Walmart is transforming the future of commerce.

With a revenue of about $570 billion, Walmart is the largest company in the world. Headquartered in Arkansas, the company was founded by Sam Walton in 1962. It's also the world's largest employer, with a workforce of more than a 2.2 million. The company operates under 46 names in 24 countries, with more than 11,000 stores and clubs. Walmart's business can be classified into four divisions: Walmart U.S., Walmart International, Sam's Club, and Global eCommerce.

Through services including pickup and delivery, ship from store, and digital pharmacy fulfillment options, Walmart U.S. offers customers an omnichannel experience that combines retail shops and eCommerce. Walmart U.S. recently?introduced Walmart+, a membership program that offers omnichannel shopping advantages, including unlimited free shipping on qualifying products with no order minimums, as well as delivery and other benefits that help customers save more time and money. Additionally, Walmart U.S. provides Walmart Connect, Walmart Fulfillment Services, and Walmart Health, all internal advertising services, as well as supply chain and fulfillment options for online marketplace vendors. Fuel and financial services, and associated goods, including money orders, prepaid cards, wire transfers, check to cash, and bill payments, are additional service options.

Walmart USA faces competition from omnichannel merchants who discount, department, retail, and wholesale grocers, pharmacy, dollar, variety, and specialty shops, supermarkets, hypermarkets, and supercenter-type stores, as well as online merchants. Their competitive position within the retail sector is primarily determined by their?capacity to build and run units in the ideal locations and to provide a customer-centric omnichannel experience. They?use a variety of programs created to address industry-specific competitive constraints. These initiatives consist of the following:

• EDLC: everyday low cost is Walmart's?commitment to control expenses so the?cost savings can be passed along to the?customers;
• EDLP: the everyday low price is the?pricing philosophy under which Walmart?prices items at everyday low prices so that the?customers trust that the?prices will not change under frequent promotional activity; and
• Omni-channel offerings like pickup and delivery and the?new Walmart+ membership offering enhance the convenience and seek to serve customers in the ways they want.

Walmart operates on a unification I.T. operating model. They have centralized decision-making for I.T. initiatives led by the group CTO. The business processes are highly standardized and integrated. Walmart's enterprise architecture is optimized core moving to business modularity. Businesses control and recycle loosely connected components. This maintains industry-wide standards while allowing for regional variations. The local managers thereafter regain a part of their power.

I.T. contribution to business success

Earlier, Walmart used technology to address specific issues. In addition, emerging technologies have supported Walmart in resolving business challenges and enhancing many facets of company operations. This is the reason they have put in the time and effort to become a technological company, and this tactic undoubtedly benefits the business much.

Walmart now wants to experiment with various technologies not just to discover solutions to specific issues but also to identify white spaces?where they might be able to create a niche for themselves. Here are some examples of how Walmart has used them to either address a problem or generate additional money:

Blockchain and IOT for tracking food safety

Industry Challenge: Food contamination causes the suppliers to suffer significant losses. Due to a widespread E. coli outbreak in romaine lettuce in 2018, many consumers and grocery stores were compelled to discard a lot of the produce. Most supply chains are hampered by manual procedures, making it challenging and time-consuming to track such a problem.

Solution via tech integration: Walmart teamed with IBM to develop the Food Trust blockchain for its live food business. It sped up real-time tracking of food from farm to store, increasing transparency.

Additionally, Walmart requested its leafy greens suppliers to utilize Blockchain to track their products back to the farm. They will be able to observe and verify where the goods were grown, handled, kept, and examined.

Walmart has also used the Internet of Things to control food safety. IoT gathers data from sensors at every stage of the supply chain, including production, distribution, warehousing, and retail, and offers details on the characteristics of the product.

Together with JD.com, the retail giant supports blockchain food monitoring initiatives in China. The Blockchain Food Safety Alliance was established by a partnership between Walmart, IBM, and Tsinghua University. With IBM and Tsinghua, Walmart trialed Blockchain in food safety in 2016 to investigate its applicability for food monitoring, traceability, and safety.

A.I. for stock management and store cleanliness

Industry Challenge:

• Things end up on the incorrect shelf by accident.
• When the supply is low, restocking is required.
• Wet surfaces in retail spaces may be dangerous.
• Floor cleaning and scrubbing are repetitive procedures that take a lot of time and energy.

Solution via tech integration: In its shops, Walmart is developing an artificial intelligence lab that will employ cameras to track lost products and spot low-running supplies. Bossa Nova, a California-based company, and Walmart have teamed together to develop AI-based robots that would wander the shop and spot shelves that needed to be restocked.

Texas A&M University's computer vision research was funded by Walmart. One of the initiatives is developing camera systems that could find water on the floor and alert the staff so they could clean it up.

In order to put this into action, Walmart had also teamed up with Brain Corporation to develop robots that clean floors. Such a robot scans its surroundings for humans and impediments using a variety of sensors, identifies the sections of the floors that require cleaning, and does the cleaning as necessary.

Augmented Reality for customer's enhanced experience

Industry Challenge:

• A quick comparison of several items based on costs, reviews, etc., is not practical.
• To improve the customer experience, retailers?must provide enjoyable and engaging experiences for customers.

