5 things Walmart suppliers need to know about Walmart

Walmart is an American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets, discount department stores and grocery stores. It operates under the name Walmart all throughout US and Canada, as Walmart de México y Centroamérica in Mexico and Central America, Asda in the UK, Seiyu in Japan and Best Price in India. Also provides wholly owned operations in Argentina, Brazil, and Canada. To manage the global operations of Walmart it is mandatory to have a broad base of suppliers in contact. Those businesses are called Walmart suppliers. These suppliers are burdened with the major task of distributing the retail products to worldwide customers. Being a retailer and that too for a company like Walmart requires precision and detailed analysis.

5 things that Walmart wants its suppliers to know about:

Make the suppliers use the Walmart Retail Link – Nowadays the valuable data in the Walmart retail link is used by the sales team and supply chain management system but not by the suppliers who take care of the wholesale after its distribution. So, Walmart urges its suppliers to use the retail link software. The use of data by the suppliers helps in reduction of the costs.

Redesigning scorecards to enhance the performance – Most of the suppliers keep one scorecard that is based on supply chain but Walmart urges its suppliers to have more than 1 scorecard to keep a check on the supply as well as on the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The lack of a single scorecard confuses suppliers. A single scorecard that balances cost, customer service and CSR which ties to buying behavior is needed.

Collaborative Logistics – Customers want their product to be delivered to them within a few weeks but sometimes the products are not delivered on time. Suppliers who take the charge of delivering them also are not present in the requisite time to have the item delivered. While oil prices have fallen, the cost of transportation has not, and will not, due to the shortage of drivers.

Walmart says that we need to stop the old buyers and sellers relationship –

In order to make it big in the world of suppliers the first thing that you need to do stop depending on the supply chain management and directly deal with the main man. Break down the barriers within the supplier and broaden the discussion.

Responsible Sourcing requirements and expectations –

All suppliers and their facilities – including subcontracting and packaging facilities – are expected to uphold Walmart’s Standards for Suppliers. Learn more about Walmart’s Responsible Sourcing program, our expectations for suppliers and requirements for facilities that include Factor visibility and Disclosure, Company representatives, Line and Fire safety requirements.

Learn Omni Channel and Walmart Strategy

In the retail market, one of the most important factors is customer satisfaction and service. This factor forms the heart of the whole system which includes business modeling, retail chains, and stores.

OmniChannel is a planned source of revolution in multi-channel retailing business and focuses on streaming all different channels from one single database maintained centrally and eventually the customers too can use those channels for a better experience.

Strategy:

                                                                

•       Analytics grow your capability of understanding the demands, trends and set a better communication to quantify the customers.

•       Understand customer’s viewpoint so as to run the business and manage customer relationship better without losing any information or track of their shopping.

•       Pointing out individual transactions will help you understand the growing trend, demography of customers, and help get a potential grip on the business systems.

•       OmniChannel targets a specific audience by analyzing the transactions and offers them different coupons and discounts to increase the business and attract the customer to repeat encounters.

•       Integrate different streams of your business together to provide your customers high-quality products and services at a very efficient price.

•       Channeling proper communication so that all important information is narrated specifically to the customer and this can build a better relationship and will help you excel in your stream.

  

•       To provide a perfect service focused shopping experience, retailer must understand that offering multiple channel service can fascinate different types of customers.

On the other hand, Walmart being the best American Multinational retail company is managing different chains of department stores, hypermarkets, and grocery stores. The Walmart suppliers’ strategy is clear and aims towards the enhancement of store networking, performance, and setup. This store has given scope to many small ventures and influenced many items from small tribal communities and from woman empowered stores, exchange of these products have given them popularity and income.

Walmart has effectively enhanced the life of mankind by providing them job assistance and job security. This company has established their offline and online retail formats very efficiently all across the world and gaining profit immensely. All these points and working strategy have made them the best retailer in the world.

