Inventory management and Wallmart Upon doing some research and looking into the company Walmart I found some interesting statistics about this company and the volume of buisness they do in a day. The retail store Wal-Mart operates 8,400 stores worldwide, has more than 2 million employees and handles over 200 million customer transactions each year. It’s revenue in 2010 was around $400 billion and is more than the GDP of many entire countries. Rollin Ford, the CIO of Wal-mart admits that the sheer scale of the data is a challenge, and is quotes as saying “we keep a healthy Paranoia.” Wallmart uses an inventory management system called Retail Link. This system enables suppliers to see the exact number of their productse on every shelf of every store at the precise moment. The system also shows the rate of sales by the hour, by the day, or over the past year and more. This helps the suppliers manage their stocks better. This h as helped walmart to change the buisness model of retailing. In some cases it leaves stock management in the hands of its suppliers and doesn’t take ownership of it until the moment its sold. By doing this they are able to lesson inventory risk and reduce cost. This is a highly efectively managed inventory system. This has been an important part of the Wal-mart culture. In order for wallmart to sucessfully manage the buisness and provide the service they do they have to have a reliable inventory system in order to continue to operate and bring in the profits that they do. In order to offer the low prices the inventory management became a very important part of their buisness plan. Using the cross docking, products for Wal-Mart are routed from suppliers to Wal-mart’s warehouses. Then from their they are shipped to stores without sitting for long periods of time in inventory. This idea has reduced their cost