Walmart Inventory Management Failure

With the holidays around the corner and the biggest shopping night of the year companies need to plan what they want to sell on their shelves months ahead. By having excellent inventory management these companies in so many industries are able to become more successful. I agree with the statement, inventory management is the heart of the supply chain which has been said by many business experts. Without proper inventory management issues can and will occur upstream and downstream of the supply chain. Companies have been able to reduce costs by properly managing their inventory, “Hewlett Packard achieved more than $130 million in total inventory savings” (supplychain)
Companies that properly use an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system are able to have visibility of what inventory they have throughout their company. A popular ERP system companies use is Systems, Applications, and Products (SAP). This system has been difficult for companies to implement in the past. One of the notorious SAP implementations that have been looked at as a failure studied in college was when Hershey’s added SAP in 1999. This inventory management failure led to product not being able to be delivered to stores. This failure was added up to be around $100 million in lost sales. (CIO.com) When ERP is properly implemented companies can benefit greatly. The ability to track and locate raw materials, work in process, and …show more content…
With hours wasted looking on the status of inventory for customers, Walmart has implemented an app for their managers called MyProductivity. (rtinsights.com) This has allowed Walmart employees to be able to identify if product is available in their store without having to waste time going to the storage area to look for the product. Managers are able to identify buying trends of the customers by looking into the data provided allowing them to re order high turnover