Walmart Keeps Shelves Stocked Worldwide with Expana’s Commodity Intelligence
A story of resilience, foresight, and transparency in volatile markets.
Company
Walmart is the world’s largest retailer, operating over ten thousand stores and numerous eCommerce websites across 19 countries, all supported by a global supply chain. Known for its Everyday Low Price strategy, Walmart relies on resilient supplier partnerships to deliver on its customer promise.
Challenges
Walmart set a bold ambition: to keep shelves stocked with essentials at everyday low prices – even when the world is rocked by supply shocks such as natural disasters, trade restrictions, or shipping delays. To succeed, they needed broader visibility into global commodity intelligence, trusted benchmarks, and seamless integration of commodity intelligence.
Walmart partnered with Expana to gain:
- Expana Benchmarks: proprietary, audited prices, often referenced directly in Walmart’s supplier contracts, eliminating disputes and ensuring transparency.
- Global, comprehensive coverage: empowering Walmart to pivot sourcing strategies across regions when disruptions occur, and by expanding datasets whenever Walmart needed additional visibility.
- Fewer data vendors: consolidating fragmented data vendor relationships to get accurate, comprehensive data from fewer providers.
- Price forecasts: supporting forward-looking sourcing strategies and cost modeling.
- Integration via API: embedding intelligence directly into Walmart’s internal decision systems.
Image source: Walmart
Outcomes
Walmart’s use of Expana has led to:
- Stocked shelves, no matter what: Expana gives Walmart the ability to earn supplier preference – vendors prioritize keeping Walmart’s shelves stocked before others. Expana also enables Walmart to have foresight and make smarter risk-mitigation decisions, such as when and how much to buy, or which regions to source from. This combination ensures product availability even in volatile times, reinforcing Walmart’s promise to customers.
- Everyday low prices: Using Expana’s verified benchmarks in contracts enables Walmart to negotiate with transparency, and forecasts by Expana help Walmart anticipate market trends to secure prices before they increase. This helps Walmart protect its price leadership while keeping costs under control.
- Efficiency gains: A unified intelligence platform simplifies workflows, consolidating smaller data vendors, and accelerating sourcing decisions.
Looking Ahead
Walmart is embedding Expana’s intelligence more deeply via APIs into its internal systems, for example as one of the main providers of data for Walmart’s proprietary procurement system. This creates even greater insight, as market intelligence is combined with internal and supplier data.
Next on the horizon is also AI-driven decision support. Together, these changes further strengthen Walmart’s global retail leadership, powered by best-in-class technology and intelligence.
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