August 23, 2022

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

48 minutes

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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Read the Full Program Transcript

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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 [email protected]

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