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.