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In 145, Sam Walton opened his first variety store and in 16, he opened his first Wal-Mart Discount City in Rogers, Arkansas.
Now, Wal-Mart is expected to exceed "$00 billion a year in sales by 00…(with current figures of) more than 100 million shoppers a week…(and as of 1) it became the first (private-sector) company in the world to have more than one million employees."
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Why? One reason is that Wal-Mart has continued "to lead the way in adopting cutting-edge technology to track how people shop, and to buy and deliver goods more efficiently and cheaply than any other rival."
Many examples exist throughout Wal-Mart's history including its use of networks, satellite communication, UPC/barcode adoption and more. Much of the technology that was utilized helped Sam Walton more efficiently track what he originally noted on yellow legal pads. From the very beginning, he wanted to know what the customers purchased, what inventory was selling and what stock was not selling.
Wal-Mart now "tracks on an almost instantaneous basis the ordering, shipment, and delivery of literally every item it sells, and that it requires its suppliers to hook into the system, enabling it to track most goods every step of the way from the time they're made and packaged in the factories to when they're carried out store doors by shoppers."
Wal-Mart operates the world's most powerful corporate computing system, with a capacity (as of late 1) of more than 100 terabytes of data (A terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes, or roughly the equivalent of 50 million pages of text.). Only the U.S. government maintains a bigger database."
Sam Walton was eventually considered "the most influential retailer of the century, and with good reason, for nearly every great retailer of the coming years would follow his business examples."
Industrial Revolution
When the Industrial Revolution took place in the United States, factories were now able to out produce consumer demand. For the first time, these new goods needed new ways to be sold, new ways to get to the public. "In New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, the first department stores opened their doors. Railroads and telegraph wires snaked across the country, giving storekeepers a new way to order goods and get them on the shelves faster than ever before. A whole new industry sprang up to persuade people through advertisements with enticing pictures and clever slogans, to buy things they'd never known they needed, to turn America, in the phrase department store pioneer John Wanamaker, into the Land of Desire."
At the same time, large corporations became another "dominant form of business", such as with U.S. Steel, Swift, R.J. Reynolds, and Procter & Gamble. Department stores such as Woolworth, Penney, Sears, A&P, and Kroger became known in the retail environment.
Early Discount Approach
The first small discount stores" started in the 10s, developed in the years after WWII and really began to take off in the 160s as "giant discount chains". This is where Sam Walton's first ideas of Wal-Mart evolve. Most large discount chains were within the average city limits. Walton decided to take a different approach and develop stores "in towns everybody else ignored as too small". He had spent considerable time in rural Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri; he knew "that small-town folks craved all the wonderful goods promised by the consumer culture just as much" as the other consumers. He also knew that there was more business than most people expected with less competition in these small towns.
As with most discount retailers, Walton would "take name-brand health and beauty aids (toothpaste, soap, shampoo, etc.) stack them high, and sell them at cost. Give them away for whatever you paid. Such bargains, advertised like crazy, pulled in customers who then loaded up on other goods that, while priced low, carried gross profit margins of up to 0 percent."
Although this approach was really what sent Sam Walton on the path to success, he would also claim that other retailers "forgot who they were selling to". It was really quite a bit more than that because Walton also made it his business to know who was selling to his customers, what they were selling and when they were selling to the customers. Sam and Wal-Mart would eventually transform "retailing the way Henry Ford revolutionized transportation. It's easy to forget, nowadays, that Ford invented neither the car nor the assembly line. What he did was to make them the new paradigms, to make life without cars, or industrial production without assembly lines, unthinkable." And with a retail example, Wal-Mart now "operates the most technologically sophisticated and efficient system in the world for getting goods from factories to store shelves. It's a system operated by men (and they were all men, as recently as 000, at the top) for whom, like Walton, the end of selling more obliterated all other concerns."
Knowing Your Inventory, Sales, and Distribution
Even before computers were involved, Sam Walton knew the importance of keeping track of inventory, customer sales, distribution, and trends. His managers were required "to turn in weekly and monthly reports. Each report had to include what Walton called a 'Best Selling Item' to focus their attention on what merchandise was selling and why." He also had them check on the competitors which sometimes included "sending his assistant managers over at night to rummage through the dumpster (behind a competitor's) to collect price tags and anything else they could find."
With the reports that managers were giving him, Walton was "trying as best he could to track his inventory how much merchandise he had in each store, what was selling and what wasn't, when to order more goods, and when to mark down prices on stuff that wasn't moving. But better record-keeping, he knew, could help refill empty shelves faster and boost sales." He knew he needed to look into computers and to the people that had expertise in that field.
The computers could also help with the distribution of goods as well. "The process of distribution is one of the keys to understanding Wal-Mart. What is a retailer, after all, but a way for goods to get from factories into people's hands?" In 166, Walton sat in on his first IBM sponsored workshop in New York and the future was in sight.
Although Walton already had creative ways to be frugal and to deliver his goods with efficiency (such as with utilizing refrigerated trucks hauling frozen chicken one way and clothing on the return trip instead of empty trucks), he wanted even expand with a "sophisticated communications, distribution, and transportation system". This led to the development of "the company's first data processing computer systems, designed to track what merchandise each store needed and when".
Data Management and Technology
Walton's top executives and managers convinced him to "buy more sophisticated cash registers" and a computer system "dedicated to keeping track of merchandise, sales, and orders. By 17, the computer system could collect some sales information from terminals at stores. By later standards, the system was crude the data couldn't be transmitted instantly, but (it) had to be collected and then sent out each night. Still the information helped Wal-Mart cut costs by keeping closer track of when goods needed to be reordered; and over the coming decades, as the system became even faster and more powerful, it would give Wal-Mart a vital edge over less technologically adept rivals knowing the flow of goods to the stores not too fast, not too slow, but just right."
