Walmart manages global workflows digitally

Walmart is bringing cross-departmental international work into a single digital workspace.

The discount giant is expanding its utilization of the Wrike work management platform from its initial implementation in its Walmart Canada banner to encompass more than 1,000 new users across international teams. Employees in departments including global tax, product, Walmart Health, and Walmart Realty are now using Wrike.

In 2019, Walmart Canada deployed Wrike within its continuous improvement team to boost productivity and develop business recommendations for the transportation department. Following a successful integration, of the solution, Walmart Canada implemented it into areas of the business including project management office, strategy, transportation, supply chain planning, logistics operations, supply chain reinvention/end-to-end, marketing, and e-commerce studio.

Dealing with a lack of standard processes across Walmart International, the organization set out to create a structure and foundation that would enable it to more effectively enable international coworkers to collaborate. Most recently, Walmart has expanded the use of Wrike internationally from 500 to nearly 1,500 users.

This has allowed the organization to customize work management to the individual teams, bring siloed departments together, streamline communication, organize cross-functional projects, and leverage analytics to tie projects to goals.

Use cases
In December 2020, the Walmart Realty Execution team, which is responsible for managing construction on store remodels, new store builds, and upkeep, leveraged the Wrike platform. The company had previously used a variety of disparate tools to manage work between external general contractors and several internal cross-functional teams.

As a result, Walmart experienced challenges like a lack of visibility across its portfolios, a considerable amount of time spent on non-value-added work, and duplicative efforts when planning and managing projects. The enhanced visibility and collaboration offered by the Wrike platform eliminated these issues.

Additionally, the U.S. Global Tax team at Walmart had an initiative that focused on developing associates’ skill sets by providing them with an opportunity to work on projects that were outside of their domain. Management needed a way to understand the current utilization of the team and identify who could be assigned to work on additional projects, which it obtained utilizing the real-time visibility into resource utilization that the work management platform provided.

“One of the biggest challenges we face at Walmart is the size of the organization and the number of teams that are intertwined,” said Carolyn Lum, director, transportation continuous improvement, Walmart Canada. “We used to spend a lot of time navigating through the bureaucracy of the different departments to get everyone aligned and on the same page. With Wrike, we can now collaborate with teams, including those we never would have interacted with before, and implement the same ways of working, which has been remarkable.”

 “Wrike helps us move faster,” said Francis Lalonde, VP, transportation, Walmart Canada. “We’re driving initiatives, momentum, and, ultimately, our culture. Teams are excited to come to project review calls and share successes, which has created a winning culture. Wrike has been instrumental in helping us evolve to this stage. I never could have envisioned the growth of Wrike in Walmart Canada, let alone how fast it would take off across Walmart International.”

“We’ve built the Wrike platform on the promise to enable teams and organizations of any size to work as one, break barriers, and scale beyond what they know to be possible,” says Andrew Filev, senior VP and Wrike GM, Citrix (Wrike parent company). “Walmart is an exceptional example of an organization that understands the importance of cross-functional collaboration and is always looking for ways to improve it. By welcoming teams worldwide to Wrike, Walmart is enabling departments to better standardize and optimize processes and streamline communication so they can do their best work together.”