Acceleration Economy has made the case in recent coverage that Walmart and Kroger are two of the top customer-centric digital innovators in the world.
Both companies reinforced that positioning in major ways last week: Walmart increased its emphasis on making big data available to suppliers and business partners and standardized on a key Microsoft platform for analytics. Kroger announced the planned acquisition of Albertsons and emphasized the need to “accelerate” its business model advances.
Given their size, tech investments, and influence across their respective value chains, we believe Acceleration Economy readers need to stay on top of developments from these two companies and others like them for insights into leading indicators in innovation, tech investment, supply chains, inventory management, and more.
Walmart and Big Data
Did you know Walmart is a software vendor? Last week the company said it’s going to start offering a free version of Walmart Luminate, a big data/analytics platform it launched a year ago within the retail industry. The company says product revenue from Luminae grew 80% quarter over quarter in just 11 months since it was launched.
The world’s largest company positions Luminate as a commercialized, democratized version of its retail insights to deliver a single source of truth within the retail industry. It provides a unified picture of retail categories, their health, and consumer trends at big data scale; in so doing, it brings suppliers and merchants closer together so they can collaborate on data-driven decisions.
Acceptance of the platform has been strong: Walmart says it has built a diverse stable of categories and company sizes on the platform. All are looking to optimize product assortments, forecast inventory, and analyze customer sentiment to deliver better customer experiences.
The company’s latest step to build on Luminate’s momentum: a Basic package that is free to suppliers, a step aimed at helping suppliers of any size to collaborate with merchants to grow their business. Basic subscribers will gain access to the software’s Channel Performance insights, which includes standard operational metrics needed to run their businesses and to understand category growth.
The Basic package does not include the Shopper Behavior module, which determines if an activity brings new customers into a given category, or the Customer Perception module, which is used to engage with shoppers by surveying customers to understand factors driving their purchase decision.
Those with the Charter (paid) version of the software also have access to a dedicated account team and engineering support for application programming interface (API) ingestion. Paid members will gain access to incremental data sets, including insights regarding items added to carts and purchased via grocery pickup and delivery, in the future.
Another indicator of the company’s technical depth and strength: It developed Luminate internally while leveraging existing platforms and enterprise assets. The software delivers fast results for complex queries, collection of real-time retail events, as well as data security and governance.
Looking forward, the world’s largest retailer is working to integrate Luminate insights into existing merchandising tools to better facilitate data collaboration with suppliers, the company said. The company is also pilot-testing use of Luminate data in the Walmart Connect advertising ecosystem.
Of course, Walmart is also making a significant push into industry cloud software, as Bob Evans has previously noted.
Walmart Finance Standardizes on PowerBI
There was another major, and noteworthy, tech development from Walmart in the past few days: the company’s finance organization disclosed its plan to standardize on Microsoft Power BI as its single-source reporting and analysis platform.
Officials said they’ve developed a “semantic model library” with massive amounts of financial data (trillions of records from multiple underlying sources) that gives employees easy access to data to analyze it quickly and efficiently.
In Walmart’s implementation of PowerBI, raw data is curated, cleansed, and enriched in a data warehouse before being presented with PowerBi. The company leverages PowerBI’s incremental refresh option which only loads the most recently changed data from the underlying database.
Company officials emphasized the importance of PowerBI working well with a wide range of partner tools and systems — not just those from Microsoft — which is so important in a tech infrastructure such as Walmart’s with a wide range of vendors’ products in its tech stack. 150
Kroger Buying Albertsons
Cincinnati-based Kroger operates 2,800 stores, has annual sales of $130 billion, and references its “seamless digital ecosystem” as a critical force in building customer loyalty and accelerating growth.
Last week it took a major step that should turbocharge growth, announcing its plans to acquire Albertsons in a transaction that values the latter at $24.6 billion. The two companies aim to achieve greater scale and leverage to compete with Walmart and Amazon.
“As a combined entity, we will be better positioned to advance Kroger’s successful go-to-market strategy by providing an incredible seamless shopping experience, expanding Our Brands portfolio, and delivering personalized value and savings,” Kroger chairman and CEO Rodney McMullen said in announcing the deal. “We’ll also be able to further enhance technology and innovation, promote healthier lifestyles, extend our health care and pharmacy network and grow our alternative profit businesses.”
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