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Inside Wal-Mart IT
prostoalex writes "Information Week magazine takes a look at Wal-Mart's IT infrastructure. Wal-Mart's yearly global sales are quoted at more than 250 billion dollars, their IT spending is less than 1% of that. At the same time, the company manages to pursue new venues in optimizing retail with the wonders of technology. And what about outsourcing IT for the sake of optimization? 'We'd be nuts to outsource,' a top IT executive at Wal-Mart replies."
... and she says its hell on wheels.. and they don't get paid well according to industry standards... i guess thats the walmart way.. makem work hard, dont pay too much, $$$profit
S-Mart fictional?
Not in California's Central Valley. Long-time grocery chain "Save Mart" now calls themselves "S-Mart" in a number of places..
Walmart IT pays less than industry average wages with lower chances of salary advancement and absolutely tepid compensation packages for most long term employees.
That said, it is a boring stable environment that you probably couldn't ever get fired from; guess that appeals to some.
(The above based on numerous employees at IT and WalMart.com)
--- I do not moderate.
It is interesting to see how outsourcing has quickly gained an immensely bad reputation.
Some are against outsourcing simply because American jobs should be kept in America. Some are against it because they lost their jobs to outsourcing. Others believe that outsourcing produces lower quality goods and services. And yet, others are against it because they are sheep.
Of course many forget that American jobs don't belong to the employees, but to the employers. Management has to do what it must to cut costs, and improve profitability. It's about the bottom line. Boycotts against companies will result in a poorer financial performance, resulting in more outsourcing.
And while, it is understandably tough to lose your job to Joe Third-World, I don't understand how some of the same people can support firing employees. Geeks aren't clamoring when big companies announce layoffs. Yet, outsourcing is bad, somehow.
As to those who believe that outsourcing provides poorer quality goods and services, it is interesting to note that a lot of manufacturing goes on in Asia. The majority of the products used to make the computers that the Slashdot audience uses to read Slashdot is made in Asia. Besides, who's to say that American tech support is any better? Tech support staff everywhere are given guidelines or sometimes scripts to help them work. If they knew better, they wouldn't be working in tech support.
I know a guy who has an IT job at Wal-Mart. He says they used to have decent health benefits there, comparable to the rest of the IT industry, but recently they were downgraded to the same benefits that the "associates" on the floor get.
In the article, it talked about Teradata providing their data storage. Teradata is more of a solution provider then a maker of storage systems.
http://www.engenio.com/default.aspx?pageID=394
But to get an idea of the hardware they might have in there.
http://www.engenio.com/default.aspx?pageId=61
I'd guess something like that?
Its not what it is, its something else.
A few years back I had a summer internship there... and it sucked big time. Here are a few things I remember (and keep in mind it was 4-5 years ago, so things may have changed):
- everyone was required to be at work at 7:30am... the earliest you could go home was 5:30pm.
- the pay was below industry standards, but it's in Bentonville, AR, so the cost of living was pretty low, too.
- salaried employees at the home office were required to work 2 saturdays a month. IT was actually an exception to that rule, because it was understood that if you're in IT, you're already working a huge amount of overtime.
- the #1 complaint from the employees while I was there was burnout. (big surprise!)
- at the end of the week, you got an email that was copied to your manager that listed: the # of emails you'd sent and received that week both internal and external to the company, the websites you'd visited outside of the intranet, and long distance phone #'s you'd called, the length of the call, and the cost of that call to the company.
That's one of the ways they can spend only 1% of sales on IT: they monitored everything you did and made sure you weren't doing anything non-work related. They offered me a full time position after my internship, but I politely declined.
Oh, and did you know that they have a wal-mart cheer?!
I work for RGIS, who provides inventory services to Wal-Mart and they are fanatics about inventory accuracy. Wal-Mart employees might not catch that sort of thing right away, but it'd show up on our counts. 1% inventory variance is a huge deal to a Wal-Mart store.
