Definitions of General Business Tactics Essay

Wal-Mart Ops Management

Wal-Mart Operations Management

The author of this report has been offer a brief treatise about the operations management aspects and tactics of companies like Wal-Mart. Indeed, the supply chain and network of Wal-Mart could and should be leveraged to gain the highest amount of competitive advantage and profits as is possible. However, there are limitations and tradeoffs to the methods that are commonly used to do just that. Methods that will be discussed in this report include reducing the amount of suppliers, disintermediation, coopetition, outsourcing and offshoring. While reducing costs and keeping things as simple as possible are commonly deemed to be good things, there are risks with taking that overall stratagem too far.

Analysis

Regarding the overall number of suppliers, the general preference for simplicity and streamlining dictate that the fewer the suppliers, the better. However, the calculus is not remotely that simple. If the bogging down or problems with the one (or few) supplies remaining occurs and there is an outage or shortage of what that person is supplying that can create a problem for the company being supplied. That problem can become anything from a minor annoyance to a fairly major catastrophe. As such, regardless of the number of suppliers that a firm uses, there needs to be a modest to major amount of risk and contingency planning employed so as to figure out in advance, rather than when an emergency happens, what will and shall be done if/when there is an issue with the supplier that is currently in place. Doing otherwise would be a major miscue on the part of Wal-Mart or any other business. Again, keeping things simple is a good thing in general but there are risks to making things too simple and basic. In some cases, complexity is a necessary evil (Dedrick, Xu & Zhu 2008).

As for disintermediation, the rules and principles that apply when it comes to reducing the number of supplies is pretty much the same as it is with disintermediation. All disintermediation really means is cutting out the middlemen that exist in the supply chain or other networks that a business works with. For example, a good example of disintermediation for Wal-Mart would be if they were doing their payroll check production through a third party provider in concert with their bank and they decided to take the payroll operations in-house. There could very well be cost savings and such from using a third party vendor for the payroll check production but there can be significant tradeoffs including how long it takes to get a payroll produced and checks delivered to the employees vs. having the facilities and capabilities on-site. Using the aforementioned third party payroll check company would be an example of outsourcing. It can be a boon in terms of saving money but, as noted above, there are always tradeoffs (Doh & Taylor, 2012; Lin & Chen, 2015).

Wal-Mart, like many companies, makes use of what…