Do as Wal-Mart does

Add comment March 19th, 2008 David Bush - Iasta

If you thought blogging was goofy, think again. SCDigest alerted me to a new corporate blog by Global #1 (or was that Public Enemy #1?). The Wal-Mart blog, named Check-out, “are buyers or merchandisers in a number of product categories (e.g., “gadgets” or “lawn and garden”) who went through detailed training in how to blog effectively and, one assumes, guidelines on what not to write.”

SCDigest is somewhat critical of the output, noted that there is very little supplier critiquing going on. By reading the posts, I agree with this but never saw anywhere on the blog that this was to be the mission.

Ultimately, they raise a good point about ripping suppliers in the open.

It’s unrealistic to expect retail corporate buyers to aggressively critique vendor offerings, for at least three reasons: (1) they would be critiquing the merchandise they had decided to stock on store shelves; (2) vendors would go ballistic over unfavorable reviews; and (3) it could potentially impact Wal-Mart sales revenue – which simply isn’t going to happen.

We have a number of progressive clients that use an internal wiki or bulletin board to post and share best practices or protocols. Information about supply bases can and should be shared on this internal resource.

It will be interesting to see what Wal-Mart does with this forum. The guy that writes on sustainability had some interesting topics. But, like the rest, the entries were more product reviews, and of course, everything is meant to look like water cooler conversation, so you have a hard time believing the genuine nature of it all.

Entry Filed under: General, Supply Management Best Practices