Has Walmart missed an important point?

On one hand we are talking about the world becoming flat & almost all the economies with some constraints opening up for investment, organizations are bound to be global & truly international.

However if we look closely, a point to be noted is that a truly big global company Walmart entering into India (A country which occupies only 2.5% of the land of the total available land on earth but provides habitat for almost 15% of the total world population!!!) almost 6 years later than the time when the revolution started in retail sector in India. Speak of future group which has got the pulse of middle & upper middle class through variety of retail formats though to a greater extent inspired from the Walmart model have deep rooted themselves & are in a position to fight the global giants today. The point I am trying to draw attention to is that has Wal-mart actually missed out on some important strategic decisions which might even cost them in a major loss of revenue?

It will not be a surprise if tomorrow we see retailers from India competing with global brands even in global market places.

Do operations consultant help improve performance?

Of late I have been hearing this term quite often. "Operations Consultant"?

But, what exactly an operations consultant does?

What I have understood is basically these so called consultants study how the organization works on routine basis, what all things consists of the day to day task. Once they have prepared the list of all such activities, the next step is to find out the reasons as to why certain activity is needed to be performed, & is there a possibility of improving the procedure to carry out that particular activity.

But, in most cases suggestions given by operations consultant happen to fail after certain time period. The major reason for that is the fact that problem is not only with the technique but also with the mindset of the people who are the part of that activity, while someone is monitoring their performance they will adopt the new methodology, but the moment the monitoring mechanism goes offline, they switch back to the old practice.

how operations research drives success?

Key to the success is training the people with the new technique & make them aware about the necessity for the change. Companies like GE, P&G have actually managed to save millions of dollars by streamlining their operation.

Once people have understood why certain thing is required to be done & how it would be beneficial to them the job is simplified