I have several large store chains as customers I support. Not a single one of them use the same bleeding edge methodologies (RFID, data warehousing, etc.) to use IT to grow their businesses like Wal-Mart. This is a really good article and really highlights how using IT can grow your business, versus seeing it as a "requirement" and treating it that way.
Some store chains "like" treating their customers like a vintage bank, i.e. do everything on paper, no redundancy, very low bandwidth links, long credit card validation times, etc. I think that Wal-Mart's success continues to hinge on them utilizing IT and that says a lot about their business.
Alternately, because of a lot of what they do is bleeding edge - they don't get the same level of application and vendor support because other stores have implemented the same systems. While the risk is a lot higher in adopting new systems (i.e. RFID), the gain from being the first adopter and being able to profit off the technology will make up for it if they are successful.
Pat
I can't despise walmart enough, and this is from someone who thought they were a good idea when they started out and used to be a regular shopper. They make MS look like a benevolent charity. They've had to resort to what in essence are a series of public propoganda commercials on the TV (seen 'em? pure FUD) in order to keep up what they are attempting to maintain as an "all amwerican" image with smiling happy workers. It's right out of kim ill dungs ministry of truth video factory.
a lmart.html
Here's a paste from this url http://www.familyfarmdefenders.org/whatsgoingon/w
" Wal-Mart Exploits Children in Overseas Sweatshops
Behind the slick veneer of success, though, there is incredible misery. Contrary to its "all-American" advertising hype, Wal-Mart sources over 80% of its products from overseas. According to the National Labor Committee, there are 1000 sweatshops in China alone supplying Wal-Mart - many of them owned and operated by the Red Army using political prisoners. Chinese teenagers get just 12 1/5 cents per hour for an 84 hour work week and at night are packed into squalid dormitories under armed guard. In Bangladesh, teenage girls receive as little as 9 cents per hour - far below the official minimum wage of 33 cents/hour - sewing Wal-Mart clothes. Wal-Mart refuses to reveal its factory locations to independent human rights monitors since, in the words of spokewoman, Betsy Reithmeyer, "This is very competitive. If we find a very good factory, we want to keep it to ourselves."
Wal-Mart Also Exploits Its Own Workers in the U.S.!
While, those sitting on Wal-Mart's board of directors earn a whopping $1500/day for their "hard work," the rest of the workforce languishes among America's working poor. Wal-Mart's vehement anti-union attitude means over half of its 720,000 "associates" qualify for federal food stamps. Wal-Mart employees average just $7.50/hr. - well below the national retail wage average of $8.71/hr. At 30 hours per week, a Wal-Mart worker earns barely $11,700 per year - $2000 below the federal poverty line for a single mother with two children."
Basically walmart says, we'll force you to lose your job, then please come shop at our store! It's the american way! Oooh, unions are evil commies, but our trade associations and our relationships with dictatorial regimes are fine!
ohhh..wait... this IS the american way now! How could I forget!
This is what all these globalist goons want for the united states, this is how you will compete, so remember to vote for the NWO R.epressive And D.omineering corporate party this election, it will speed up the transformation to a glorius culture of low pay, dismal working conditions, and the cheapest designed and built crap possible! YaaaaY!
How Wal-Mart is Remaking our World
By Jim Hightower.
Posted April 26, 2002.
From union busting to Chinese sweatshops, there are a thousand reasons to worry about Wal-Mart.
Bullying people from your town to China
Corporations rule. No other institution comes close to matching the power that the 500 biggest corporations have amassed over us. The clout of all 535 members of Congress is nothing compared to the individual and collective power of these predatory behemoths that now roam the globe, working their will over all competing interests.
The aloof and pampered executives who run today's autocratic and secretive corporate states have effectively become our sovereigns. From who gets health care to who pays taxes, from what's on the news to what's in our food, they have usurped the people's democratic authority and now make these broad social decisions in private, based solely on the interests of their corporations. Their attitude was forged back in 1882, when the villainous old robber baron William Henry Vanderbilt spat out: "The public be damned! I'm working for my stockholders."
The media and politicians won't discuss this, for obvious reasons, but we must if we're actually to be a self-governing people. That's why the Lowdown is launching this occasional series of corporate profiles. And why not start with the biggest and one of the worst actors?
