How Walmart’s Supply Chain Technology Has Helped Serve Customers During the COVID-19 Crisis
By: Rohit Jain
Tags: Covid 19, Data Science, Leadership

(Image designed and owned by Walmart)

Within Walmart’s Supply Chain Technology organization, Technical Product Managers build, design, and enhance many software products, systems, and mobile apps that enable our customers to shop online or in our stores, and allow our frontline associates to serve our customers. Offerings like two-hour Express Delivery, Spark (Walmart’s home-grown platform that enables gig drivers to make grocery and last mile deliveries nationwide), BOPIS (Buy Online and Pick up In Store or curbside), picking and shipping from stores, and contactless deliveries are some of the products and experiences these product managers have built from the ground up. And,I am so proud and humbled to say that’s my team. We take a great deal of care to make sure these services meet and exceed our customers’ expectations. But now, during the COVID-19 crisis, it’s even more important for customers to have a safe, seamless experience. During this difficult time, a lot has changed in the way we all live our daily lives, and these changes have come rapidly and without warning. That means businesses like Walmart need to be able to make big changes quickly so we can support our customers in the way that helps them most.

Our priority has always been to help people save money and live better. Here’s how we’ve been able to do that and what we’re doing to ensure our customers can continue to get food, medicine, and anything else they need to keep themselves and their families safe and healthy.

First, we need to take care of those who are at risk within our teams and communities, as well as abide by local guidelines. For us, that includes limiting the number of shoppers in a store to ensure social distancing, regularly deep cleaning and disinfecting our facilities, making masks and gloves available to our front-line associates along with many other safety protocols, and offering senior shopping hours to limit exposure to others while shopping. Our Home Office associates, including our product and technology teams, are working from home to minimize the risk of infection per local guidelines. All of this has driven us to adapt rapidly in these unprecedented times. And if you are working in supply chain tech like me, you know how the world has changed. For those who work at Walmart, it has been incredibly humbling and gratifying to hear from so many people — my friends, family, and even my doctor — how instrumental Walmart has been throughout this pandemic. None of that would have been possible without the amazing speed, nimbleness, and agility displayed by our engineering, product, and operations teams. Prior to COVID-19, we had begun working on how to make time slots in Online Grocery more user-friendly and widely available. However, as the pandemic expanded in the U.S., we knew we had to change our processes immediately. With the massive spike in demand, we saw customers booking slots as far as 7 days out, which left no slots for immediate purchases. So, we reduced delivery sign-up options from 7 days to 2 days to help ensure we could handle the demand. As we increased our capacity, we were able to expand our time slots back to 7 days. Although for some customers this change may have appeared inconvenient, it ultimately allowed more customers to have access to Online Grocery, and more importantly, it provided an easy, contactless way to order and pick up groceries.

For customers who are part of vulnerable communities or are caring for someone who is, we enabled “At-Risk slots”. Additionally, customers also wanted the option to receive grocery orders in less than two hours. While Express Delivery (our less than two-hour delivery offering) wasn’t created in response to the pandemic, the crisis accelerated our development cycle. In typical start-up fashion, product managers and engineers scrappily built the needed technologies to launch Express Delivery in a matter of days/weeks and then continued to optimize post launch. Since our launch in April, we are now at full scale and continue to enhance the experience.

At the beginning of COVID-19’s spread into the U.S., most of our orders were shipped from Fulfillment Centers (FCs) and we only shipped online orders to our customers from a limited number of stores. However, as online orders spiked in a matter of days, our FCs were stretched. We had to act quickly to alleviate the demand, so in less than one week we made a critical decision to create and launch the new process, which required rapid changes to our technology and business processes and expanded our Ship-from-Store capability to thousands of stores across the country. All this could not have been possible without the focus, dedication, and work ethic of my amazing product and engineering team and partners across the U.S. and India. And all this while working from home and taking care of themselves and their loved ones. I am so proud of them!

During this time, there are so many things to worry about, and getting groceries to feed your family shouldn’t be one of them. Working through this difficult time has helped us all realize the importance of making quick, thoughtful decisions so we can continue to make things a little bit better for our customers.