Delta Associates

RL201: Retail Link® Software Analysis Methods

Advance your productivity with advanced Retail Link® skills.

Are you confident creating advanced queries within Wal-Mart’s Retail Link® software? Are you still building basic queries, but wishing you could get more out of your efforts? Would you prefer to spend less time acquiring and formatting data and more time actually analyzing it? You can, and Delta Associates will help. Our acclaimed RL201 workshop will lift basic users to the next skill level, resulting in a significant increase in productivity and efficiency.

Join us and you will learn how to spend fewer hours running queries or creating reports and more time managing your products and categories effectively. You will eliminate redundant tasks while mastering the advanced drill-down skill sets needed to more effectively manage your Wal-Mart information. The workshop is divided into two parts: 1) using Retail Link® and Decision Support to develop and benefit from advanced queries and 2) acquiring, managing, and formatting more efficiently with advanced Microsoft® Excel functionality.

After taking this course, you will be able to address critical business questions that otherwise might have remained unanswered and be equipped to take action. These questions include:

• How can I quickly identify high and low weeks on hand?
• Which stores have inactivated my items?
• Are sales trending upward in the last few weeks at a higher rate than year-to-date?
• What is the cumulative sell-through by week?
• Are units growing faster or slower than dollar sales?
• What is the in-stock trend in relation to inventory and sales?
• And many others.

Key learning components.

Retail Link®’s Decision Support

• Explore the tools available in Store of the Community and how they can be applied to better understand shopper's and identify sales opportunities.
• Develop reports that keep you updated on major performance metrics and serve as a compass for weekly analysis.
• Learn several methods for analyzing sell-through, and determine which method is most efficient and time-saving for you.
• Work with multiple timeframes and layouts, and learn how to collect and format data in the manner that serves you best.
• Develop a single-store-level report that allows you to answer a multitude of business questions from the top down.

Microsoft® Excel

• Automate repetitive reporting functions by designing efficient workbooks.
• Use PivotTables to answer a series of business questions from a single data source.
• Use the simplicity of Macros to reduce repetitive tasks tenfold.
• Learn other functionalities, such as Concatenate, Value, Conditional Formatting, Vlookup, and Named Ranges.

Who should attend?

If you have attended an introductory course on Retail Link® and gained some fundamental abilities—such as building basic queries—this workshop can further enhance your productivity. Even users with years of Retail Link® experience can learn new techniques to improve efficiency. We recommend that all participants have a minimum of three months’ Retail Link® experience.

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.