In 177, Wal-Mart completed its first true computer network. Not only did it link stores to headquarters, letting sales data flow back to Walton and his executives more quickly; it also linked stores to the distribution centers, so that orders for goods could be sent and filled faster. From this point on, the upgrades never paused. By 17, the company was able to collect more kinds of data about sales and orders and more importantly draw more useful conclusions from crunching that data than almost any of its far larger rivals." Keep in mind that Sam Walton used toe get this type of information from his managers' weekly reports, his notes on yellow legal pads as he visited stores personally, from dumpsters behind competing locations as well as the sales clerk working with customers. Now more of this information was quickly at his finger tips in a system that was able to organize and select data. Imagine doing a query from pages of yellow paper and varied reports. Now imagine how computerized queries could change the way your business functioned.
Other technologies that helped Wal-Mart (especially gain an edge over Kmart) were the hand held scanners and better electronic cash registers. Again these devices "helped Wal-Mart become more efficient at tracking goods, reordering them, and keeping them in stock. With the hand held scanners, for example, "managers could now inventory and reorder goods in an hour and a half, instead of a day and a half". The electronic cash registers "could scan sales tags to collect information as each sale was made and feed the data and feed the data electronically back to buyers at the company's headquarters".
It wasn't just that a vast gulf had developed between how Wal-Mart and Kmart approached the business. Something more fundamental was happening As surely as it was once transformed by the railroad and the telegraph, retailing was now being remade again by the use of computers to collect and sift through mountains of data and the use of telephone lines and then satellites to transmit that data and to link stores, buyers, warehouses, and manufacturers in one vast web."
By the late '0s, retailers could track people's particular shopping patterns, building vast mosaics to tell them not only which brand and flavor of toothpaste young white housewives, middle-aged single black women, or elderly Chinese-American widowers prefer, but what those preferences implied about the deodorant they'd choose, too. Some retailers even tracked which parts of the stores shoppers visited without buying something. Using what they called 'just-in-time' distribution, retailers were replacing traditional warehouses with laser-guided, automated systems in which goods arriving on a truck from a factory were split up and repacked on the fly to roll right into order trucks that zipped them off to stores, with (ideally) barely a pause in between."
Wal-Mart executives (such as Jack Shewmaker and David Glass) "were quick to grasp the implications of these technologies" which would prove crucial to Wal-Mart's success. "By 18, when Kmart was still struggling with tracking when a tube of toothpaste was sold and for how much when clerks in some Kmart stores were still writing orders by hand Wal-Mart's in-store computers were doing things that Kmart executives weren't even dreaming of."
In the early '80s, OCR (Optical Character Recognition forced clerks to type in a numbered code for items) and UPC (Uniform Product Code mostly in grocery stores with a barcode) codes became standards for inventorying products. The UPC barcode scanning process was much faster and many of Walton's items already had UPC codes on them (nearly one third of the inventory because those items were also carried by grocery stores). Instead of investing in the OCR technology, Sam had his distribution centers (with access to 80% of Wal-Mart's products compared to the 0% at Kmart) place barcodes on the other items. This was relatively simple especially since employees were already attaching pricing tickets on various items. "When, as we now know, UPC became the industry standard, retailers who'd invested in OCR had to play catch-up, and spend millions of dollars to switch over."
Piece by piece, Wal-Mart was building a system that would give its executives a complete picture, at any point in time, of where goods were and how fast they were moving, all the way from the factory to the checkout counter. Instead of poring over last month's or last week's reports from each store or region, executives (in the main office) could call up the data on the computer from one day to the next; they could easily follow from day to day how quickly (or slowly) any item…was selling in one region compared to another. This made it easier to tailor the assortment of goods according to local tastes and to experiment. They could display an item several different ways in different stores, and then quickly order all the stores to adopt the way that worked best. This also meant Wal-Mart could keep less inventory on hand (tying up less cash), because it could reorder goods more quickly and be more certain of when they would arrive."
Next, the satellite system was added. In the long run, this "would prove to be a fabulous investment cheaper than a telephone network would have been to build and maintain; faster, too; and more useful in a thousand ways, big and small. By 188, Wal-Mart would have the largest privately owned satellite communications network in the country, a system with six channels that not only let Walton give his pep talks, but on which a buyer could tell department heads in every store at once about new products and demonstrate how to display them." It was also utilized for credit card authorization, among many things, which eventually cut transaction time down drastically. This time savings kept customers happier but "also let Wal-Mart start doing authorization for all charges, not just those above the floor limit. Credit card fraud plunged saving enough to more than pay for the system". Additionally, the satellite system would allow Sam Walton to look over the technicians shoulders and "see the total of the day's bank credit card sales adding up as they occur" as well as other daily sales transactions and data…all the items that Sam used to get from monthly reports and his yellow legal notepad.
Once the satellite and computer systems were rolled out, Kmart (Wal-Mart's primary competitor) erased much of Wal-Mart's technological edge; but, Kmart didn't use the data it gathered as quickly or efficiently." In fact, "most of Kmart's buyers didn't know how to use their computers effectively to track sales and orders; some of Kmart's buyers didn't use their computers at all; and Kmart's cash registers often had out of date information and rang up wrong prices"."Kmart still couldn't keep in stock; it never had enough of the best selling items and repeatedly had to take huge markdowns on clothing and other goods it had too much of." Their executives "didn't seem to appreciate the urgency of getting goods back on store shelves", tracking trends, managing inventory needs and the power of the data that the computers could collect.
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