The company has been known for more than 40 years as a master of retailing in low cost segment and many of the innovations in supply chain management such as CPFR, Bar Code or RFID were pushed by this company: Yes, we are talking about Walmart but it seems that glory days are over!

Realizing that low-end of the market is becoming saturated, the company started to pursue a new operations strategy since two to three years ago: Becoming a one-stop source for people's retailing needs. The company opened new stores on the crazy rate of almost one per day to penetrate into new areas and increase the sales. At the same time, stores added to their offering and didn't limit themselves to low cost products.

Apparently the new strategy hasn't worked out well and according to the Business Week article "Wal-Mart's Midlife Crisis", the new stores are now so close to each other that the company has ended up competing with itself. The company also encountered a lot of challenges regarding the service. During the last year, 25% of Wal-Mart's stores failed to meet minimum expectations of cleanliness, check out times, product availability and so on.

The reason is not that hard to guess: Wal-Mart has never been a player with differentiation strategy; the company is master of low-cost retailing but doesn't know how to forecast the demand, and how to run marketing campaigns and how to sell high-margin products.

In order to clean the mess, Wal-Mart brought John E. Fleming from Target and appointed him as Chief Merchandising Officer. Fleming believes things can be improved: "We will get it fixed".

What do you think? What should Wal-mart do with its supply chain?