some weirder things that, are coming out and that are in development now. But this is really we need to finish all of the basics. We need to finish all of the most important things that people are actually using Luminate for. 
 

So I wanted to highlight that in September. This is more of what you would see earlier on in the year as the app was still being finished. but, yeah, they're still doing updates to the Vendor Performance Scorecard and, Custom Datasets, Store Sales and Inventory, and Distribution Center. This is September that this is happening, right? 
 

And it's been, there's been access to Illuminate for a long time before that. if the Vendor Performance Scorecard is still being updated in September, lots of changes are still going on, too, right? It's a little bit more of what a more traditional month. would have looked like. So this is what I just mentioned already, before, but essential reports, basic reports, not in the capital B basic, but really foundational reports are still being enhanced. 
 

So that's the language that they're using there. It's a little bit vague, but yeah, it's,the release notes are still really just high level too. but fine tuning charter reports, UX, as well as something that we'd like to call out. Report title and duration of weeks displayed in the report interface and updates to reports user interface. 
 

So,some of this is more aesthetic. Some of it is to actually make it a better user experience. And some of it is really just enhancing and refining the data itself. Making sure that you do have all that visibility that you need.that's our, September for us. In October, there's UX updates, which is interesting too. 
 

and, New and Enhanced Endpoints in Walmart Luminate Data Feeds APIs, so that's just for, Charter as well.the, the Data Feed APIs is your back end application for pulling reports. but the thing that we really want to call out in October that we've, that we think is interesting Is the, new product, that's the language that Walmart is using.

New product called Insights Activation. So presumably this is something that could change the cost of charter. I don't know that for sure, but that's what it sounds like to me. If you're calling it a new product and not a new app. this is something potentially that Walmart will try to upsell people with, and presumably it's something that, people only will have access to if they're already paying for charter. 
 

the language that Walmart uses is that you can speak to your administrator to get access, but it's more about integrating Luminate and Walmart Connect. And I think that we've got the announcement here too. So that's, you can see that there in the bottom left hand corner, speak to your administrator to get access. 
 

I think it's probably going to be a little bit more complicated than that. But yeah, this is for helping you optimize your Walmart Connect and Luminate. How can you use the same kind of behavior based insights to learn more about your ads, right? Which is, which is huge too. pretty interesting stuff. 
 

The, the language here is hard to read between the lines on, because it is,salesy, but save compelling media opportunities directly to the Walmart Connect Ad Center, where you can activate them through display campaigns, right? Just, having that visibility into your, ad performance, basically, they say, shortening the path from insights to activation by leveraging business critical media activation opportunities based on customer purchasing patterns and transactional data. 
 

So it's a lot of words and it's a lot of Luminate language that is, basically, the same thing that we see everywhere else. How can we. How can we take all of this information that we have, maybe get some money from suppliers, and help everyone's businesses improve at the same time? That's really all that we can tell about Insights Activation from this announcement. 
 

But yeah. Eliminate cumbersome efforts required to analyze data and extract relevant insights and opportunities through automatically generated recommendations delivered bi weekly for every brand across various subcategories.not really AI, but it sounds like that. It's being marketed in the same way that all of that is being marketed to with that automation and recommendations. 
 

but yeah, I'm really curious about this. I'm really excited to see where it goes and, if we've got,if there's an early adopter program, what's it like at the beginning? What kind of bugs are they going to have to fix and all of that, but yeah, that's pretty exciting. So that's the full extent of my knowledge on insights activation. 
 

so if you have more questions about that, Probably won't be able to help too much with that. But that's it in terms of the content that we have for today. Are there any questions, Bekah? 
 

[00:28:53] Bekah Tatem: I haven't seen any come through yet. We can give it just a little bit. If anyone wants to drop a question in Q& A, that would be great. 
 

In the meantime, I just wanted to call out some resources. Rebecca, I see your question and I will ask that to Peter next. but I just wanted to call out some resources that we have, for Walmart suppliers. Just some cheat sheets and ebooks that you can find on our website. So we would love for you to check those out. 
 

We also, have them for Home Depot, for Target, for some other suppliers too. And just For, suppliers in general that aren't related specifically to a retailer. So we invite you to look at all of those. And then Peter, one question did come in the chat. how much does charter cost?  
 

[00:29:41] Peter Spaulding: Yeah, thanks. so charter is based on a percentage of your store sales, not a brick and mortar store, but your Walmart sales. 
 

So not. Sales to Walmart, but sales that Walmart is making, it's very confusing. And it was this huge pain point, early on too. but yeah, so that's,if Walmart hasn't been reaching out to you about it, then,It's worth looking into. I'd also recommend, the Walmart Supplier Support Group on Facebook. 
 

a lot of people at the beginning, whenever Luminate was being announced, a lot of people were talking about that cost and how to measure whether it's worth it or not. So I would just go there and I would search. LuminateCharter and just do a bunch of reading there too, because people were giving a lot of good advice about that at that time too. 
 

So that was, I think, earlier in 2024. but yeah, it's based on the Walmart, it's based on Walmart sales, not your sales to Walmart. and so that's, it's a confusing and tricky thing too, but hopefully that answers your question. 
 

[00:30:42] Bekah Tatem: That's all I'm seeing in the way of questions. If y'all have just a burning question that you didn't get answered or you think of later, you're always welcome to reach out to us by email. And we would be happy to follow up. And then you can also find, like I said, all our content and other resources at SupplyPike.com and at SupplierWiki.com.