Making Walmart Better (Opinion)

As good as Walmart is, it will never be any better than the collective performance of its supplier teams. The strengths and shortcomings of suppliers will directly affect — if not determine — Walmart’s future success. For Walmart to continue to improve, its supplier teams must also continuously improve.

For the better part of the past three decades, Walmart has been on the receiving end of much well-deserved praise and adulation for its innovation and leadership in many key areas, including operational efficiency, supply chain logistics and information technology, to name just a few, all of which led to spurts of sales and market share growth that no other retailer has ever been able to seriously contest.

But in recent years, the world’s largest and most powerful retailer has made fundamental errors, alienating consumers and frustrating suppliers. Now, Walmart is forced to cope with problems foreign to all its previous experience, struggling to run great stores while blaming external factors for soft sales and chasing the competition in what is actually beginning to look like a real contest. With Walmart’s competitive edge dwindling, its suppliers may very well be its only way out.

I worked for Walmart for more than a dozen years, and have spent the last ten working with thousands of its supplier teams in our classrooms and conference rooms throughout the country.

I have enjoyed the opportunity of studying Walmart in different contexts and identifying the handful of things that make the company unique from every other major retailer.

Sam Walton very famously said, “Our People Make the Difference.” He believed that Walmart owed its success to the “ordinary people doing extraordinary things” in Walmart stores and offices around the world. And I think he was right, at least in part (though many would argue that it was Walmart’s entrepreneurial spirit of days past that made those “ordinary people” so extraordinary).

Besides great associates, what enabled Walmart to become an efficient operator and leader in the areas of supply chain logistics and information technology was its collaborative relationship with its supplier teams, as well as those teams’ collaborative relationships with each other.

Over the years, Walmart has gone out of its way to create and facilitate the dialogue between itself and its supplier teams, as well as among the supplier teams themselves.

Far from seeing the retail business as a zero-sum game, supplier teams freely share ideas, insights and best practices to make their companies better, and to make Walmart better. A stronger Walmart means store growth, and growth means more sales for the supplier.

It is for this reason that 8th & Walton brings people from teams of all sizes and categories together into one classroom to learn basic skills from instructors who are suppliers themselves. And it was precisely for this reason that we launched our “Saturday Morning Meeting” concept earlier this year.

Walmart is unequalled in the amount of data it shares with suppliers, but this is done with the expectation that those suppliers will do likewise: consistently deliver actionable intelligence about all relevant aspects of their business.

Many Walmart buyers change categories every eighteen months or so. True expertise in the category resides in the more enduring supplier teams. In recognition of this fact, Walmart places enormous value on the insights and information those teams create.

With so much of its future uncertain, and with more changes expected in terms of how, when and where consumers shop and purchase, Walmart will come to depend more on its supplier teams for guidance than ever before.

To those suppliers, I would say keep studying, keep analyzing and keep sharing. You are making your company better. And you are making Walmart better, too. 

Matt Fifer is the co-founder of 8th & Walton, a Bentonville-based Walmart supplier development company. He is also the founder and CEO of Store of the Community, a Bentonville-based shopper marketing company. Fifer spent nearly 13 years serving in a variety of leadership roles for Wal-Mart Stores Inc.