The beast from Bentonville
Wal-Mart is now the world's biggest corporation, having passed ExxonMobil for the top slot. It hauls off a stunning $220 billion a year from We the People (more in revenues than the entire GDP of Israel and Ireland combined).
Wal-Mart cultivates an aw-shucks, we're-just-folks-from-Arkansas image of neighborly small-town shopkeepers trying to sell stuff cheaply to you and yours. Behind its soft homespun ads, however, is what one union leader calls "this devouring beast" of a corporation that ruthlessly stomps on workers, neighborhoods, competitors, and suppliers.
Despite its claim that it slashes profits to the bone in order to deliver "Always Low Prices," Wal-Mart banks about $7 billion a year in profits, ranking it among the most profitable entities on the planet.
Of the 10 richest people in the world, five are Waltons--the ruling family of the Wal-Mart empire. S. Robson Walton is ranked by London's "Rich List 2001" as the wealthiest human on the planet, having sacked up more than $65 billion (£45.3 billion) in personal wealth and topping Bill Gates as No. 1.
Wal-Mart and the Waltons got to the top the old-fashioned way--by roughing people up. The corporate ethos emanating from the Bentonville headquarters dictates two guiding principles for all managers: extract the very last penny possible from human toil, and squeeze the last dime from every supplier.
With more than one million employees (three times more than General Motors), this far-flung retailer is the country's largest private employer, and it intends to remake the image of the American workplace in its image--which is not pretty.
Yes, there is the happy-faced "greeter" who welcomes shoppers into every store, and employees (or "associates," as the company grandiosely calls them) gather just before opening each morning for a pep rally, where they are all required to join in the Wal-Mart cheer: "Gimme a 'W!'" shouts the cheerleader; "W!" the dutiful employees respond. "Gimme an A!'" And so on.
Behind this manufactured cheerfulness, however, is the fact that the average employee makes only $15,000 a year for full-time work. Most are denied even this poverty income, for they're held to part-time work. While the company brags that 70% of its workers are full-time, at Wal-Mart "full time" is 28 hours a week, meaning they gross less than $11,000 a year.
Health-care benefits? Only if you've been there two years; then the plan
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Taxes in this country wouldn't be so high if the tax payers had to write a check at the end of each year for what they're nickle and dimed on during the course of that year.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
The nucleus of the IT infrastructure Dillman presides over is a single, centralized, 423-terabyte Teradata system that churns data from 1,387 discount stores, 1,615 Supercenters, 542 Sam's Clubs, and 75 Neighborhood Markets in the United States, plus 1,520 more stores worldwide. "That's key to how we can leverage what we do into the future," says Dan Phillips.
This may give the impression that this is the centralized mainframe system for Walmart.
Actually, Teradata is used for Walmart's Datawarehouse, which is one of the most efficient uses of datawarehouses around. It does not process online transactions, it only does decision support type of work, with massive amounts of data.
Others like Oracle and DB2 sure do beat it for online transaction processing (OLTP), but for Decision Support work on very large databases, Teradata is king. This is the major source of confusion when Teradata is mentioned, and the comparison is not apples to apples.
Here is an an old comment by me with some details on Walmart's use of Teradata.
Here is another comment by someone else on Teradata.
Disclaimer: I still work for NCR, but not with their Teradata division.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
This is part of the "personality test" given all Wal-Mart applicants. It's supposed to filter out hippie scum like yourself and those that might want to join a union. This is 1 of the few personality tests I've heard of where you can actually fail. I know several people that work at Wal-Mart corporate and its suppliers. The majority don't have college degrees. The few that do didn't do that well in college anyway. And they are worked like dogs. The minimum work week for corporate is 45 hours, but you're not going to ever see the low side of 50.
I work for a company that sells various products to Walmart. In the last couple of years we moved from a mish mash of paper/fax/edi to full blown AS2/EDIINT connectivity. Of all the partners we have made this transition with, the Walmart team was the most knowledgeable about their own software, AS2 connectivity, and their partner expectations.
