WALMART 

Walmart Inc. is an American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of

hypermarkets, discount department stores, and grocery stores, headquartered in Bentonville,
Arkansas. It was founded by Sam Walton and Started in 1962. Walmart has 11,368 stores and
clubs in 27 countries, operating under 55 different names. In 1978, they introduced their IPO
in the market and now they have acquired more than 14 companies and still counting.
Walmart core Business Model is Cost Leadership. It has 3 Verticles Walmart U.S., Walmart
International, and Sam’s Club Segment(Online). They have high sales volume through which
they have high earnings. The net revenue of Walmart grew from $500.3 billion in 2018 to
$514.4 billion in 2019. Walmart has started a premium subscription service called Jetblack.
This was developed last year by Marc Lore, who joined Walmart when WMT acquired
Jet.com in 2016. Walmart has acquired Flipkart for $16 billion which is considered as the
world’s largest e-commerce deal.

WALMART BUSINESS MODEL

Started in 1962, Headquartered in the U.S., Walmart began its business as a retail store with
its USP of providing products at a cheaper rate than what is available in the market to the
Consumers.
It was founded by Sam Walton. In 1978, they introduced their IPO in the market and now
they have acquired more than 14 companies and still counting.
Walmart started its new vertical of providing services such as groceries, food items,
Healthcare services and Medical Services as well.
They work on a business model which eliminates the Middle Man from all the Distribution
Channels in business, also provides benefits to the ultimate consumers by providing them
products and services with the lowest prices.
Walmart has the main motive to enter every segment in the market and dominate them by
offering the lowest prices to the consumers.
Walmart core Business Model is Cost Leadership
Everyday low cost (EDLC) is Walmart’s motto to manage overheads.

WALMART HAS THREE CORE VERTICALS:

a) Walmart U.S
Walmart U.S. segment operated in the United States. It provides customers with products and
services that are not present in the physical stores at low prices and services online through its
e-commerce website and Mobile Applications.
The Ecommerce website includes a special feature that allows the third party to sell products
on Walmart.com.
It does business across various Store formats such as supercenters, discount stores,
neighbourhood markets and Walmart.com.
b) Walmart International
Walmart International segment includes three categories which are retail, wholesale and
other.
These categories have various formats such as supercenters, hypermarkets, Warehouse club,
home improvement, speciality electronics, apparel stores and drug stores as well as digital
retail.

c) Sam’s Club Segment

With its online portal “samsclub.com”, Sam Club provides various benefits to its customers
in the form of a variety of Merchandises, which are not found in its club and services online
at samclub.com, and by its Mobile Application.

WALMART'S SUCCESSFUL SUPPLY CHAIN

MANAGEMENT
Walmart inventoryWalmart 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 everyday low pricing. Next, Walmart 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.

FEWER LINKS IN THE SUPPLY CHAIN

Walmart’s supply chain innovation began with the company removing a few of the chain’s
links, right from the very beginning. Founder Sam Walton, who owned several Ben Franklin
franchise stores before opening the first Walmart in Rogers, Arkansas in 1962, selectively
purchased bulk merchandise and transported it directly to his stores.
Later, in the 1980s, Walmart began working directly with manufacturers to cut costs and
more efficiently manage the supply chain.
Under a Walmart’s supply chain initiative – called Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) –
manufacturers became responsible for managing their products in Walmart’s warehouses. As
a result, Walmart was able to expect close to 100% order fulfillment on merchandise.
In 1989, Walmart was named Retailer of the Decade, with distribution costs estimated at a
mere 1.7% of its cost of sales – far superior to competitors like Kmart (3.5%) and Sears (5%).
The company’s supply chain has only become more effective since then.
WALMART INVENTORY INNOVATION: STRATEGIC
VENDOR PARTNERSHIPS
Walmart has long practiced strategic sourcing to find products at the best price from suppliers
who are in a position to ensure they can meet demand. The company then establishes
strategic partnerships with most of their vendors, offering them the potential for long-term
and high volume purchases in exchange for the lowest possible prices.
Furthermore, Walmart streamlined supply chain management by constructing communication
and relationship networks with suppliers to improve material flow with lower inventories.
The network of global suppliers, warehouses, and retail stores has been described as behaving
almost like a single firm.
Walmart’s whole thing was collaboration,” Crowell said. “That’s a big part of what made
them so successful.”

