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Supply Chain Management in a Wal-Mart World

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Supply Chain Management in a Wal-Mart World
HBSWK Pub. Date: Aug 4, 2003

The Wal-Mart supply chain management structure is not one size fits all. How do you keep everyone else happy? Apply service differentiation to your strategic accounts. by Jonathan Byrnes Here's a supply-chain dilemma: Now that you've learned how to do business with Wal-Mart, what do you do with everyone else? Over the past decade, Wal-Mart has famously invited its major suppliers to jointly develop powerful supply chain partnerships. These are designed to increase product flow efficiency and, consequently, Wal-Mart's profitability. Many companies have stepped up to the challenge, starting with the well-known Wal-Mart/Procter & Gamble alliance, which incorporated vendor-managed inventory, category management, and other intercompany innovations. P&G even fielded a dedicated account team in Bentonville, AR. In a very creative approach, the team members represented key P&G functions: sales/marketing, distribution/supply chain management, IT, and finance. In the eyes of one P&G vice president who was centrally involved at the time, Wal-Mart's CFO became a key customer as P&G's objective became maximizing Wal-Mart's internal profitability. Increasingly, top managers have learned how to integrate their supply chains with major customers like WalMart. (For an example from the hospital supply industry, see my column, "Profit from Customer Operating Partnerships.") Much has been written about the need to develop customer partnerships, and most companies have at least one project in this area. What most companies have not sorted through, however, is what to do with all of their other customers. Now what? A common answer to the question of how to structure relationships with other customers is to try to apply the Wal-Mart relationship to all customers. This approach is implicit in commonly shown

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