Management Planning at Walmart

Successful corporations in today’s business world must be able to employ different levels of planning in order to achieve goals put in place by senior management. Wal-Mart has many different levels of management planning in place to follow through on its goals and objectives. There are many factors that influence Wal-Mart’s strategic, tactical, operational and contingency planning. Although Wal-Mart has been a very successful corporation throughout its existence, it has had to absorb the impact of legal issues, ethics, and corporate responsibility in its management planning. In Wal-Mart’s strategic planning stage, they are highly regarded as visionaries. One thing that Wal-Mart prides themselves in is the fact that they develop planning processes that enable the company to understand where they want to go, how they want to get there, and what things they must focus on along the way to drive the plan. One thing that has never lost focus is Wal-Mart’s drive to always make sure that they are first and foremost a value driven company. The only way that Wal-Mart would continue to push the value button was by leveraging the size of the company to force vendors for better costs of goods. This enabled them to maintain its image as value driven. Along the way, Wal-Mart became more tactical as well. Part of their tactical planning was to figure out how to get customers to buy more once they were in the store. Wal-Mart never really had a problem attracting the consumer in the store. So they came up with a solution that would ensure better inventory management as well as improved supply chain management. In other words, they wanted to make sure that they improved the way that goods made it to store shelves so that the consumer bought them. This affected their entire distribution channels as the entire

system would need to be revamped. Along with this tactic, they reduced the amount of items that they carried that were deemed as not returning on their investment.

References: Willing, R. (2001, August 13). Lawsuits a Volume Business at Wal-Mart. USA Today Retrieved April 28th, 2008 from: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001/08/14/walmart- usat.htm Sustainability- Wal-Mart website(2008). Retrieved April 28th, 2008 from: http://walmartstores.com/Sustainability/