Yes, setting up with them was not about user friendliness, but trust me, they were the partners we have had the absolute fewest issues with. For any issue, they are knowledgeable, helpful, and consistent. The folks I spoke with at 1st and 2nd level support were polite and all about resolution, not blame, or fault and took ownership.
As I said, I work for a company that does a huge amount of business with them, but I can't say all the above things about any of our other partners.
I have contracted at Walmart.
Wal-mart has the worst working environment of places that I've worked at bar none. I have heard of worse places, but havent experienced such horror first hand, so Walmart is at the top of my shit list. Let me list a few observations :
Other than the above list, there are other considerations too that may apply depending on whether you are conservative or not. For example, at the time I was there (1997), one couldnt get MTV on cable, because the consensus was that MTV was satanic ("work of the devil" was the actual quote I heard). The number of churches outnumbered the number of gas stations. And when the neighbouring town of Fayetteville ("First home of Bill and Hillary Clinton" states a prominent billboard as you drive into it) was subject to a new ordinance outlawing the sale of beer in the biggest titty bar in the region, that proved to be yet another nail in the coffin for many contractors who were working there from out of state.
Plus, if you cant take being located in the middle of nowhere, dont work at Walmart HQ.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
Since I don't work for Wal-Mart, and my butt was the one 25ft up in the air running cable, I would call this outsourcing.
My guess is they don't consider this IT, they consider it "facilities."
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Another fellow suffer of the NMCI plague.. They are trying to choke down my base right now (I however will be transitioning to another federal agency before they get to me... Call me a NMCI refugee). The best part is that the genius's chose a R&D base as their first victim, Pax River(NAVAIR). I still know think they have everything right there. I cannot figure out why they didn't start with the easier stuff and then work their way up to the hard stuff.
Though I think that you do have a slightly skewed perception, there is a number of groups in the Navy for whom NMCI works perfectly well, you are only giving the R&D side of the arguement. But the lack of planning to account for that group was just short of criminal. Not quite the disaster that you are presenting though (most of the Navy will not need the legacy network to operate, just the R&D), more like a billion or 2 hobbling, not the whole number.
Let's go point by point, shall we?
1. Likely you were stuffed into what is affectionately termed a 'war room'. These are the occasional 'situation rooms' W*M ISD puts together when something goes horribly wrong - they get all the right people and a few layers of management together in one room and hash it out - sometimes lasting minutes, the longest (which I was involved in) lasting 3 months. Not hardly 'standard conditions'
2. Yes, Wal-Mart's pay is lower than the industry standard, but when you consider that their IT is centered in BFE Arkansas while most other IT is on the coasts, the COL is so much lower it just really doesn't make a difference. Most first-year employees can buy a new car and a 3-bedroom house on their initial salary. And you need more than that? The store visits (once a year - *ouch*) are instituted to keep people from forgetting what IT's number one goal is - helping the business make money. They work one evening a year in the stores. That's really harsh.
3. Lee Scott empties his own trash, and that's been the status quo for some time. Let me tell you, if someone has trouble getting up once a week or so and walking the 30m it takes to get to the bins, well...
4. What cafeteria that serves 1000+ meals (at an average cost of $3.50) a day has just spectacular food?
5. The practice of sharing rooms has been in place since day one, when Sam Walton first started travelling with executives. To this day, most of the execs still share rooms, down to the lowest first-year hires, unless paying the extra out of their own pocket. Why is saving money wrong? They're not required to share, only to pay the difference should they elect not to.
The locale comments are... in line with the 'Bible Belt'. Unless in a very urban area (KC, StL, etc.) that's what you're going to find in the midwest. That's what those people like, that's what they believe in; if you can't stand it, there's no one forcing anyone to work there.
Incorrect. I earned my BS in Geophysics, Minor in Math. BFD. Took about 1/2 the courses for the MS before I got tired of being poor.
When the rubber hits the road, having a paper doesn't mean jack shite in determining whether someone can actually do the job, and that, mi amigo, is all that matters.
Yeah, right.