The Supply Side: NWACC notes 15 years of training Walmart supplier analysts

It was around 1990 that Wayne Callahan, former local management for H.J. Heinz, got a call from then Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott to head up a project to train more professionals with the skills they needed to help the retailer and its suppliers better serve their customers.

“You have to remember Northwest Arkansas was a different place back then. Wal-Mart was growing much faster than suppliers could train sales and analyst teams and plant them here,” Callahan said at the 15th Anniversary event held at NorthWest Arkansas Community College in Bentonville on Thursday (Jan. 15).

He said it was much easier for suppliers to hire away the analysts they needed from Wal-Mart’s talent pool. In fact, Callahan said suppliers were constantly poaching talent from each other as well because there just were not enough retail analysts in the region to handle the workload when Wal-Mart unleashed Retail Link in 1991.

NWACC board chairman Ric Clifford who is retired from Del Monte, said Scott called together a group of its suppliers to discuss a possible solution to talent shortage and asked Callahan to take the lead because of his reputation as a “know the customer” exec.

“I just knew that I had better not screw it up,” Callahan said.

GETTING STARTED
A steering committee from the local retail and supplier community wrote the curriculum for the first Certified Retail Analyst Program taught at NWACC. The instructors were a blend from Wal-Mart and local suppliers. Many of the core basics are still being taught 15 years later in what is now a 10-course certificate program that includes analysis of real sales data, logistics and category management and space planning.

Suja Chandrasekaran, the chief technology officer at Wal-Mart, said Retail Link, the proprietary software that Wal-Mart created with the help of General Electric in 1991, was the first time a retailer made its sales data available to the its suppliers. She said it began quite small but was quickly adopted by the growing supplier base and it allowed for a more granular look at sales and inventory data.

Charles Halliburton, a senior planner at Wal-Mart, said he recalls the day former Wal-Mart officer Tom Coughlin, who was over U.S. operations at the time, granted permission to NWACC to sign-on as a Retail Link user. This allowed curriculum to be written around Retail Link and NWACC was and still is the only college in the world with student access to Wal-Mart’s data inside Retail Link.

“Can you imagine all the universities, including the University of Arkansas, that would like to have this access to Retail Link? It was given to NWACC for the purpose of training up an analytical retail workforce and it has not been duplicated,” Halliburton said.

Halliburton spent a decade teaching parts of the Certified Retail Analyst Program and said he felt honored to help train students who were then able to secure good jobs in the local supplier community or with Wal-Mart.

PROGRAM SUCCESS
“I remember one young lady, a stay-at-home mom, who wasn’t sure she had the right background for a job as a retail analyst.” Halliburton said.

After a brief conversation he said she had plenty of experience. She managed a pantry and understood the importance of being in-stock. She ran the kids to soccer and school and knew there were consequences to being late and she handled the family budget.

“I told her that ‘open to buy’ was nothing more than a really big checking account that had to be managed because when it ran in the red there was a big problem. She finished the program and got a job as and analyst with a supplier. Sshe was the promoted to senior analyst,” Halliburton recalled.

Teresa Warren, director of retail and supplier education at NWACC, said there have been 630 students who have completed the program in the past 15 years. Approximately 87% of all students who complete the program find jobs in the supplier community, she said.

“We have tried to keep the classes small so that we do not oversaturate the local market with talent and our placement rate has remained high. Our goal as a college is train professionals for the workforce. This program does that,” Warren said.

RETAIL LINK USER GROUP (RLUG) SUPPORT
Danny Batson, president of the local Retail Link User Group, said the program has been and active supporter of the Certified Analyst Program for many years. Batson was approached by Steve Galen in 2001 to start an internship for students in their last semester of the program.

Galen, of Bissell Homecare, taught in NWACC’s program. He recalled Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott telling the suppliers to develop their own talent, which the NWACC program did and still does. Batson said the internship program allows for a few students each semester to spend real time working in the supplier offices and Wal-Mart is now taking on some of the interns.

RLUG gives $5,000 annually toward scholarships for students in the NWACC Certified Retail Analyst Program. He said students in the program are given a Retail Link log-in which is the primary requirement to attend an RLUG meeting. He invited the students to attend the monthly meeting because of the hands-on discussion groups that take place among retail link users. Aside from being a great networking opportunity, Batson said there is plenty to learn from experienced Retail Link experts as the system is continuing to unfold new operations moving toward the highly anticipated Retail Link 2.0 rollout.

Chandrasekaran told The City Wire at Thursday’s event that a broader launch of Retail Link 2.0 is planned for 2015. She said it is being tested by a few suppliers and there will more pilots introduced in the next few months before a major rollout by year-end.

Retail Link 2.0 is said to have embedded analytics as well as provide real time collaboration between supplier and retailer for better inventory and replenishment accuracy. The system also offers dynamic visualization capabilities.