Mapping Wal Mart Retail Link Data

210680 Resource 203467 210588 1 1218149279137 1251214149169 Controlled Mapping POS Data: De-pivoting the Pivot Table

One of the most powerful benefits of mapping retail sales data is the simple elegance of seeing 3600 sales numbers as colored points, in geographic context, on a map. Sure beats 3600 store IDs.

<p style="text-align: left">Just this week we announced a new map-centric business solution aimed at <span style="font-weight: bold">Category Managers</span> for grocery and consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers.  The product is called <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: rgb(0,102,0)">AWhere CPG</span></span><sup>™</sup> and you can check out the <a href="http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Awhere-Inc-885634.html">announcement here</a>.</p> <div style="text-align: left"> </div> <p style="text-align: left">Category Managers are the bright and focused people that are responsible for the ultimate sales success of high volume consumables that we buy at Walmart, Safeway, Krogers, Target and Walgreens (among several thousand other retail chains.)  Did you know there are 34,000 grocery stores in the US alone?\nEach with 30,000 to 50,000 products?  That’s a lot of data.</p> <div style="text-align: left"> </div> <p style="text-align: left">Category Managers are Excel spreadsheet gurus. Think of it.  If you sell to Walmart, you have more than 3600 retail locations in the US alone serviced by more than 100 distribution centers (DCs).  If you are responsible for a dozen SKUs of juices, each with 20-30 pricing, sales, and inventory parameters: All that together makes for a <span style="font-style: italic">very large </span>spreadsheet dump.  All referenced by 3600 4-digit store IDs. Whew! I’m feeling numb writing this.</p> <div style="text-align: left">As we developed AWhere CPG with its integrated capability to import POS data from <span style="font-weight: bold">Walmart’s Retail Link</span>® online reporting tool, one of the first and most obvious uses of mapping is simply seeing a products sales velocity painted as 3600 colored points on a US map.  Instead of staring blankly at 30 Super-A pages of Wal-Mart Store IDs (let see, is store #916 or #2717 in Hattiesburg Mississippi, oops, both are!), now you can see at a glance which sales figures go with Chicago and which go with LA.  And, wow! Look at what’s going on in Tucson and South Florida!</div> <p style="text-align: left"> </p> <p style="text-align: left"><img border="2" hspace="5" alt="Mapping POS Data: De-pivoting the Pivot Table" vspace="5" align="baseline" src="/docs/Walmart-US-LowHH-450.jpg" /></p> <div style="text-align: left"> </div> <p style="text-align: left">Over the next few days, I’m going to share a few of the first observations that we and our early customers have had with AWhere CPG:  Some we expected. Some were surprises, even to those of us that live and breath maps every day.</p> 9 application/xml false AWhere CPG Category Manager excel indexing map Point of Sales Retail Stores Safeway sales Wal-Mart Mapping Wal Mart Retail Link Data | AWhere Blog Add a geographical dimension to your WalMart sales analysis and learn how to maximize sales. item/210591 Add Maps to Excel Spreadsheets | AWhere Blog Maps let your team see the spatial component of the data, and increases the speed from information to action. item/209024 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 4.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Zune 3.0; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729) 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 $Admin 67.172.146.66 false true false false true 204488 false false true false false false true 203467 blog blogsite/AWhere/web