Walmart taking a giant leap towards data analytics and supply chain analytics
Walmart is an American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets, discount department stores, and grocery stores, it has 11,695 stores and clubs in 27 countries, operating under 55 different names. Walmart is the largest retailer in the world and has developed the world’s largest private cloud Data cafe– A state of the art analytics hub, big enough to cope with 2.5 petabytes of data every hour. This only shows how big Walmart is on business analytics.
This Data café gets the data from both internal and external resources including 40 petabytes of transactional data that is quickly modeled, manipulated and visualized. This helps the company to analyze the sales for every store in all the locations on a daily basis. This detailed data feed and analytics help Walmart to better strategize the products sold both online and in stores.
Walmart uses analytics in various ways to make sure that it attracts more customers in its platform which is present in both online & offline space. This analysis helps them to make sure that the right inventory is available at the right time at the right location at the right price for the customer of all ages. This, in turn, results in better company revenues and customer satisfaction.
90% of Americans live within 10 miles of Walmart store and it serve 140 million customers per week. If we trace back the routes of Walmart, Sam Walton’s main idea behind opening a retail store was to make the everyday life of customers a little bit better by saving their money and his motto is still the driving force behind the company’s success which is “Save Money. Live Better” and with the online space, the company is following the same mission of saving customers money, no matter how they want to shop i.e. either in-store or in Walmart.com. If you are one of the shoppers in Walmart, you will see the banners as soon as you enter the store, which will look something like Everyday low Price. One of the main constituents that helps Walmart maintain low prices on its thousands of product categories is Supply chain management. Supply chain management works like the mind of the entire eco-system. It coordinates with multiple systems like payments, inbound & outbound inventory, merchants, customers, third party sellers, vendors, etc. to make sure it pulls the data from every corner system and feed it into intelligent analytics models which uses various customized machine learning algorithms to predict the forecast of the inventory in all its store/warehouses across entire Walmart network. This exercise help the Supply chain pillar of Walmart to identify and recognize the patterns & trends and help to accurately answer the question of knowing what is needed, how much is needed and when it is needed in all its online and offline stores and it makes sure that it never goes out of stock in any of its merchandise. By utilizing numerous key metrics like customers data — age, sex, location, occupation, buying methods (online or offline), location of the store or warehouse, point-of-sales data, product data — frequency, quantity seasonality & type/category etc., Walmart quickly puts them into its forecasting & allocation analysis algorithms and replenishes its inventory with lowest cost of manufacturing, ordering it from different vendors ahead of time with less transportation costs, less storage costs, less operation/overhead costs, which ultimately results in Everyday low price to its customers.
Discovering knowledge by identifying patterns, behaviors, trends from the existing raw data and predicting/recommending future by modeling the data though various business metrics/scenarios are what I would call as analytics.
The Internet has opened new horizons for e-commerce and forced all the retailers around the world to provide better satisfaction and services for its customers. Walmart is using its Big data café to get competitive advantage among its rivals and with Internet Of Things everywhere, I think Walmart can integrate its big data technology and analytics platform to better predict customer needs and recommend or order basic household things like groceries — milk, egg, bread, etc. on customer behalf using customer purchase history and profile. Walmart can integrate with Google Home, Apple Home pods and IoT devices like intelligent refrigerator’s, intelligent garbage/trash cans to see the current consumption rate of groceries at home and help customers to replenish those items way ahead of time before it is completely depleted and help individuals to save time, effort and money. Since, now Walmart have home deliveries available to all its customers, this idea of ordering on customers behalf based on the analysis and purchase history can help elderly shoppers who stay alone and often forget to order medications, daily groceries until the very last moment.
