Walmart is one of the world's most sophisticated supply chain management companies. They use a private blockchain network to automatically reconcile invoices and payments. There are entire companies that make REALLY good money today that basically reconcile invoices for trucking fleets. Their blockchain technology does all that work for free, and as a result, they spend far less human hours chasing down data to ensure that the invoices are correct. It creates the paper trail for you automatically.
How about Walmart's automated supply chain. Who are the users, why do they benefit from controlling their data? Why does Walmart want to build on some future incarnation of this?
Walmart has built the most effective logistics system in the world. It's one of their most important competitive advantages.
Side note: Certainly Amazon is also very effective at logistics but I see that as almost a different use case than Walmart - i.e. centralized vs decentralized systems
Is their logistics different from their IT? I've read many articles over the years how Walmart was steamrolling competition. There supply chain was very computer driven.
It'll be interesting to see what this does to Florida's supply chain program.
I went to a school that's ranked in the top 3 for supply chain programs. And despite not being in the supply chain program myself, I stumbled into a 6 month internship with a company consistently ranked in the top 2-3 for supply chain.
Walmart is the type of company that invents supply chain management methods which eventually get taught in schools. In a similar fashion to how Google invents solutions and releases whitepapers around those concepts that spawn entire ecosystems of concepts and systems.
One thing Walmart is notorious for is how they onboard new suppliers. They effectively dictate the margins they'll let you have on a product. If you tell them that isn't possible, their SCM division will look over your internal processes with the fervor of a forensic accountant, and tell you exactly what you need to do to shape up your operations and get to the level they demand. If you're a fledgling company that scored a Walmart contract, it can be incredibly helpful in rapidly evolving your SCM/Logistics. And once you can service Walmart, you can service any company.
Although I'm not sure if that's offered for all suppliers or just their smaller suppliers that are at risk of not being able to keep up with Walmart's volume. And it's not really optional, but rather a form of risk management as well as price control. If they think you won't be able to deliver, they won't award you the contract and risk empty shelf space.
I'm curious if they'll take a similar approach to these SCM programs. None of the universities listed have ranked supply chain programs, but with Walmart directing their associates to the programs, I doubt they'll stand by and not demand changes to suite their needs. And with their expertise, they could easily catapult these programs to top ranked ones.
Walmart had the largest corporate database in the world at one point in time (about a decade and a half ago), and used it to build a brutally efficient supply chain.
Innovation in process engineering and operations isn't really discussed much here, but it's almost assuredly had a much greater impact on keeping inflation at bay (helping the median American's salary stretch a little farther) than anything Amazon has ever done.
Wal-Mart is a very odd to work with from the vendor side. They have a purchase order tracking system named PULSE that is completely independent from their EDI system and their supplier Retail Link program (which is the slowest, most horribly designed website you could imagine).
You're required to SFTP up a CSV file of what you've shipped to them that day, along with information about. They also have a creaky acknowledgement/acceptance procedure and the technical folks (seems outsourced) aren't very impressive. You have to pass a 'visual inspection' with your test files and it's the most ridiculous process you can imagine with box-checkers flagging you for the dumbest reasons.
So from this side of the transaction it always makes me wonder about articles like this, all their good tech must be internal only. To be fair to Wal-Mart the situation with other big store chains usually isn't any better.
I think the reason that can work is that (the vast bulk of) Walmart is entirely dedicated to executing on a single, very well defined (and easy to measure) task - their supply chain.
Unfortunately, few problems in the world are like that, and that's why large companies (and governments) fail to address them effectively.
Before Amazon took the crown of using technology for ruthless efficiency, Walmart was king.
I remember reading articles 10-15 years ago about how the minute someone scanned an item at the cash register, Walmart's inventory systems, which knew what product was on what shelf and in what quantity, would automatically order refills from the supplier.
They have always been highly innovative and tech savvy when it comes to the supply chain, at least for physical retail.
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