Wal-Mart Retail Store - Report Example

Wal-Mart is a retail store that is well known for its low costs as well as the generic strategy of management. The retail store has a variety of approaches that are mainly focused on its supply chain and integration to serve the market as well as survive the stiff competition from other top retailers like Amazon. The success of Wal-Mart is to its survival strategy of prioritizing its decisions and operations management mainly through technology in carrying out the business. As a retail store, Wal-Mart has characterized its products in low-cost cuttings in the sense that all kinds of people can have access to their commodities. Besides having a different line of products like toys, groceries, and housewares, it has Great Value as well as Sam's Choice as its core brands. Additionally, Wal-Mart efficiently minimizes the cost of production through designing goods that are easy to manufacture in bulk to serve a wider market.

As an online retail store, Wal-Mart is using technology in its services to the bigger economy in all possible way in its strategy of driving efficiency within and outside the organization. Being a top retail store, Wal-Mart serves the market through different stores like the warehouses, supercenters as well as grocery market. As Doug argues on the benefits of technology, the supply chain of Wal-Mart is because of the way the company has embraced the use of technology in its logistics as said by the CEO Doug McMillon in a meeting last week. Wal-Mart has split its use of technology in two categories of Wal-Mart Technology in Bentonville as well as Global eCommerce in Silicon Valley.

The two groups of technology work on controlling the stores and developing other e-commerce technologies to run the sites. In using the Silicon Valley technology, Wal-Mart has ensured to get people that have talents and capabilities that will bring development in the company's production through the introduction of Vudu streaming video services. Additionally, as an eCommerce store, it has Torbit website that acts as an accelerator that makes the online sites to operator faster and efficiently for the company to serve the needs of the market on time. More so, Wal-Mart also uses these sites in evaluating the different views and reactions of the people to improve on the areas that have most complaints. The supply chain of Wal-Mart highly depends on information technology in that information systems links directly to the company's ability to operate under low-cost operations approach. Additionally, the systems guide the managers, suppliers, and vendors in making collaborative decisions in merchandising across all the chains to meet the market demand.

Recommendations

The fact that online retail is positively impacting on businesses, it implies that the online competition will become more stiff and robust. Technology keeps changing in the sense that people can have access to any product or service they want just by using their smartphones. It is evident in this case that Wal-Mart must not only embrace technology as a selling and buying platform but as a social interaction. It should create other sites under which customers can also view the comments and suggestions from fellow buyers. Additionally, Wal-Mart should use online platforms to involve people in the manufacturing of their products to see how the products come to the market and the efforts enacted before their consummation. It can be through the use of free videos showing how the company manufactures its products. Through these, the customers will invest more in acquiring the commodities having seen all the struggles to satisfy their needs.

References

Barratt, M., Choi, T. Y., & Li, M. (2011). Qualitative case studies in operations management: Trends, research outcomes, and future research implications. Journal of Operations Management, 29(4), 329-342.

Kistruck, G. M., Morris, S. S., Webb, J. W., & Stevens, C. E. (2015). The importance of client heterogeneity in predicting make-or-buy decisions. Journal of Operations Management, 33, 97-110.

Qingyi Huang, Vincent R. Nijs, Karsten Hansen, Eric T. Anderson (2012) Wal-Mart's Impact on Supplier Profits. Journal of Marketing Research: April 2012, Vol. 49, No. 2, pp. 131-143