WHEN DOES WALMART RESTOCK? CROSS-DOCKING AS

AN INVENTORY TACTIC
Cross-docking is a logistics practice that is the centrepiece of Walmart’s strategy to replenish
inventory efficiently. It means the direct transfer of products from inbound or outbound truck
trailers without the need for extra storage, by unloading items from an incoming semi-trailer
truck or railroad car and loading these materials directly into outbound trucks, trailers, or rail
cars (and vice versa), with no storage in between.
Suppliers have been delivering products to Walmart’s distribution centers where the product
is cross-docked and then delivered to Walmart stores. Cross-docking keeps inventory and
transportation costs down, reduces transportation time, and eliminates inefficiencies.

INVESTING IN ADVANCED INVENTORY TECHNOLOGY

In its relentless pursuit of low consumer prices, Walmart embraced and invested in
technology to become an innovator in the way stores track inventory and restock their
shelves, thus allowing them to cut costs. In 2015, the company spent a reported $10.5 billion
on information technology and has also invested significantly in improving their eCommerce
capability.
DELL: BUSINESS INNOVATION AND SUCCESS
Dell Inc. is an American multinational information technology corporation which is based in
Round Rock, Texas, United States. The corporation being the largest technological
corporations in the world develops, sells and supports computers and related products and
services which employs more than 96000 people. The company bears the name of its founder,
Michael Dell. The company sells personal computers, servers, data storage devices, network
switches, software, and computer peripherals. The company is also popular for its HDTVs,
cameras, printers, MP3 players and other electronics built by other manufacturers.
Dell Inc. brands its service agreements at five levels for their business customers. The first
one being the Basic support which provides business-hours telephone support and next
business-day on-site support/ Return-to-Base or Collect and Return Services which are based
on contracts purchased at point of sale.
Then is the Silver support which provides 24×7 telephone support and 4-hour on-site support
after telephone-based troubleshooting. The next being the Gold support which provides
additional benefits over and above Silver support. The Platinum Plus support provides
additional benefits to Gold Support. And the last but not the least is the two-hour on-site
support.
Another important is the Dell’s Consumer division which offers 24×7 phones based and
online troubleshooting rather than only during business hours in certain markets. Dell has put
together packages of options for each category of its customers be it small and medium-sized
businesses, large businesses, government, education, and health-care- and life-sciences.
There are various marketing strategies of the company which helps it to achieve its desired
goals. Its marketing strategies include lowering prices at all times of the year and offering
free bonus products.
Another important strategy is offering free shipping in order to encourage more sales and to
stave off competitors. The company has planned to expand its program to value-added
resellers (VARs), giving it the official name of “Dell Partner Direct” and a new Website. This
innovative idea would help the company to go a long way.
Dell used to sell its products through Best Buy, Costco and Sam’s Club stores in the United
States but then it stopped this practice because it cited low profit-margins on the business.
The major competitors of the company are Apple, Hewlett-Packard (HP), Acer, Toshiba,
Gateway, Sony, Asus, Lenovo, IBM, Samsung, and Sun Microsystems.
Dell is a company that has pioneered the art of offering exactly the kind of machine needed
and demanded. As a company that revolutionized the PC industry, Dell helps drive industry
innovation through a time-tested process that puts the customer first. It is aimed at producing
easy-to-use products, services and solutions that address needs.
Innovation is central to Dell’s recently-announced ‘Simplify IT’ strategy. Committed to
reducing complexity and costs for its customers, Dell looks to turn their IT investment into a
significant business driver. In a typical IT spends, about 70 per cent goes into maintenance,
and only 30 per cent is for innovation. Dell is committed to reversing this ratio not just
driving innovation within Dell’s own products and services, but also facilitating innovation
for customers with Dell solutions. Some of the other innovations include The H2C thermal
transfer unit, the solid-state disk drive, The Blu ray optical disk drive, Display port cables and
connectors.