Understand the Importance of Sales Inventory Analysis

In a company when we experience an increase in sales life feels better, but when it heads towards the counterpart it is usual to feel little panicked. So to avoid getting that panicked feeling setting up the procedure of sales inventory analysis for all products and services is a great option. It initiates you to establish growth trends for an effective track of market and company’s inventory hierarchy. From this, you will get warning signs quite early and get enough time to fix the malfunction. On dealing with products or services, an analysis specifies you about the declination and inclination in the demand and supply.

Role of Sales Analysis

A continuous analysis of your sales over a long period of time enables you in setting a better parameter for the sales pattern. This will be a great support while coping up with the sales budget in the future and for the future.

A complete analysis of your company and sales department has a crucial importance while developing the company’s marketing plan for next year. From this, a company determines where the range of manufactured services and products make them stand in the competition. According to the results, one can map its sales and marketing activities for a better opportunity and future profitable growth.

Take for an example, if a service or product represents the major part of your sales, from that, you can conclude that you require enough plans on marketing and sales to protect the service in the competitive market. Again, comparison of your sales performance in the market will become easier too. 

Although your business is increasing every year, the market too is increasing at a greater pace. Salesinventory analysis might direct you to understand that your other competitors are gaining more by capturing your potential customers.

Remember the following points while analyzing the sales performance of your business:

•        Pricing regularly changes like discounts, increasing price or drop in price

•        Competitors keep on entering and exiting the market periphery

•        Sales grow with launching of new products and services

•        Introduction of new products cannibalizes the existing ones

•        Interest of customers fluctuates between the products and services

•        With the advancement, demand of customer changes

•        Take care of the distribution channel you operate in  

From the entire content, you can understand much about the importance of sales analysis. Follow this and reach your exact goal!

Four Prominent Steps towards Better Inventory Management

The trouble in business can be easily controlled by an implementation of inventory management and control system. Most of the companies take help of software and a manual team to trace the sales inventory analysis, such a system can make a true difference. If an organization takes help of any software, then learning basic steps in handling the software becomes an important part of your service. Follow the four steps and form a better inventory controlling management. 

1) Training – This becomes the biggest causes of system breakdown. It happens due to improper training, or due to employees who do not follow the exact procedure in times of call-to-action and this badly affects the stock market. Units of measure form the basic area of training. Improper count or picking wrong units will result in snowball effect, if not rectified in correct time; this can hamper a big part of the organization. To avoid this situation, a proper training to inventory staff can save tons of burdens. 

2) Cycle count program – For accuracy in the estimation of inventory and finances, follow a daily or weekly cycle count rather than a yearly check. This will make you proficient and get an exact sales inventory analysis report at the end of the year. Frequent check on the counting cycle will help you understand the loss, profit, internal theft, and conspiracies. 

3) Chalk out causes of discrepancies – Identify consistent errors, then make an effective research on its cause. Often, elimination of error becomes easy if identified well and this becomes possible with special training sessions and by amending the physical aspect or discrepancy.

4) Storage and Warehouse – Theoretically, this point can look simple, but in general, it is a challenging step. Associates ought to be coached properly to take care of inventories, in organizing them and in housekeeping. The best method to follow in this department is "clean as you go". In this case, before leaving the workplace all the members have to give a report on their entire day’s work as well as clean the whole surrounding. The work may include labeling, organizing them together, keep up store organization and assign bin location. 

Implementation of these rules will surely help you in proceeding with the best business in your niche.  

Points to Understand in the Inventory Management

Inventory management deals with the things in stock, which are meant for business better prospect. Inventories are the base of a business and form the tangible part, which relates to all facets of business. It includes stock in the warehouse, raw materials, and finished product; when all these are included, it specifies the exact investment by the system. Again, unhealthy inventory can lead to brand fall and hamper the rate of customer conversion; after a failure retaining the same position in the market is a difficult job. So, always be prepared with your sales inventory analysis for a detailed record and mapping of product and sales. 

