Walmart Capacity Planning Analysis

Capacity planning

This is the process of knowing the production capacity an organization needs to meet the changing demands for the products. It helps to determine the quantity of the product needed by a firm to meet the demands of its customers.

The capacity planning elements for Walmart are; facility, product and service, and human resource. This should be inconsideration by ensuring that the facility layout is proper and conforms to the behavior of the customers e.g. separating the customer care desk from the cashiers’ counters.

Also this is done by ensuring that the capacity is able to contain the production such as where houses which Walmart has several distribution centers in the different states thus enabling the products to reach the

Highly competitive pricing for its customers

6. Leading force in a highly competitive Global Market.

Walmart’s operations management goal is to maximize productivity so as to support the minimization of costs. There are various quantitative and qualitative criteria or measures of productivity. These are: Revenues per sales unit, Stock out rate and Duration of order filling.

The revenues per sales unit is the sales revenues per store, average sales revenues per store, and sales revenues per sales team. Walmart maximizes revenues per sales unit. The stock out rate is the frequency of stock diminishing and this has to be minimized. Walmart’s objective is to minimize the stock out rate thus reducing the amount of time taken to fill an order. The satisfaction of these objectives contributes to the company’s performance in operations management. When these measures are later evaluated, it is easier to implement the control measures in place.

Walmart Company uses a number of metrics to assess its performance; comparable store sales it indicates the performance of the existing stores by measuring the growth in sales for such stores for a particular period over the corresponding period in the prior year, operating income growth greater than net sales growth, inventory growth less than net sales growth and return on average assets must be

In this report, it was indicated that the employees were rude, they shouted at customers, accused customers of thievery, managers avoided customers and the employees went to the extent of scratching customer vehicles. This was retrieved from the online forums where people voice out their experiences and opinions. Websites such as ComplaintsBoard.com, Consumersaffairs.com and Report Your complaint.com also highlight lots of issues involving customer service at Walmart.

Slow customer service has also been a challenge to Walmart as per Reuters Report 2011. Customers have to wait on long queues when there are empty checkout counters.

All in all, it’s not all lost to the Walmart customer service since it has invested in improving customer service;

- Ship to store option, allows customers to pick items in lockers in the store with a customized code. It speeds up the shopping process

- Smart phone App, customers are able to scan items as they shop then pay and pick receipt on their way out. It saves