Lowering the High Cost of Selling to Wal-Mart.

By Sheldon Cwinn

Walmart is a very expensive customer to have, often requiring armies of people to manage and service their vendor managed inventory model. There are new ways of lowering those costs through automation.

“Wal-Mart is not only the world’s largest company but also one of the world’s most demanding customers,” said Sheldon Cwinn, vice president of Wisdom Analytics. “In our recent survey, 92% of vendors contacted maintain that Wal-Mart is the most expensive retailer to sell to. Wisdom Analytics automates many of the repetitive tasks that take time and effort and cost vendors money. Order scripting, demand planning, spotting POS exceptions and finding opportunities at store level, category management, improving instocks, and maximizing sell thru% are all benefits derived from Wisdom Analytics. Best of all, Wisdom Analytics is software that can be afforded by any vendor. It is intuitive to use, and easy to learn.”
 

Wisdom Analytics today announced the availability of Version 4.0 of its award winning software focused on driving the cost of doing business with Wal-Mart down. Wisdom Analytics has rapidly become the most adopted software solution for vendors selling to Wal-Mart.
 

“Wisdom has many of the features of its competitors but at a fraction of the price,” says Dan Batson president of the North West Arkansas Retail Link User Group and a Wisdom Analytics user at Fuji Film. “It helps to lower the cost of selling to Wal-Mart.”
 

“I remember the day one of our Retail Link analysts left us,” says Ronnie Kornbluth, president of UFO Jeansware. “The workload became staggering for all concerned. We never wanted to be in that position again. So we skeptically at first adopted Wisdom Analytics to help us out. Now we accomplish more than ever because Wisdom has made us so much more productive and we have watched our business with Wal-Mart steadily grow. We now have a better understanding of our POS position. Wisdom is a great tool and I would highly recommend it.”
 

Wisdom Analytics 4.0 new features include order scripts that can optionally be varied by long-range weather forecasts provided for every Wal-Mart store in North America. Advanced demographics that can show you who is purchasing your products at point of sale. Wisdom Analytics 4.0 also includes new and improved facilities for order scripting, demand planning, category management, and replenishment. Wisdom Analytics includes the 18 core reports and analytics framework that has traditionally made the software so powerful and easy to use. Wisdom Analytics turns Retail Link reporting into a real time online environment. MS Excel and continually printing dozens of multi-page reports every week is a thing of the past.
 

Wisdom Analytics is sold by annual subscription that includes upgrades and support. Subscriptions start at $5,000 a year. For more information call me - Sheldon Cwinn 514-341-5000 or email me sheldon@wisdomanalytics.ca.

Why Do So Many Vendors Have It Wrong ??

By Sheldon Barry Cwinn

Most vendors that sell to Wal-Mart do not realise this but basically, selling to Wal-Mart means selling on consignment. Wal-Mart cleverly disguises this by "advancing" money to you according to your Vendor Agreement. But, make no mistake about it, your merchandise is strictly on consignment and faces the prosepect of  50/50 markdowns, being returned to you, or a combination of both. Here are some stories that you should consider......

