netrashetty
Netra Shetty
Organisational Structure of Walmart : Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (formerly branded as Wal-Mart, branded as Walmart since 2008) (NYSE: WMT) is an American public multinational corporation that runs a chain of large discount department stores and a chain of warehouse stores. In 2010 it was the world's largest public corporation by revenue, according to the Forbes Global 2000 for that year.[6] The company was founded by Sam Walton in 1962, incorporated on October 31, 1969, and publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange in 1972. Wal-Mart, headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas, is the largest majority private employer[7] and the largest grocery retailer in the United States. In 2009, it generated 51% of its US$258 billion sales in the U.S. from grocery business.[8] It also owns and operates the Sam's Club retail warehouses in North America.
Wal-Mart has 8,500 stores in 15 countries, with 55 different names.[9] The company operates under its own name in the United States, including the 50 states. It also operates under its own name in Puerto Rico. Wal-Mart operates in Mexico as Walmex, in the United Kingdom as Asda ("Asda Wal-Mart" in some branches), in Japan as Seiyu, and in India as Best Price. It has wholly owned operations in Argentina, Brazil, and Canada. Wal-Mart's investments outside North America have had mixed results: its operations in the United Kingdom, South America and China are highly successful, while it was forced to pull out of Germany and South Korea when ventures there were unsuccessful.
Wal-Mart Corporation
Organisational Information
Wal-Mart is the largest retail company in the world, larger than Carrefour, Metro AG, and
Royal Ahold combined.1 The company controls approximately 20 percent of the retail grocery
and consumables business in the United States, making it the largest grocery retailer in the
country. Wal-Mart’s large size enables the company to purchase supplies at low prices
through bulk purchases, thereby providing lower prices to consumers but forcing many
smaller retailers out of business.
Sam Walton founded Wal-Mart in 1962 in Arkansas, United States. After the company went
public on the New York Stock Exchange in 1969 providing it with an influx of capital, the store
expanded operations throughout the United States. While having mixed results internationally
having recently closed operations in Germany and South Korea, the company still boasts
almost 6,500 stores in 15 countries.
Headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas, U.S., Wal-Mart employs more than 1.8 million
people worldwide, and earned more than US$11.2 billion in operating income during 20062.
Wal-Mart did not actively engage in the data collection process for the 2006 Global
Accountability Report. Indicators were therefore scored based solely on public information
and data collected from independent experts and stakeholders of the company.
Transparency | Participation | Evaluation | Complaint and Response
Organisational Structure
Wal-Mart’s governing body is the Annual Shareholders Meeting, which is responsible for
electing directors to the Board of Directors, ratifying the appointment of the external auditor,
voting on shareholder propositions and amending the Articles of Incorporation.
The executive body is the Board of Directors. As of early 2007, the Board had 14 members,
10 of which are independent. The Board is responsible for developing strategy and policies
for Wal-Mart. Supporting it are five committees: Audit Committee; Compensation,
Nominating, and Governance Committee; Executive Committee; Stock Option Committee;
and Strategic Planning and Finance Committee. Wal-Mart separates the function of
Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer (CEO).
Transparency Dimension
Wal-Mart rank ninth among the ten assessed corporations for their transparency capabilities
with a score of 15 percent.
Wal-Mart does not have an information disclosure policy, but makes an aspirational
commitment to transparency in its Statement of Ethics. The Statement pledges accurate and
fair disclosure, however, this commitment only pertains to reports and documents filed with
the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and ‘other public
communications.’ Wal-Mart should, at minimum, make a commitment to transparency that
goes beyond SEC documents and commits to transparency in all activities and operations.
Preferably, the company should develop a transparency policy that clearly identifies what
when and how information will be made available and includes good practice principles that
provide a commitment to respond to all information requests within a specified timeframe.
Participation Dimension
Wal-Mart rank sixth among the ten assessed corporations for their participation capabilities
with 43 percent.
External Stakeholder Engagement
While Wal-Mart lacks a policy that guides engagement with external stakeholder, they do
make a commitment to engaging in community dialogue. The company makes this on their
website under ‘Our Commitments.’ This commitment however is not expanded on in any
other public documentation and fulfils none of the good practice principles on stakeholder
engagement.
Based on publicly available information, no evidence was found to suggest that Wal-Mart has
a senior executive overseeing community engagement or stakeholder engagement more
broadly, or that employees are trained on stakeholder engagement. Similarly, Wal-Mart has
not institutionalised the involvement of any external stakeholders in corporate decisionmaking.
Member Control
Wal-Mart’s governing articles provide for relatively equal member control. The company
bylaws allow all shareholders to attend the Annual Shareholders Meeting and enable them to
add items to the meeting’s agenda. Shareholders are also able to recommend candidates for
Board of Director elections by writing to the Compensation, Nominating, and Governance
Committee, and remove Board Directors at any time with an affirmative vote of at least a
majority of capital shares. Wal-Mart also follows the one-share, one vote principle. Wal-Mart
could improve shareholder control of the executive however, by requiring a majority vote in
electing candidates to the Board of Directors instead of a plurality.
Evaluation Dimension
Wal-Mart ranks ninth among the ten assessed corporations in evaluation capabilities with 15
percent.
The low ranking reflects the fact that Wal-Mart does not have a policy guiding its evaluation of
environmental and social impact (or at least does not make it publicly available). There is
evidence that Wal-Mart assesses aspects of its social impact as the 2005 Report on Ethical
Sourcing identifies Ethical Standards Audits. The audits are produced by regional audit
teams that observe violations, conduct worker interviews, and review documentation across
different factories. The audits are based on information in the Code of Conduct that describes
health, safety, environment, and labour issues. The information found publicly on the Ethical
Standards Audits did not include a commitment to any good practice principles.
