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About Walmart

Walmart is the biggest multinational retail corporation with annual revenue of over $600bn. Walmart operates 11,000 stores in 27 countries and is the world's largest retailer, employing over 2.2 million associates worldwide. The company is known for its low prices and wide range of products, including electronics, clothing, groceries, and household items.

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About ProcureTech

ProcureTech is on a mission to accelerate and amplify the digital future of procurement.​ Founded in 2021, it is home to the ProcureTech100, curated annually with Kearney, we spotlight the pioneering digital procurement solutions supercharging the enterprise.

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We shift procurement performance through the design and implementation of digital procurement blueprints, procuretech stacks and road maps, that incorporate the dynamic, data-driven insights from 1,000s of digital procurement solutions.​

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Lance Younger

Founder and CEO of ProcureTech

​ProcureTech also provides the following services and programmes: SOURCE platform, ACCELERATOR, StrategyLABs, SCOUT, EXPERTS, ProcureTechSTARS, Champions Indexes, research insights, SIGNALS, Founders’ Circles and more.​

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​About the Accelerator

ProcureTech scanned the market of over 60 solutions and shortlisted 6 companies for individual demo sessions. ivoflow was proud to be selected as the preferred partner and accelerator winner for the 7-weeks ACCELERATOR program to co-create advanced cost analytics solutions for Walmart Canada. During the 7 weeks program, ivoflow was able to demonstrate their know-how in advanced analytics, visualization and the automated generation of new value-delivery-opportunities and actionable insights.

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The Challenge

Walmart was looking for enhanced transparency for its items and services. Prices needed to be separate from demands and aggregate spend data in order to achieve better analytics and overview. The linkage of Walmart's total cost to related costs as well as the implementation of should cost models and benchmarking, was defined as the challenge. Furthermore, Walmart was looking for useful value base opportunity insights and execution tracking.

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The Solution

The co-created fast track solution between the ivoflow and Walmart teams solved the following pain points in the 7-weeks program. Some of these are highlighted here:

1/ Building the Backbone | ML implementation: In order to gain valuable insights into part price developments and better category categorization, virtual “parent” parts had to be created based on supplier invoice descriptions. Purchased Services and Parts on the indirect side did not have any dedicated part numbers. ivoflow implemented a machine learning (ML) algorithm that was able to map numerous supplier invoice descriptions to unique parts, enabling key insights into price developments for any kind of article and drive better part family categorization.  

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2// Linear Cost Comparisons among 390+ plants | Locations: Using the methodology of the Linear Price Progression model (LPP), the team build a microservice that automatically compared cost per purchased category to a cost driver variable (e.g. sqft). This way locations similar in size, sales that were spending more per e.g. sqft than other locations can be tracked and analyzed and a category level. In parallel to identifying the outliers, targets and benchmarks were added to enable progress and target tracking

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3/// Mapping external market intelligence data to internal data: In order to understand historic purchase price performance and support forecast planning, the team mapped external market intelligence data from external providers to each of Walmarts spend categories. The team was able to built its own unique market index per spend category and understand how category pricing compared to market pricing. Also with the ability to forecast how much pricing will decrease or increase per category over the next 12-18 months, planning can now be done at a much more accurate level.  

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The Result

ivoflow and Walmart were working closely together to develop new micro-services tailored for the retail market to view, analyze, and deliver key insights into their indirect spend categories. The team developed new and advanced analytics insights to automatically track new opportunities and potential risks. As well as the implementation of tracking and reporting tools to help manage Walmart’s indirect spend more effectively and efficiently.

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“The ProcureTech Accelerator program was a big enrichment to our entire team. The perfectly managed 7 weeks program was a great combination out theoretical and practical coaching and how to effectively manage a project with a fixed deadline. With our cooperation partner Walmart we bootstrapped an advanced cost analytics tool and developed new microservices within only 7 weeks”

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Adrian Hommen

Head of Customer Projects

ivoflow

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