Advantages Of Supply Chain Management

Wal-Mart didn’t just get by with cost-saving methods. They were ahead of their competitor’s technology wise too. Even in the 1970’s, Wal-Mart was able to track inventories in their warehouses and link it with stores. They tracked their sales data for specific items and could increase or decrease their inventory accordingly, achieving a higher efficiency than other retail companies. Another aspect that Wal-Mart felt strongly about was expanding there reaches. In 1978, they introduced a Pharmacy, auto center and jewelry divisions.

Supplier chain management (SCM) has been the most imperative management function for attaining long term competitive advantage. As competition is in global markets, firms are facing challenges enhancing their performances, from getting quality right to serving disparate and fluctuating markets.As a result, acquiring a good understanding of SCM practices has become essential to sustain profitable in today’s highly complex and competitive business world. From a hypothetical perspective, this study shows the involvement of various kinds of resources to different performance measures. The research findings provide feasible insights for managers to comprehend the effectiveness, and also weaknesses, of distinctive supplier management practices in enhancing different operations performance measures of firms.

Walmart.com has an alliance with the master of retail process: Wal-Mart. Having the best process and infrastructure when it applies to supply chain is definitely a competitive advantage. Walmart.com can take advantage of back end operations and inventory management processes through its alliance with Wal-Mart.

1. Wal-Mart has been able to achieve respectable leadership in the retail industry because of its focus on supply chain management. Discuss in detail the distribution and logistics system adopted by Wal-Mart.

Walmart—This $245 billion dollar mass market retailer has a budget larger than many small countries. It operates over 3,400 stores in the U.S. alone. Walmart has achieved this unprecedented dominance as a result of savvy business practices, including operating the leanest supply chains in business today and making visionary use of technology. Walmart products move off the shelves faster than anywhere else and the time it takes to replenish inventory can be measured in hours, not days.

Walmart’s history dates back in 1945 when Sam Walton bought an outlet of the Ben Franklin retail stores with the aim of selling products at a relatively low cost, so as to generate huge sale volumes and make profits at a low margin. Although this portrayed the purchased outlet as a crusade for most consumers,

By 1990, Walmart had opened stores in 32 states and became the nation 's #1 retailer in both total sales and profit (http://corporate.walmart.com/our-story/our-history). Walmart’s business has largely matured. Besides its large scale in consumer product purchasing, Walmart also holds four key sources that give it a competitive advantage. First, Walmart has a highly advanced and efficient supply chain system. Walmart built a vendor-managed inventory system to manage its warehouses and its distribution centers are strategically located in order to ensure timely deliver of its products. Second, Walmart minimized its operational costs. Walmart built stores in small rural towns in the early years, and then concentrated on expansion once name recognition had been achieved. This significantly decreased the payroll and rent cost. Third, Walmart had sufficient Human Resources (HR) management. Walmart shared profit with associates in the form of salaries, bonuses, discounted stock, and information in contrast to other retailers. Lastly, Walmart developed an advanced information technology system. Walmart developed its own information system to help it manage all stores and distribution centers remotely by collecting and analyzing data in a timely fashion. As a result, Walmart garnered the capability to expand its market with dramatic cost savings improving profits and enabling continued growth of Walmart stock. Considering alignment with its competitive advantages, Walmart

Wal-Mart sources its inventory across the globe, stores them in one location, and then ships them directly to where there is demand. Since one of the major principles of Wal-Mart is to retails low cost products to its customers, the company is able to meet this principle through the adoption of a

Nowadays when talking about Walmart we are referring to one of the biggest and successful companies worldwide. When talking about Walmart we don’t just think about a supply chain of stores that are located in every continent, but a store that a consumer can purchase all kind of unimaginable goods.

Walmart is the largest supply chain in the world which distributes different products of multiple firms. For the last fifteen years, Walmart has grown significantly in terms of revenues, sales volume, profits, and gradually gaining its market share. In addition, the firm has successfully to make a significant transition from a regional retailer to become a world largest brand. The main reasons contribute to Walmart?s success due to smart management, adapt new latest technological advance, strategic partnership collaboration, innovate operation system such as hardware and software application.

Walmart the supercenter giant was founded in Rogers, Arkansas in 1962(Walmart). Founded by Sam Walton with his visionary leadership and along with his associates they focused on helping consumers and communities to save money and live better (Walmart). The successful retail giant has been known to dominate markets and operate on global efficiencies. Walmart operates in 27 countries with more than 11,000 stores serving more than 2 million consumers worldwide (Walmart). The economic satisfaction encouraged Walmart to develop new strategies and methods that they are now using to help with management. The retail giant has been very successful with Inventory Management and there Forecasting methods. Some key tactics they incorporate within success of inventory management are strategic vendor partnerships, fewer links in the supply chain, cross docking and technology. In result to having such inventory system Walmart is able to forecast and plan for any unforeseen circumstances.

Nowadays when talking about Walmart we are referring to one of the biggest and successful companies worldwide. When talking about Walmart we don’t just think about a supply chain of stores that are located in every continent, but a store that a consumer can purchase all kind of unimaginable goods.

Over the past ten years, Wal-Mart has become the world’s largest and one of, if not the most powerful retailer with the highest sales per square foot, inventory turnover, and operating profit of any discount retailer. In its transition from regional retailer to global powerhouse, the organization has become extremely successful with supply chain management. Wal-Mart began with the goal to provide customers with the goods they wanted whenever and wherever they wanted them. The company then focused on developing cost structures that allowed it to offer low everyday pricing. Walmart then concentrated on developing a more highly structured and advanced supply chain management strategy to exploit and enhance this competitive advantage and assume market leadership position.

Wal-mart was founded by sam Walton in 1962. The idea behind was to bring discount shopping stores to rural America. It grew rapidly with huge popularity. Today it has 3708 Wal-mart U. S. Units, 569 U.S. Sam’s Club and 4112 International units. It toppled GE and became No.1 in Fortune 500 Company list with annual revenue of 405 Billion USD and employs about 2 million associates. It has presence in multiple sectors across retail industry like grocery, Auto, Pharmacy, Jewelry, Clothes, electronics, books etc. Let’s consider strategies in place and changes during last 25 years of Wal-mart.

Target and Kmart and other business alike were forced to try and compete against Walmart’s highly competitive pricing. Walmart then wanted to come up with a better structure for a more advance supply chain management strategy, because they had the competitive advantage and wanted to make even more money while still able to have a low cost to the customers. Walmart focus on cost all along turned out to be the right thing to focus on. Their focus on costs turned to logistics, and Walmart definitely had the lead in using technology. This allowed Walmart to developed different logistics structures to drive down the costs, years earlier than Target, Kmart and everyone else in the business.