Walmart Canada's Continuous Improvement team started off where many organizations do – using a spreadsheet to manage multiple complex projects and a rapidly changing operation. Tasked with developing new business recommendations for their Transportation department, along with managing thousands of employees, stores, vendors, and supply chains, the Continuous Improvement team quickly realized they needed a solution that provided the visibility and scalability needed to succeed.
Since it integrated Wrike into their systems, Walmart Canada has been able to better consolidate, view, and accelerate their workflows across the board. They've also reduced project approval times to near zero and cut the number of regular status updates and calls significantly. The Continuous Improvement team utilized Wrike to create their ideal workplace of the future, customized to work exactly the way they want. Today, their success with Wrike has led to its deployment across other Walmart teams.
We recently took some time to chat with Francis Lalonde, Vice President of Transportation at Walmart Canada, and Carolyn Lum, Director, Transportation Continuous Improvement at Walmart Canada, to get a better understanding of how they discovered Wrike, their integration journey, and how it’s helped them do their best work.
Carolyn Lum, Director, Transportation Continuous Improvement at Walmart Canada
Q: What drove you to find a new work management solution?
A: “We needed to make our process better. Walmart is innovating in so many ways, and we saw this as an opportunity to get even better.”
Q: Why did you decide to use Wrike?
A: “Walmart moves at such a fast pace, and decisions and directions can change within even the same week. It allows us to make the changes as we want on our schedule without having to rely on any sort of third-party development team to make those changes for us.”
Q: What Wrike feature or functionality do you love most?
A: “Multiple views — so no matter what tool someone is working in, they can easily and seamlessly work within this one tool. And Reporting is a big deal as well. My executives really wanted a high-level, bird's-eye view of where we are. And the fact that we can do that in real time is amazing. We also use Wrike Analyze a lot. It's live, it's in real time, and we can report on any custom field we created.”
Q: What does the future of Wrike look like for Walmart Canada?
A: “Every day, on our internal application store where we have our Walmart desktop app, I'm getting emails asking — can you talk to me about this tool? Can you talk to me about this solution? Can you walk us through how you're using it? The fact that everyone wants to implement the same ways of working that we have is really quite remarkable.”
Q: How did the Continuous Improvement Team come about?
A: “I created the Continuous Improvement Team two and a half years ago. What I really wanted was to have a team that would help create that culture of continuous improvement … so it's not just a team of project managers. I wanted to build a team that would create a support network for our entire ecosystem. Their responsibility is to support teams with reporting, analytics, and everything they need to deliver on their initiatives. And that's what the team has been doing brilliantly.”
Q: What do you love most about your job?
A: “I love a million things about my job. I love that I get to service all of our customers on a daily basis. I love that we've built a team that’s relentlessly focused on people. And that's one of the things that I'm most passionate about, seeing that our people are growing, they're getting to a different level in terms of maturity in terms of performance, and have the chance to transform the business as well.”
Q: What do you love most about Wrike?
A: “Wrike is scalable and easy to use. And it really brings everything together. I'm also not the most technical guy, and my team will tell you that I'm using it every day. It's easy for me to navigate through all the details. So if dinosaurs like me from the system side are able to go in and really adopt it, everybody else can go in there and use that solution in a very easy manner.”
Q: Where do you see your journey with Wrike taking you?
A: “The fun thing is other departments now want to get on the journey. We've been giving demos, probably once a week, for about a year and a half with other folks because others want to get on the program.”
Learn more about the success of Walmart Canada and how they use Wrike to achieve operational success by watching the full video.
