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Walmart: Planning and Controlling the Supply Chain

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Planning and Controlling the Supply Chain

Introduction Wal-Mart is a retail giant that operates many stores around the world. Its resound market success has a basis on low prices and one stop shopping for a wide variety of goods in their superstores and discount centers. Over the years Wal-Mart has become the world's largest and arguably the most powerful retailer with the highest sales per square foot, inventory turnover and operating profit of any discount retailer.
The organization owes its transition from a regional to a global retailer to changes in and effective management of its supply chain. It started out with the goal of providing customers with the goods they want, when they want and where they want them. It then put focus on development of cost structures that enabled it to offer low prices to its customers. This paper will therefore look at the strategies that Wal-Mart uses to plan and control the supply chain. (Bisk Education, 2012) Forecast of future demand are essential for making decisions in supply chains. They can be based on subjective criteria and they can amount to little more than wild guesses or wishful thinking while others can be on the basis of historical, quantitative data and can be given credence by outside parties like analysts or potential investors. Though they cannot provide a prediction of the future with certainty, they remain an essential tool for the estimation of a company's forward prospect. These foresting techniques

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