Essay Sample on Walmart Innovations and Competitive Advantages

Introduction

The turn of 21st Century competition redefined the business Environment such that, large firms are forced to adapt to the ever-evolving business factors in order to rapidly grow and hold an upper hand over their competitors. The major cause of this competition is technology. Organizations are striving to apply technology in innovating new ideas and products in order to open up new opportunities and also to protect themselves from the external threats emerging each day. Hisrich and Kearney (2014) indicate that nowadays customer grouping are more differentiated and competition is top notch, therefore, for an organization to sustain the competitive advantage they require to do the following:

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• Adapt to external environmental changes,
• Be customer driven and focused,
• Have flexible strategies and processes that can meet the needs and diverse requirements customers, suppliers, distributors, regulators, and stakeholders,
• Be able to quickly respond to the fast pace of change to the environment by recognizing and taking advantage of opportunities that emerge,
• Proactively meet and exceed the need of customers in light of existing competition,

Actively engage in R & D to continuously prioritize the development of new products, services, processes, markets, and technologies (p. 69).

For a company like Walmart which is the largest in the whole world on the basis of revenue and having an excess employee base of more than 2.3 Million worldwide, these requirements come in handy on a day to day basis for it to maintain its status. For competitive advantage, Walmart applies various strategies to take on the opportunity to grow its market share. They include market penetration, market development, and product development. Walmart's main Corporate Mission is "to save people money so they can live better" ("Walmart Corporate," 2018). The mission is fulfilled through the company's core strategy of low prizes. This drives the philosophy of the organizational leadership that sets up ways to fulfill it, with innovation as the main contributor as new technologies are developed to cut on wages hence lowering cost of production and hence low prices on products.

Market penetration is the main strategy used by Walmart, and it involves selling more goods to its market by offering discounts and selling at low prices while operating at low costs. It is majorly influenced by opportunities and threats encountered by Walmart due to macro environment factors like political, economic, sociological, technological, ecological and legal. This is achieved through low costs of production that is attributed to low human resource spending achieved through automation and technology-related activities and importation of low-cost goods from countries like China ("Walmart Corporate," 2018). Market development is the second strategy and it involves offering the company goods to new Markets. Walmart is opening stores in countries where it did not operate before. This happens when the political and economic opportunities are favorable to the organization. In the modern day, Walmart has ventured in markets like third world countries with stable political state, urbanization growth, and where mobile platforms are stable.

Walmart's major goal is for it to be the best retail company for customers, suppliers, regulators and all stakeholders involved in the retail business to thrive, work, invest and interact. Market development strategy has been set up in order to cater for the diverse customer needs. It involves offering the existing company goods to anew market, this case being e-commerce they offer. With almost anything needed by the customer having been made readily available on the e-commerce platform, shopping for busy families has been made easy and convenient. The pickup shops and delivery mechanisms have been made easier to save on time and money for the customers. For the suppliers, Walmart endeavors on diversity and doesn't discriminate suppliers owning the companies on the basis of race or gender provided the supplied product meets the quality and safety merit. Product price competitiveness is encouraged and supply chain efficiency is maintained. Besides that, all Walmart processes are improved through a close engagement of all the stakeholders who guide the board of directors to ensure effectiveness is maintained ("Walmart Corporate," 2018). In addition, Walmart aspires to follow regulatory bodies responsible for health and environmental sustainability through the development of products which are environmentally friendly. Tax adherence is maintained, employment regulation rules are abided to, and food safety is retained through product quality transparency.

Walmart uses product development as an intensive strategy to maintain growth and sustain competitive advantage. Product development involves the use of research and development(R & D) to introduce new products and services to the market or to improve the quality of the products. Walmart's Centre for R&D is located in Bengaluru and it employs more than 1200 people responsible for technology innovation. Walmart's R&D mainly gears on managing crowds during shopping ("Walmart Corporate," 2018), Acquisition of Jet.com by Walmart, has intensified its innovation thereby improving efficiency and convenience. Some latest innovation includes mobile app development for use by customers and employees. Walmart app offers customers some diversified capabilities like maps of Walmart stores, order placing capability and receipt scanning capability. Another innovation done was the introduction o the artificial Intelligent Robots have been installed in stores to help in accuracy and customer affairs improvement. The robot collects of stocks and ensures that price tags and shelves tag are accurate and up to date. ("Walmart Corporate," 2018).The offloading process in the backroom of Walmart stores has also been automated through the "fast unloader" which uses conveyor belts to unload trucks.

Conclusion

In conclusion, organizational management strategies and philosophies are currently being affected by the external environment factors like technology, economic conditions and new markets creating new opportunities and threats that did not exist before (Hisrich & Kearney, 2014, p. 67). This means that innovation is a key ingredient for growth and sustained competitive advantage for all entrepreneurial organizations of the 21st Century. Walmart's organizational team has embraced innovation in order to fulfill its core mission of saving people's money via innovation and at the same time maintaining its competitive advantage over its competitors like the Home Depot and others.

References

Hisrich, R. D., & Kearney, C. (2014). Building an Innovative and Entrepreneurial Organization. In Managing Innovation and Entrepreneurship (pp. 63-70). Sage Publications Inc.

Walmart Corporate. (2018). Retrieved from https://corporate.walmart.com/