John King, Senior Manager, Analytics & Insights, Private Brands at Walmart reveals how the largest US retailer makes use of a “firehose” of data. This amounts (according to some estimates) to 2.5 petabytes of unstructured data from 1 million customers every hour.
Walmart’s FP&A unit ensures this potentially limitless information provide instant business decisions for the US retail giant.
First John explains his path to being an FP&A leader, starting as a Geographic Information Systems (...
John King, Senior Manager, Analytics & Insights, Private Brands at Walmart reveals how the largest US retailer makes use of a “firehose” of data. This amounts (according to some estimates) to 2.5 petabytes of unstructured data from 1 million customers every hour.
Walmart’s FP&A unit ensures this potentially limitless information provide instant business decisions for the US retail giant.
First John explains his path to being an FP&A leader, starting as a Geographic Information Systems (GIS analyst) at Tradewind Energy in Kansas.
Here his love and appreciation for technology - which plays a central role at Walmart- was born. John's passion for technology saw him thrive at his roles at two of Walmart’s FP&A divisions: Realty Market Strategy, and now Private Brands. Private brands - a good that is manufactured for and sold by Walmart competing with brand-name products is a huge source of data and revenue. In fact,18 of Walmart’s private brands do more than $1 billion in sales and its largest name, Great Value does more than $27 billion a year globally.
In this interview John speaks about the intersection of FP&A and business-decisions at Walmart and his career.
- His passion for technology and the tech stack used at Walmart
- The core metrics which Walmart judges FP&A on and what other retailers can learn
- How to get insights for the business “today or tomorrow” through dimensional modeling
- How to keep focus on the most important data in the face of potentially limitless consumer data
- As both a Python and Excel expert, whether FP&A leaders need to know Python, Excel or both?
- The importance of taking logic and analysis to the data - rather than the other way around
- The most important advice for anyone starting in FP&A to succeed
Follow John on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
With Datarails you get improved data integrity and visibility helping your relationships with your internal business partners and external stakeholders; real-time latest version of all your company’s data in one place, with version control, audit trail and records, ensuring errors and multiple versions are avoided; the ability to let your data tell your story through proprietary, built-in visualization of critical KPIs in real-down; and drill-downs to answer questions on underlying data on the spot.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Follow DataRails on LinkedIn to find out about upcoming episodes and the latest FP&A news
Read the Full Program Transcript
Watch the Full Episode on YouTube
To suggest a great guest for the show, or if you would like to be the FP&A Leader being interviewed contact jonathan.m@datarails.com
View more
