Introduction to Wal-Mart

Team 1 decided to choose Wal-Mart as our company because Wal-Mart is a well knows and respected company worldwide that many people use because of their great prices and variety of items you can buy. Retail and discount stores started to come into play around the 1950’s; the retail store idea grew in the United States the quickest because it was easy to buy all the items you needed in one store instead of going to five or six different stores. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. is an American public corporation that runs a chain of large discount department stores. Sam Walton opened his own discount and retail store in Rogers, Arkansas. In 1962, Walton opened the first Wal-Mart and five years later opened up more. In 1969 Walton’s chain of stores finally went under one company by the name of Wal-Mart Store Inc. The first Wal-Mart Super Store was opened in Washington, Missouri in 1988. The company started expanding into overseas markets in the 1990s. The year 2000 saw Wal-Mart listed for the first time in the prestigious “Fortune 500” list of the world’s biggest corporations.

Facts: Type of Organization: Public Company

Foundation: Rogers, Arkansas Founder: Sam Walton Current

Revenue: 404.16 Billion US Dollars

Net Income: 13.59 Billion US Dollars

Total Employees: 2,100,000

CEO of Wal-Mart

Michael Terry Duke is currently the fourth chief executive officer of Wal-Mart. Duke joined Wal-Mart in 1995, and most recently served as the executive in charge of the company’s international operations. He became the CEO of Wal-Mart in February 2009, Duke succeeded Lee Scott. Duke earned a BS in Industrial Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1971. Duke is currently fifty-nine years old and number eight on Forbes list of The World’s Most Powerful People.

Wal-Mart has made some considerable changes to market itself as a company with strong commitment to being green. For many years, they has been accused of underpaying its workers, offering limited benefits, exploiting employees in sweatshops around the world, and engaging in gender discrimination. As the company has pursued a responsible corporate social reputation though, it has realized significant savings.

Wal-Mart adopted a scorecard program to review the way each product is made, its merchandising, and its recycling availability. Vendors have been forced to make changes to their processes if they want to continue to sell to Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart even began offering promotions and benefits to vendors that scored well on the sustainability scorecard. Wal-Mart is concerned with minimizing packaging and fuel usage, but it may not quite have adopted the real meaning of “going green”. Since Sam Walton founded Walmart, it has always been a values-bases ethically led company. The Values that guide our decisions and our leadership are the 3 Basic Beliefs: 1. Respect for the individual 2. Service to our customers 3. Striving for excellence.

The Wal-Mart Office of Security is in the process of building a comprehensive and innovative security risk management program across Wal-Mart facilities. To support this effort, ARA (Applied Research Associates) assisted Wal-Mart security professionals develop security standards for a wide range of Wal-Mart facilities, a security risk assessment methodology designed specifically for Wal-Mart and a software tool to assist Wal-Mart personnel perform and document security risk management assessments. ARA also provided training to Wal-Mart personnel in the application of the methodology and the accompanying software and software support on an as-needed basis.

Wal-Mart created a five-step process designed around four basic questions for risk management: What are the risks? What are we going to do about these risks? How will we measure whether we are having a positive or negative impact on the risks? How will we demonstrate shareholder value?