LANCASTER — Walmart says it has figured out its future supply chain and has located all parts in Dallas-Fort Worth.
America's largest retailer has reinvented the way it manages store inventory and ships online orders. D-FW is the first market in which all functions of the newly transformed supply chain are concentrated in one geographic location.
Dave Guggina, executive vice president of supply chain for Walmart US, said D-FW “makes sense to bring the future all in one place at once. Dallas is a very special place for us. This is a truly unique place in the country.”
By pixelating the U.S., Walmart's strategy team has been able to look at demand across the country in new and different ways, he said. Walmart claims to have a store within 10 miles of 90% of the population.
“What we found in Dallas is really unique in that we have urban, rural, and a wide range of socio-economic bases,” he said. “So this is where we put in all the new hardware and software.”
D-FW is also Walmart's largest market with 156 Walmart and Sam's Club stores, competing with national and regional competitors who also see D-FW as key to their business.
The final major piece of the new supply chain will be a 740,000 square foot distribution center in Lancaster that will supply stores with fresh produce stored in refrigeration units cooled to -15 degrees Celsius. It has been under construction since the end of 2021.
Other next-generation logistics include:
- Walmart's 1.2 million square foot distribution center, built in Sanger in 2001, will be renovated with new automated hardware and software. Supply stores with miscellaneous goods and food items that do not need to be stored at extreme temperatures.
- It is the third large facility to open last year on Lancaster's East Belt Road. His automated three-story structure is 1.5 million square feet and can handle twice as many orders as his other fulfillment centers at Walmart. We ship hundreds of thousands of orders a day. We also ship multiple orders to stores that act as regional sorting centers.
Walmart technical staff partnered with Witron, a German logistics systems company, to develop a new system that uses both robotics and artificial intelligence technology.
The grocery distribution center, located at the southwest corner of East Pleasant Run and Cornell Road, currently sends frozen foods from pizza to ice cream to stores.
By summer, all 156 local stores will be stocked with fresh produce, including meat, dairy products and produce. The facility also supplies his 14 stores in Arkansas, Louisiana and Oklahoma.
The wooden pallets and forklifts that are the mainstay of grocery warehouses are still there, but the pallets are loaded by robots in the order in which boxes of food are unloaded into each store's aisles. The autonomous forklifts will be monitored and maintained by personnel hired and trained in the new warehouse job description, including automation equipment operators and automation data specialists.
Robotics and AI
About 99% of the inventory flowing through the warehouse is handled by automated systems overseen by about 500 employees, Guggina said.
The grocery distribution center can store 2.5 million cases of products, which is twice the amount that a traditional warehouse can store. It also processes twice the amount that traditional facilities can handle in 24 hours.
The freezer compartment is set at -15 degrees Celsius, and the fresh area is set at 34 degrees Celsius. The facility has redundant power generation. In the future, the land Wal-Mart purchased in Lancaster could be home to a large solar energy field.
Customers will be able to more accurately see when their food will be delivered to their stores, Guzzina said. Products arrive undamaged, fresher, and on time, resulting in fewer empty shelves.
“We can operate at lower costs and reinvest in customer experience, pricing and related experiences,” Guzzina said. “We are reimagining the jobs of our employees.”
This system eliminates complexity in the store backroom.
Incoming shipments from suppliers arrive on pallets, are inspected for quality, and recorded in an automated inventory system.
Workers enter attributes such as weight and dimensions. This allows the robotic system to know how to handle product through a series of high-speed lifts and conveyor belts into a dense, automated storage structure 80 feet tall. The pallet is unloaded and the boxes are placed on separate trays with unique tracking information. Each case is stored like data on a hard drive.
When customers shop in-store or online, algorithms determine the order and placement of each case on the store pallet. Once the pallets are constructed, they are packaged for transportation and sent to shipping docks for loading.
historical leader
Long before Amazon was born, when founder Sam Walton realized he could lower prices by bringing in-store distribution in-house, Walmart was consistently viewed as a leader in the retail supply chain. Ta. He began building regional distribution centers for products that did not require temperature control.
When Walmart entered the grocery business, it moved into fresh food distribution centers. We have the largest fresh food distribution network in Japan. The company was also one of the first retailers to build its own trucking network.
For Walmart, D-FW has long been a place to try new things. From learning the grocery business in the late 1980s, to opening large supercenters in his suburbs in the 1990s and 2000s, to him offering in-store online grocery shopping here for the first time in 2015. is.
The role of the worker
The two new Lancaster facilities still require workers, but fewer than traditional large warehouses. The new grocery store has 500 employees, and the online fulfillment center will have 1,000 employees by this holiday season.
A year ago, Walmart cut 1,047 jobs from its Fort Worth fulfillment center, which it opened in 2013. The center was one of Walmart's first facilities dedicated to fulfilling online orders.
Gugina, who calls traditional warehouse workers “industrial athletes,” said new warehouse jobs use more creativity than physical strength.
“When I see pallets made by these machines, it reminds me of how people used to make pallets,” he said. “However, current pallets are built in an aisle-specific order within a store, which would be difficult for a person to build manually.”
Xavier Gonzalez, 37, is an automation data specialist with a university degree in information systems. About 50% of his time is spent on the floor observing machines. He collects information about how cases of food move through automated systems and identifies patterns that need to be corrected.
“Some products can be moved too quickly and get crushed,” Gonzalez said. “It's fun is not it.”
Samantha Garcia, 23, has an associate's degree in business and currently works in a grocery store control center and helps write training manuals. She worked for four years in her traditional warehouse business in cooperation with a competitor.
“I heard that 99 percent of the products were moved by robotic systems,” Garcia said. “I thought, 'What the heck is that?'” And I applied. ”
Mr. Gugina joined Walmart from Amazon in 2018, where he led the company's first complete apparel fulfillment center. He previously worked in warehouse optimization and canning operations at Anheuser-Busch. The Purdue University graduate's first job was as an intern at the Lordstown Auto Assembly Plant in Ohio, owned by General Motors.
He said he has repeatedly heard from workers who say they don't go home as tired as they used to.
He said the average warehouse worker walks eight to 10 miles a day and lifts hundreds of items an hour. “These are very repetitive tasks and, frankly, can get monotonous.”
Looking for more retail coverage? click here To read all retail news and updates. click here Subscribe to D-FW Retail and other newsletters from The Dallas Morning News.