Salient features of Inventory Management 

- Control the capital investment by keeping a check on available stocks;

- Confirmation of availability of inventory by an uninterrupted production, to fulfill the consumer demand and satisfaction;

- Plan inventory needs by relating to a scientific estimation of demand and supply;

- Maintain safety stock to tie up the demand fluctuation;

- Plan to fight deterioration in the demand of products;

- Take safety precaution to safeguard the inventories from thefts, waste leakages and replenishment. 

Benefits of Inventory Management

- Helps in understanding and improving the liquidity position of the firm in the market, by reducing excess investment of capital in inventories;

- Maintains a smooth production operation to ensure a reasonable material stocking;

- Maintain the vicious regulation cycle of finished products from the manufacturing unit to the distribution unit to the consumer’s hub;

- Takes care of time variation in the provision and supply of raw material;

- Keeps a check on production scheduling, ordering issues, and material shortage;

- Regular track on sales inventory analysis- minimizes damage, obsolescence, declination, etc.

- Influences the company to take advantage during price fluctuations of raw materials in the market and helps in saving finances.

Limitations related to Inventory Management

- Professional management of inventories can highly reduce business risk rather than eliminating it.

- On sharing the responsibilities and liabilities of inventories, the operation cycle becomes easy to handle and more functional.  

Understand all the objectives, benefits and limitations of inventory management that help your business to perform well by taking care of all facets of business. 

Sales Inventory Analysis – a Smart Management Mode

With regard to the fact that you own an online hub or a grocery shop, the constant flow of inventories becomes the base of your company and help in earning a profit. If you are an owner of a store dealing with physical entities, then you should keep a constant check on those commodities. Sales inventory analysis is considered a smart mode of managing the process, which determines your sales and the process related to the increases in sales.  

Location

Boost your sales with the inventory management; one can come across websites and software related to this process.  By the help of them, you can locate your position in the market and also learn about the dispersal of your products. By this, you can configure the region in the country or the world, responsible for the elevation of your product or services. A perfectly analyzed report will help you claim an enhanced territory by putting more ads on the areas saturated with your commodities. 

    

Mark your Bonus Spot   

When you come across any company, you will learn that they have some products that involve the biggest amount of business, this will be your bonus spot and you can do a major amount of business from them.

Sales inventory analysis and management help in understanding this concept in your business related to that specific product. Those reports assistance you, understands the worth of this stock.

Avoid Backlogs

Are you stuffed with inventories, which can’t be sold? Track the availably of electronic commodities that are replaced in the future by their adjacent flagships. These are the products, whose popularity declines with their updated versions. So, stock your warehouse with a reasonable amount of product or in future you will be haunted by the stock and this will affect your revenue stats too.

Backup Stock

Backup of your commodity moderates the risk of being out of stock when the product is in demand. Backup of stock proportionally impacts, the elimination of backlogged commodities. So, build your comfort zone and stock your warehouse with a balanced number of commodities.

Sales and products or services are directly proportional to each other. So, be aware of them and increase your business!

The Technique of Sales Analysis You must know

Every financial manager or business owner strives to know where the sales or revenues are at. The life blood of any business is sales which translate into cash flow. In many cases, and certainly it's not a good thing, as other issues such as rising interest rates, material costs, and, in general, overall solvency can be masked or hidden temporarily by the revenue or sales growth .

Year over year or this month's sales to last month, often sales is compare. To compare the revenues by setting up a time frame in mind to a previous period; year ago, month ago, etc is intuitive for the owner.

In the context of other aspects of the business, sales revenue needs to be studied by the business owner. To enable the business owner from the viewpoint of ratios to understand overall financial importance there are some ways to look at sales. Sales have been referred to as the lifeblood of the company. Thus, to the toolkit of understanding the business, that meaningful Salesinventory analysis should be a great additional.

Growth viewpoint is the easiest and most basic way to view sales. The calculation is very simple. The sales revenue of the year, minus sales revenue last year, and divided by sales revenue last year - by multiplying that by 100 percentage of sales growth number is calculated. Hopefully achieving upward sales growth the calculation is best charted in the context of a company. The overall number becomes much more meaningful over a number of years, when a business owner plots or charts this number over a longer period. The company might be doing a bit more poorly when inflation is taken into account, if sales growth is flat.

