John King: Inside the Success of FP&A at Walmart

 

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 

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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