The company is contacting all manufacturers that provide products to its more than 4,000 U.S. stores and Sam’s Club membership warehouse clubs, said Kelly Abney, Wal-Mart’s vice president of corporate transportation in charge of the project. The goal is to take over deliveries in instances where Wal-Mart can do the same job for less and use those savings to reduce prices in stores, he said.
Given Wal-mart's scale of operations, I wouldn't be surprised if, over time, in some markets they will compete for commercial delivery business with Fedex and UPS.
tags: distribution, efficiency, problem, solution, transportation, scale,
From a system perspective, this would be an example of a solution to an efficiency problem. Distribution is being tightly integrated with Sources (manufacturers) and Tools (stores and warehouses) to optimize the system's overall performance. It's an indication that today's brick-and-mortar retail infrastructure is entering the stage of extreme maturity. Once the infrastructure is in place, Wal-mart will be able to either add "out-of network" manufacturers and stores or put them out of business altogether.
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