Wal-Mart: A leader in Supply Chain Management & Technology

Supply Chain Innovations by Walmart
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Supply Chain Innovations by Walmart
It is without a doubt that Walmart has achieved the greatest operational and logistical triumphs in history. According to Supply Chain Digest, Walmart operates more than 10,000 stores in 27 countries around the globe, stocks products manufactured in more than 70 countries and managed over $32 billion in inventory (Lu, 2015). With such kind of numbers, there is a need to have an efficient and effective supply chain management. Walmart has been able to achieve this through technology. Technology forms the foundation of its supply chain as it owns the biggest information technology infrastructure of all private companies in the world. Its State-of –the-art network design has allowed Walmart to precisely forecast demand, predict inventory levels, and manage service response logistics and customer relationships
For example, Walmart becomes the first retailer to make use of the Universal Product Code bar codes that allowed for immediate collection and analysis of store level information. It went further to devise Retail Link, an enormous Bentonville database (Lu, 2015). With the help of a global satellite system, this database is linked to analysts who forecast demands of suppliers to the supplier network. This displays real-time sales information from cash registers to Walmart distribution centers.
Manufacturers and suppliers within the supply chain bring together their demand projections under a forecasting and replenishment scheme, collaborative planning, and each link in the chain is connected via technology to a central database, a satellite network and a store-level point-of-sale systems.
However what made Walmart so innovative was that it has been sharing this information with thei...