Solution via tech integration: Walmart has added an augmented reality (A.R.) scanner to its smartphone app; when objects are pointed at on a shelf, the camera displays information about each item, including its name, price, and user reviews. Using Apple's ARKit technology, a team originally created the technique at a hackathon held within Walmart.

To incorporate this technology into their retail locations, Walmart also teamed up with the augmented Reality software company Zappar. Customers may scan the Zapcodes at the stores to start the augmented reality experience, which is supported by a variety of companies, including Pepsi, Nickelodeon, etc. Meetings with company mascots like Tony the Tiger or Chester the Cheetah, mini-games, 3D animations, and face filters are some of the AR-related activities. All of this significantly improves the customer experience.

Walmart wants to attract more attention from customers and improve its in-store experience. Thus it has decided to make its shops AR-enabled. Walmart is making an effort to make routine shopping trips exciting in order to increase consumer engagement.

Virtual Reality for enhancing the employee-customer experience

Industry Challenge:

• Without establishing a setting that is similar to a real business, training personnel is challenging.
• To improve the customer experience, merchants must provide enjoyable and engaging experiences for customers.

Solution via tech integration: Virtual Reality has been used by Walmart to train its employees. Through the headsets, the colleagues may watch modules to learn. This enables them to simulate a real-world retail setting for experimentation, learning, and problem-solving. Walmart was really among the first businesses to make use of virtual Reality's capacity to improve staff education.

Walmart even purchased virtual reality firm Spatialand in order to develop V.R. applications for its physical shops. In 2017, Spatialand and Walmart's Store No. 8 collaborated on a project that produced a V.R. proof-of-concept experience for customers. According to authorities, the product Spatialand is developing for Walmart may not be seen for 12 to 18 months. The virtual Reality (V.R.) goods at Walmart's shop appear to be things that will be available in the future when the technology is more widely used and less expensive.

Wireless Charging for Store Maintenance

Industry Challenge: Devices used in-store, such as battery-operated barcode scanners and electronic shelf labels in retail establishments, require plugging into standard power sources. Due to the time and effort that could have been used elsewhere, this one extra job causes a drop in employee productivity. More significantly, the retailer's battery prices go up because of these products.

Solution via tech integration: Walmart and Ossia collaborated in September 2018 to test wireless charging in all of its retail locations. Out of hundreds of submissions, Walmart chose Ossia Innovation's Cota Real Wireless Power to revolutionize the shopping experience at the Walmart Innovation Summit in April 2018.

Autonomous Driving for product delivery

Industry challenge: There must be a suitable channel of delivery service available for clients who desire home delivery. Additionally, clients find it inconvenient to visit a retail establishment each time they want to make a purchase.

Solution via tech integration: Ford and Walmart collaborated to explore the viability of using the latter's self-driving cars to carry goods, including groceries, toiletries, pet food, and other consumer goods. The partnership would be centered on "collecting critical consumer preference data" and figuring out the most effective approach to match customers with the products they would require.

Additionally, Walmart and Waymo are working together on a pilot program for online food shopping. The goal is to get to know the clients better and provide them with a special, easy experience.

Cloud Computing for enhancing the customer's experience

Industry Challenge: When a company rents all the computer power they require to efficiently service its consumers, managing data across thousands of private servers is a difficult undertaking.

Solution via tech integration: Walmart and Microsoft signed a five-year agreement for the use of Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform. Walmart would do this to make all of its websites and programs work natively on Azure. As part of the cloud alliance, they also disclosed the creation of a joint engineering office in Austin, Texas, in late 2018. As a result, Walmart is now able to store and analyze data more efficiently, which will help to increase retail and online sales.

Key Takeaways

• Walmart's strategy of working with a university to see if a specific problem can be solved, then partnering with a startup to get a more sophisticated solution for a related problem, demonstrates its commitment to creating intelligent stores and enhancing the shopping experience at its physical locations.
• It demonstrates its drive to construct intelligent stores by acquiring businesses in order to combine cutting-edge technology and future techniques. This is all done in an effort to become more customer-centric by becoming tech-centric.
• By utilizing the most recent technology, Walmart is not only reducing its reliance on physical labor for mundane chores but also saving money on electricity bills.
• Walmart appears to be making every effort to provide customers with the most convenient experience. Walmart would use this program to investigate how successfully expand its global reach through food delivery.
• Walmart is working hard to maintain its competitive edge against Amazon by effectively managing its data-intensive operations. Not to mention how the cloud program mimics how Amazon drives digital sales with cloud-powered big data.
• In order to strengthen its position in the e-commerce industry, Walmart is doing a great job of harnessing the strength of cutting-edge start-ups. Their current aim is to acquire businesses and bring them into Store No. 8, where they can offer all the necessary support and obtain cutting-edge innovations.
• Although it may employ certain components from other sources, the great majority of the technology Walmart uses and will use was created in-house. The shop also intends to quickly iterate on novel and distinctive experiences involving robots, computer vision, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and machine learning