There is a danger of fast growth to the companies. Therefore, based on their current financial position, business owners might want to calculate the rate of their growth. The calculation goes this way. To get the calculation in percentage the gross income of the company divided by last years retained earnings, and then multiplied by 100. The firm might not be able to sustain this growth, if the growth rate in sales is faster than our affordable growth rate. That is of course as receivables; Sales inventory analysis and assets that need to be financed will be needed by the company.

Achieving Omni channel Excellence in a Retail Business

Today, customers are much more aware about the products, services and ideas available in the market. They are also brand conscious, price leery than ever before. Smartphones are now helping people shop anywhere and compare products within fraction of a second.  A typical characteristic of an online shopper is, he/she can collect pricing information from different sources without waiting in queues. The stakes for retailers have never been higher when it comes to meeting customer expectations. The digital age customers are more insightful, have high expectations for information regarding product quality and use of technology to make purchasing decisions. Customers are now using search engines to get additional information about a product or brand. They compare products and explore manufacturers’ websites to check endorsements, reviews, and recommendations. Based on this ground reality, retailers need to focus on their omni channel strategy and foster their desired products into the hands of their customers.

Getting ahead of customers:

In today’s business environment, retailers need to get ahead of their customers to serve them well and ensure a lifelong loyalty. Many business owners have started to successfully grasp omnichannel retailing in which, they deliver a seamless fulfillment experience for consumers need a fast and easy shopping experience. Some of the retailers are successful in this methodology and one of the reasons for their success is identifying the interdependency between consumer facing operations and practices related to supply chain.

However, a productive Omnichannel operation combines unique product identification, accurate attributes, customer preferences, purchase history and paths to purchasing. It’s all about knowing what a retailer has, and following through on promises to the buyers.

Walmart’s future-ready retail:

Walmart has near about 11,000 stores and 10 active websites around the world. This retail business is experiencing more than 246 million customers and it sees near about 300,000 social mentions per week. Walmart is using big data analytics to get control over its worldwide customers and supply chain. This process helps Walmart in reducing overstock and stock most in demand products. Walmartsuppliers are required to use the real time vendor inventory management system for a particular product, if it has no significant sales. Walmart also uses mobile big data analytics to get its mobile strategy in order. Because, e-commerce is closely related to mobile purchase in today’s smartphone environment.

Better data management leads to better inventory management. It is an essential omnichannel strategy for retailers around the world. Better consumer data promotes better targeting and delivers the knowledge of consumer needs. Retailers and suppliers need to take advantage of this system to operate their business effectively.

The author of this article is associated with 18knowledge.com that provides big data analytics and data mining for supply chain management, inventory management and retail business.

How Big Data Analytics in Changing the Facet of Inventory Management

People use big data analytics when they have a huge volume of both organized and unorganized data that is too large and it can’t be processed using the conventional database or software facilities. In most of the companies, the volume of data is too large. At the same time, it moves very fast and outrun the existing processing capacity of the currently used applications. Although, there are problems with big data, they are really helpful for a company to improve the operational efficiency, make profit, faster management and take wise business decisions.

Big data analytics makes sales inventory analysis effortless and uncomplicated. The main attraction of this system is its ability to process extensive information in an advanced way. If there are too much data without the use of technology, it may create problems than their value. If a business has conventional IT structure, their large data volume can be a challenge for them. Because, on-premise solutions can’t manage the weight of large data sets. In case of big data analytics, there will be variety, volume, veracity and velocity. 

      

Big data analytics can manage the size of the captured data, the speed at which data alters forms of data sources, and ambiguity of data accuracy. The process of big data has the ability to analyze data in real-time and to extract critical data for operation.

How big data is changing inventory management?

It is helping to integrate business systems to improve operational efficiency of a business while delivering higher profits than before. Innovative business owners are now realizing the benefits of big data analytics after applying it across their supply chains.

