Supply Chain Management: Walmart

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Wal-Mart, now it is branded as Walmart, is the world largest public multinational corporation by revenue in 2010, which runs a chain of large discount department stores and a chain of warehouse stores worldwide. Walmart focuses on the improvement of sales, constant reducing costs to offer goods at the best price, the adaptation of efficient distribution and logistics management systems to ensure the constant flow of the goods and the use of innovative IT and systems to accurate efficient operating processes. Throughout this essay I would like to focus on its distribution and logistics system and Information Technology that strongly supports Walmart’s success today.

There are always great distribution systems behind the successful supply chain management, and the same goes to Walmart. Walmart owes much of its past success and expectations for future growth to an ability to self-distribute merchandise from a vast network of modern distribution centres served by a private truck fleet. It has a developed distribution system that allows company to satisfy customer needs quickly. In the Walmart’s distribution system, the distribution centres are the most important part. Walmart has many distribution centres at different geographical locations within a certain distance that enable each store to receive replenishment within a day. Each store can choose a number of delivery plans. Walmart also has own warehouses which can directly supply 85 percent of the inventory, as compared 50-65 percent for competitors. Therefore, Walmart can provide replenishment quicker than competitors. It takes only 2 days while others need at least 5 days. Running own distribution centre reduce not only distribution time but also shipping costs. Each distributio...

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...as all products flow through the distribution centre, some products available in Walmart stores are directly delivered from supplier. Seven-eleven provide many store services at each store to meet customer needs. Instead of those store service, Walmart presents variety of product selection . We can find everything at Walmart, and we can say even it is actually difficult to discover anything that is not available at Walmart. Comparing Walmart and Seven-eleven, there are some differences. In my opinion, many of those differences are cased because Walmart has strategies that aim to fit Americans while Seven-eleven’s are suitable for Japanese. To succeed in the supply chain management, it is important to figure out suitable strategies in each situation. Walmart and Seven-eleven meet customer needs so that they are both now the most successful Supply Chain in the world.

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