Peer Review Explanation

The company that I have chosen to write about is the Wal-Mart Corporation; this is a company that has had the leading edge in the retail industry for many years. With new competitors popping up every day it is important for Wal-Mart to be constantly developing new innovations to keep their competitive advantage. Some of the competitors that Wal-Mart faces today are companies that offer their products online with shipping to their customers’ homes. This gives these companies a competitive advantage because they do not have the same amount of overhead that regular brick and mortar store has. With a lower overhead these companies are able to sell their products at a much lower price. The innovation that I am developing is a service that would allow our customers to place an order for anything that we sell in the store and have it delivered to their house. The innovation that I am developing would go one step further and make it possible for our customers to even order regular groceries and have them delivered to their homes.

One situation that our customers face today is a lack of time to do their basic shopping or their regular grocery shopping. With the additional demands on everyone’s time and our customers being pulled in a bunch of different directions, I feel that our customers would really benefit from this service. One situation that we are going to face at store level is that we are going to have to revamp our website due to the increase in traffic that this is going to create. Another situation that we are going to face is that we are going to have to move our associate structure around in order to free up some associates that are going to be able to pick and deliver these orders to the customers. We are going to have to be able to deliver these orders in a timely manner as some of these orders might be necessary for the customers to have in order to prepare their evening dinner.

With this innovation put in place we as a company are going to face many problems and innovations. One of the problems that we are going to face is hiring the additional associates in order to keep up with the traffic of the new orders from our customers. We are also going to have to hire associates that are proficient with the programs that are necessary to receive the customers’ orders and to pick the customers’ orders out of the computers and out of the store’s inventory. Another problem that we are going to face is the liability that we face with having one of our associates delivering this merchandise to our customers’ homes. There could be accidents that could harm our associates and we are also sending our associates to peoples home that they do not know, this also could pose a risk. With the addition of this innovation we are also going to gain many opportunities. One of these opportunities will be that we are going to gain a larger customer base. There may be customers that are not able to leave their homes due to illnesses or handicaps that are able to shop online. This innovation would allow these customers to shop on our websites and we can then deliver their merchandise to their homes. This could give these customers a sense of independence that they may have not had before.

Communication is very important in the retail industry, with all of the competition out there it would be very easy for our customers to get their needs met at one of our competitors if we are not meeting their needs. In the creative concept development process we are finding out what are customers’ needs are and the process that we need to take in order to meet these needs. In this process is where we are evaluating the customers’ needs and develop different prototypes or processes to discover the best method to meet their needs. It is very important to come up with the best methods as quickly as possible since process testing is very expensive. The plan is to roll this out to some select stores in order to see if this is a process that our customers will be interested in participating. We will also have to gather some feedback from the customers that do use this service in order to see where we may need to make some improvements. In this process testing method we will provide a survey for the customer to fill out online when they place an order so that we can see where the customers feel that we can make some improvements.

In the process testing we will select some stores that already have a large amount of customer orders on our pick up today website. This is a website that allows our customers to place orders for select merchandise and they can then pick up this merchandise at their convenience. We are going to add a selection to this website that will allow the customer select to have this merchandise delivered to their house and it will also expand the merchandise selection to allow the customers to select groceries and have them delivered to their homes. We will have to put a fee on the delivery unless it is over a certain dollar amount and then we can offer free delivery, this amount will be tested during this process. We will also be testing whether it would be more beneficial for these stores to purchase a couple of vehicles for use in the delivery or to have associates use their personal vehicles and compensate them for this use. This also will be tested in the stores with some stores purchasing a couple of vehicles and some stores having their associates use their personal vehicles and compensating them.

Since we will be live testing this on an existing website and in stores that are already in operation this should have a smooth rollout if and when we determine the process is used by our customers and a profitable innovation for the company. If we can show the other stores how much more profit they can generate from this process I am sure the store managers will promote this innovation to their associates and promote the use of this innovation to their customers. It will take some advertising to our customers but I think it will really catch on once they get the hang of it and word spreads amongst our customers.

In conclusion I feel that this will be a really successful innovation and our customers will really see the benefits of being able to order their household needs and have them delivered to their homes at their convenience.