Global brand strengthens cross-functional collaboration and standardizes organizational processes to drive efficiencies and winning culture.
Wrike, a work management platform which is part of Citrix, has announced that Walmart has expanded its Wrike instance outside of Walmart Canada.
It now encompasses more than 1,000 new users across international teams, including Global Tax, Product, Walmart Health and Walmart Realty. With the ability to bring cross-departmental work into a single digital workspace, Wrike is enabling Walmart to work as one and giving them a level of visibility into and control over projects and resources that they’ve never had before.
In 2019, Walmart Canada deployed Wrike within its Continuous Improvement team to boost productivity and develop business recommendations for the Transportation department.
Following the success of Wrike’s integration, Walmart Canada implemented the work management platform into PMO, Strategy, Transportation, Supply Chain Planning, Logistics Operations, Supply Chain Reinvention/End to End, Marketing and E-commerce Studio.
With other areas of the business operating in different ways, however, there was a lack of standard processes across Walmart International. The organization set out to create a structure and foundation that would enable them to come together and take its business to the next level.
“One of the biggest challenges we face at Walmart is the size of the organization and the number of teams that are intertwined,” said Carolyn Lum, Director, Transportation Continuous Improvement, Walmart Canada.
“We used to spend a lot of time navigating through the bureaucracy of the different departments to get everyone aligned and on the same page. With Wrike, we can now collaborate with teams, including those we never would have interacted with before, and implement the same ways of working, which has been remarkable.”
Most recently, Walmart has expanded the use of Wrike internationally from 500 to nearly 1,500 users. This has allowed the organization to customize work management to the individual teams, bring siloed departments together, streamline communication, organize cross-functional projects and leverage analytics to tie projects to goals.
“Wrike helps us move faster,” said Francis Lalonde, Vice President, Transportation, Walmart Canada.
“We’re driving initiatives, momentum, and, ultimately, our culture. Teams are excited to come to project review calls and share successes, which has created a winning culture. Wrike has been instrumental in helping us evolve to this stage. I never could have envisioned the growth of Wrike in Walmart Canada, let alone how fast it would take off across Walmart International.”
In December of 2020, Wrike engaged with the Walmart Realty Execution team, which is responsible for managing construction on store remodels, new store builds and upkeep.
Prior to Wrike, they used a variety of disparate tools to manage work between external general contractors and several internal cross-functional teams. As a result, they experienced challenges like a lack of visibility across their portfolios, a considerable amount of time spent on non-value-added work, and duplicative efforts when planning and managing projects.
Additionally, the US Global Tax team at Walmart had an initiative that focused on fostering the development of team associates’ skill sets by providing them with an opportunity to work on projects that were outside of their domain.
Leadership needed a way to understand the current utilization of their team and identify who could be assigned to work on additional projects. Its existing work management solution could not offer the real-time, accurate visibility into resource utilization that Wrike can.
“We’ve built the Wrike platform on the promise to enable teams and organizations of any size to work as one, break barriers and scale beyond what they know to be possible,” said Andrew Filev, Senior Vice President and Wrike General Manager, Citrix.
“Walmart is an exceptional example of an organization that understands the importance of cross-functional collaboration and is always looking for ways to improve it. By welcoming teams worldwide to Wrike, Walmart is enabling departments to better standardize and optimize processes and streamline communication so they can do their best work together.”
