Delta Associates

RL101: Fundamentals of the Retail Link® Software

Success with Wal-Mart begins with the fundamentals.

Wal-Mart’s Retail Link® software is one of the most powerful tools in the retail industry. It delivers an enormous amount of critical data that will help you make well-informed business decisions to optimize your products and save time. But before you can unleash the full power of Retail Link®—and enjoy all of its benefits —you have to learn the basics.

Delta Associates offers an acclaimed one-day workshop that will quickly bring you up to speed on Retail Link® and Decision Support. Our hands-on training gives you the skills to create reports successfully, while teaching you how to build basic queries that are fundamental to your business. You will generate insights into product performance and much more.

The workshop is divided into two parts: 1) an overview of Retail Link® and its application to your business and 2) an in-depth look at Decision Support and its highly informative reporting capabilities. By the end of the course, you will have the knowledge, skill, confidence, and resources to answer a variety of important business questions, including:

• Which items are performing best based on sales dollars?
• Which business segment has experienced the most sales dollar growth?
• Where and when do out-of-stocks occur? Where is there phantom inventory?
• Which are the top-performing stores for a given item?
• Which locations have potential pricing issues?
• What is the annual trend by item, Fineline, etc.?

Key learning components.

Retail Link® Overview

• Customize your home page to suit your needs.
• Navigate through various tools and documentation for a top-level glimpse of Retail Link®’s vast capabilities.
• Explore SWAS reporting and identify reports that enable you to view business-performance measures with just a few clicks.
• Set up My Business at a Glance to quickly know your company’s performance the moment you log in.

Decision Support

• Learn the building blocks of query design (items, time, locations, and report columns), and understand how these four selections can be used to build virtually
  any query.
• Become knowledgeable in using the queries that give you 90% of the data you need to impact your business.
• Become familiar with the types of data and amount of history available to you.
• Understand the types of reports and their uses; learn how to save, share, and schedule reports.

Who should attend?

If you have little or no experience with Retail Link® or you lack the necessary skills to construct basic queries, this workshop is for you. Likewise, if you know how to build a query but need some additional learning about Wal-Mart’s retail practices in general, this class will be extremely helpful.

You can register for one of our public workshops online or we can deliver this class in a private setting for a group of eight to 16 people. This private option allows you to customize course content according to your needs, minimize valuable time away from the office, and save money.

During the workshop, each participant uses his or her own computer to log into Wal-Mart’s Retail Link®.* There is no sharing of computers, so each attendee can save the exercises conducted in class and continue to work with them later, upon return to the office.