• Touch My Monkey!  The Wal-Mart buyer came to a well-established apparel manufacturer one day with a concept of doing several children's sleep sets with the theme "Touch My Monkey." This was to be a Wal-Mart private lable initiative. Dutifully the manufacturer went out and designed 12 different pieces of artwork for the "Touch My Monkey" line. Six designs were eventually approved. Then the manufacturer was beaten up in price. The entire project was to be done "as a favour" to the buyer at very low margin. Well guess what?  One hundred and twenty thousand sleep sets were produced. When they got to the stores, no manager wanted to place the merchandise on sale because they found the sleep sets vulgar. Wal-Mart returned  a great portion of the merchandise, and the manufacturer is no longer in business today. Moral of the story.... even if you supply private lable goods to Wal-Mart, they are there on consignment only.
• Sour Puss! The story of Vlasic Pickles is a typical Wal-Mart vendor tale of woe. Vlasic's sold a half gallon of pickles in Winn Dixie  for $2.99 a jar. The pickle buyer from Wal-Mart got inspired. How could he better Winn Dixie? He approached the Vlasic company, could they produce a gallon jar of pickles that would sell at retail for $3.99? Wal-Mart would purchase over one million jars of pickles a year, and Wal-Mart would only make a nickle a jar. It would be a tesiment to Wal-Mart's "We sell for less" mentality. The jars would go into "Action Alley" the mid-aisle as the consumer walked into the store and the pickles would flyy off the shelf....err floor in this case! Know what? They did!!!!!! There was only two problems. The first was that Vlasic's couldn't get enough pickle cucumbers to satisfy Wal-Mart's order. The second, no other retailer wanted to touch Vlasic's products because they could never match Wal-Mart's price point! And, Vlasic's couldn't make enough money on the Wal-Mart order to avoid Chapter 11. The company had other problems besides the Wal-Mart one, but the Wal-Mart problem sure did not help. Vlasic's couldn't reorganize and the pickle division was acquired under banruptcy by H.J. Heinz.
• Naturally Delicious! Two partners Bob & Doug went into the business of marketing Doug's mother's  all-natural salad dressings. The small company became profitable, but Bob and Doug were eking out a living. If only they could sell to Wal-Mart! That would solve all of their problems. Wal-Mart has "new vendor fairs", usually sponsored by a chamber of commerce, and held all over North America. Prospective new vendors show their wares to Wal-Mart buyers and Wal-Mart helps the smaller regional companies become vendors. Bob and Doug went to the New Vendor Fair in their area. The buyer dipped his finger into a few flavors of the delicious salad dressings. Eureka! He loved them. Just lower the price by 15% and Wal-Mart would order a ton of salad dressing. And they did! Wal-Mart buyers have thousands of miles of shelf-space to fill, so the orders just kept right on comming! Business was booming until one day. You see natural salad dressing has a shelf life. Eventually the buyer called to return thousands of bottles of dressing. The small company quickly went bankrupt.

Vendors seldom get it right. The relationship with Wal-Mart is really a partnership. One where the vendor has a say as to where there merchandise goes in the store, and which stores their merchandise goes to. Automation with a product like Wisdom Analytics can help analyze trends at store level and can help vendors build a profile of where their merchandise should go. Factors such as long-range weather trends, demographic, and geo-analytical information is analyzed at store level. Wisdom is a fantastic tool to help you know where to place your merchandise in order to assume the least possible risk.

The moral of the story is - never forget that your merchandise in a Wal-Mart store is exactly that - your merchandise. To succeed you have to get the replenishment metrics right, know about the stores you are selling through, and apply a heaping helping of good old common sense. Consignment is consignment no matter how you dress it up! 

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How POS Analytics Make Your Business Grow With Wal-Mart

 

 
Use Automation - Make Your Business With Wal-Mart More Profitable.
 

 

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When you enter into a vendor relationship with Wal-Mart it becomes immediately clear that Wal-Mart is a very sophisticated company with lots of vendor tools. Many of the day-to-day aspects of running a complex supply chain are automated. So why shouldn’t you as a Wal-Mart vendor have the same advantages.

In a recent survey of Wal-Mart vendors conducted by Nielsen, vendors indicated that they spent 22% of their time and resources performing repetitive tasks with respect to managing data. That is an enormous overhead to assume. Consider that downloading, cutting, pasting, sorting through, grouping, filtering, compiling, disseminating and distributing Retail Link data has a high cost to your organization. There must be a more efficient way to cut costs and boost productivity. There is.....automate!

Wisdom Analytics has been created to go beyond the traditional cut and paste do-it-yourself management of Retail Link data. The entire process of data management and information reporting is completely automated thus making every vendor who adopts it immediately more productive
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