Retail Supply Chain

Wal-Mart Storage Wal-Mart is a quintessential example of a company that leverages storage, facilities and logistic techniques in a fashion that allows them to keep shelves stocked, keep in-demand goods at the ready and the registers in the stores actually do much of the ordering for the store. A summary, a critique and a nominal amount of suggestions on how to improve the logistics and facilities framework in Wal-Mart will be executed in this report.

While Wal-Mart does things very quickly and very efficiently, they could and should be doing some minor things better. Wal-Mart basically has four stages for their goods as they progress any number of ways from arriving at their distribution centers to being sold on the shelves. Speaking of distribution centers, that is the first point of contact that many, but not all, goods have with Wal-Mart. Some vendors work directly and deliver the goods directly to the stores whilst making no use of Wal-Mart's extensive trucking system.

However, most goods enter the hands of Wal-Mart at their distribution center. This is usually the first stage for most goods. Drivers than ship these goods to stores on planned sales campaigns and/or direct orders from the stores. Once a good reaches the store, it is then moved to the back room out of the truck. If it can be stocked to the floor right away, then this is done.

However, if there is not enough room for a good, it should not be on the floor quite yet or something else along those lines, it is either binned or left in the receiving area. The stockroom is the second of the four possible stages. The third stage is sometimes but not always used and that is when goods are stored on risers and other shelving whereby customers do not have direct access.

There are also some bin locations on the floor to keep high-dollar or high-theft goods secure such as iPods, cell phones, laptops and so forth. The fourth and final point of goods in the Wal-Mart logistics and facilities system is when it's buyable by the customer whether it be on a normal shelf, on a stack base (the square-shaped stands of goods in the aisles) or on an end-cap (goods on the shelving at the edge of an aisle).

This is a fairly good system but there is one fairly large flaw in the ordering of goods at times and it stems from poor training of register associates. Quite often, goods that are quite similar but not the same such as different varieties of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese or different types of Haagen-Dazs are ringed up interchangeably and this has can cause a big mess.

In other words, if someone checking out goods sees four boxes of Macaroni and Cheese and they are all Kraft, a person may just ring up one box four times. However, if not all four boxes are the same variety (i.e. not the same UPC), then this can lead to both item counts in the inventory system becoming incorrect and this can lead to a glut of one good and a lack of another.

Add in the fact that Wal-Mart allows customers to ring up their own goods in a lot of stores, the locus of control regarding who is ringing things up and how they do it is not nearly as constricted and controlled as it could be.

Perhaps Wal-Mart is saving more money from doing self-check than they are from having to correct inventory counts at least once a year (and they should really be doing it more than that) but it would seem to be unlikely for this to be the case. Another problem came up in the near-death of celebrity Tracy Morgan. The driver who hit Morgan's limousine with his tractor trailer was actually hauling a Wal-Mart load and this man had been up and awake for literally a day or so.

Of course, there is no way that this driver was operating legally as there are strict regulations on how much can be driven at a time or in a day. As such, Wal-Mart itself needs to rein in their drivers and/or the contractors that hire them and make it clear that log books will be verified and checked and anyone not complying with the law vis-a-vis drive time and down time will be punished and/or fired.

Overall, however, Wal-Mart's logistics both in their stores and prior to that are designed quite well and they do very good considering the low-skill nature of a lot of their employees. There just needs to be some basic training on ringing up purchases and perhaps less reliance on self-check registers unless their use.