Enhanced operational efficiency:

In comparison to the older reactionary models, big data analytics helps remove hindrances and enhance efficiency in supply chain operation. It’s a great option for the operations manager to improve the supply chain efficiency.

Maximize profit:

Real time data are highly essential in the wholesale distribution industry. Big data provides greater insights to achieve maximum profits.

Reduced costs and increased customer satisfaction:

The cloud based nature of big data curtails both hardware and maintenance costs. The system can also be integrated with the existing IT system with a minimum expense. This process helps match inventory and inventory levels to orders accurately. It increases customer satisfaction.

Management Information Systems of Wal-Mart’s Retail Link

The Wal-Mart Retail Link system is one of the largest B2B supply chain systems in the world. This connects consumer purchase data to the Wal-Mart purchasing system and to vendor supply systems. Retail link plays a key role in Wal-Mart’s corporate strategy to become the dominant low cost provider of retail goods. Simple Steps Together we lay out the individual decision-support that needs of your team are  

•        Salient helps create automated Retail-Link feeds of raw details by date. (Any roll-up and any drill-down are then available for independent management access.)
•          We work with you to create automated feeds from your in-house systems, such as: sales, inventory, shipping and related facts.
•          We bridge the sources together with cross-reference tables so your customer numbers and product numbers reconcile to Wal-Mart codes when necessary.
•          We provide the means to leverage the information to maximize margins.

1.  Salient Dashboards- For interactive web building and viewing of consolidated performance facts (drag & drop web 2.0 style interface).
2.   Salient Interactive Miner- An interactive Visual Data Mining system that can let your internal personnel explore beyond the boundaries of typical dashboard systems, and into root causes in the underlying data.

Benefits:

•          Time Savings - the overhead involved in manual report building with data from multiple places is eliminated.  
•          Intuitive Analysis - rather than delivery only charts & graphs; Salient VDM helps managers identify root cause.  
•          Root cause data-mining – see the connections and relationships in the data to easily identify problems and opportunities.

Retail margin:

It is measured and reported back to Wal-Mart using figures from the Wal-Mart DSS pre-built reports. The summaries can be used when working with Wal-Mart buyers on specific items. Price management is a very important part utilized here to keep track of which items are “rolled back” and for how much and how long. This provides regular automated extractions of these facts based on what’s important to your Retail Link team, and helps you focus on what to do about the results.

Things must be known about the Inventory Analysis Measures

The Sales Inventory Measures:

Before we move into the specific details of Sales Inventory Analysis, measures and metrics, let's first become familiar with the overall concept of performance measurement. And why it is so important to organizational success. Every organization conducts a variety of measurements, but what separates the successful from the not so successful approaches is the level of thought and deliberation. This goes into designing and implementing the right measurements to focus on the right things. This is especially true when it comes to inventory systems and processes; without proper and effective inventory metrics the organization is, for practical purposes, operating blind and potentially creating negative financial consequences

Benefits:

Some of the benefits an organization will realize from the use of proper Sales Inventory Analysis include:

·         Better oversight and management of inventory carrying costs

·         More efficient processing and delivery of product

·         Improved sales opportunities and delivery times for marketing and sales purposes

·         Improved forecasting and management for manufacturing purposes

·         Better oversight and evaluation of operating costs related to inventory

·         More effective and profitable financial oversight and management

How to use the inventory measures effectively:

Using inventory measures effectively will be your next most important step. It is not enough to just put the measures in place; the organization must also analyze the results and interpret them effectively. This may sound easy enough, but in the real world it is not so simple or straightforward. Effective analysis makes use of data collected to either validate or invalidate the results. It is not about "running the numbers" per sec, but rather about understanding the underlying data, identifying the useful information offered by this data, and then putting that useful information into action in ways that benefit the organization.

Inventory Spreadsheet:

All these inventory measures can be developed using a well-designed inventory spreadsheet allowing you to:

·         Enter test data or your company’s actual data

·         Select various reports with extensive filtering capability

·         Automatically generate well formatted Reports

These inventory spreadsheets should be professionally designed with no extensive spreadsheet knowledge required by the user.