Based on publicly available information, no senior executives were identified that oversee the
audits process. However, evidence was found to suggest that Wal-Mart has an auditors
training program where auditors are tested every six months on specific situations and
violations. Auditors who score below a minimum score are removed from auditing and retrained
until their score improves.
Complaints and Response Dimension
For complaint and response capabilities, Wal-Mart ranked ninth among the assessed
corporations with a score of 28 percent.
While Wal-Mart does not have a policy for handling complaints from external stakeholders, for
employees, the company has a Statement of Ethics that outlines its whistleblower principles.
The Statement includes some good practice principles such as assurances of confidentiality
and non-retaliation, independence of investigators, and a clear description of how to lodge a
complaint and how it will be investigated. Wal-Mart could improve its whistleblower
protections by explicitly stating that those proven to have retaliated against a complainant
face mandatory discipline, and that all negative consequences suffered by victims of proven
retaliation are reversed.
In regards to Wal-Mart’s internal complaints systems, the ethics office has oversight
responsibility of ethics violations. Additionally, guidance on resolving ethics matters will be
sought from the Legal Department. Whether Wal-Mart provides training to employees on
whistleblower policies or if those conducting investigations were trained on policy
commitments could not be confirmed based on publicly available information.
Below is a description of Wal-Mart’s operating structure which was published in a court document in 2003. The only advantage to reading the text here is that I removed all of the legal cross references and footnotes to make the text readable. [The following should be taken with a grain of salt in that this information was produced from an anti-Wal-Mart lawsuit and does not come from the company's official filings.]
There are a total of 41 regions: 35 Wal-Mart regions and six Sam's Club regions.
Each region is supervised by a Regional Vice President (RVP), who is based in Bentonville and travels for three weeks out of each month to the region.
Because the regional management is based in Bentonville, Wal-Mart has an unusually high concentration of executives and managers based in the Home Office.
Regional management meets at least weekly with Bentonville-based corporate and executive leadership to discuss developments in the individual stores.
Each region, in turn, contains approximately eleven districts; each district contains approximately six to eight stores.
Each district is run by a District Manager, who lives in the field.
At Sam's Club, district managers are called Directors of Operations, but the job responsibilities are identical.
On personnel matters, District Managers work in conjunction with Regional Personnel Managers (RPM).
The RPMs are based in Bentonville and are responsible for recruiting and assist in selecting store management and monitoring personnel policies.
RPMs visit the stores on a weekly basis and submit reports to five People Directors in the Home Office.
Each Wal-Mart store has the same job categories, job descriptions and management hierarchy.
At the bottom of the ladder, the primary entry level hourly positions are cashier, sales associate and stocker.
The first step up is hourly Department Manager.
Other hourly supervisor positions include Customer Service Manager (CSM), known as Check-Out Supervisor (COS) at Sam's Club.
The highest level hourly manager at Wal-Mart is Support Manager.
The next step up is to management trainee, a four-to-five month program which prepares employees for positions as Assistant Managers.
The first salaried management position is Assistant Manager.
Each store has several Assistant Managers, varying with the size of the store.
The next level is Co-Manager, a position used only in larger stores.
The top store position is Store Manager, called General Manager in Sam's Clubs.
CEO
Mike Duke
Chairman of the Board
Rob Walton
4
Director
James Cash
3
Director
Aida Alvarez
2
Director
Roger Corbett
2
Director
Allen Questrom
2
Director
Linda Wolf
2
Director
Gregory Penner
Director
Jim Walton
3
Director
Douglas Daft
4
Director
Steven Reinemund
2
Director
Arne Sorenson
Director
Lee Scott
3
Director
James Breyer
4
Director
Michele Burns
8
Director
Christopher Williams
3
Chief Financial Officer
Thomas Schoewe
Legal
Jeffrey Gearhart
CIO
Rollin Ford
Corporate & Government
Leslie Dach
2
Human Resources
Susan Chambers
2
Legal, Ethics & Secretary
Thomas Hyde
International
Douglas McMillon
2
Sam’s Club
Brian Cornell
Replenishment, Pricing & Pla...
John Westling
2
Walmart U.S
William Simon
2
Global.com & Global Sourcing
Eduardo Castro-Wright
Walmart U.S
Bill Simon
Finance & Treasurer
Charles Holley
Control
Steven Whaley
2
Wal-Mart Brazil
Marcos Samaha
2
Wal-Mart Canada
David Cheesewright
Wal-Mart China
Ed Chan
Seiyu
Ed Kolodzieski
2
Walmart Asia
Scott Price
Latin America
Eduardo Solorzano
3
Merchandising, Sam's Club
Linda Hefner
2
Marketing & E-Commerce, Sam...
Cindy Davis
Operations, Sam’s Club
Ignacio Perez Lizaur
Wal-Mart Realty, U.S.
Eric Zorn
Wal-Mart West
Raul Vazquez
Administration, Wal-Mart U.S.
Thomas Mars
4
Marketing, Wal-Mart U.S.
Stephen Quinn
4
Merchandising, Wal-Mart U.S.
John Fleming
Grocery, Wal-Mart U.S.
Jack Sinclair
Supply Chain, Wal-Mart U.S.
Johnnie Dobbs
Mexico and Central
Scot Rank
Wal-Mart has 8,500 stores in 15 countries, with 55 different names.[9] The company operates under its own name in the United States, including the 50 states. It also operates under its own name in Puerto Rico. Wal-Mart operates in Mexico as Walmex, in the United Kingdom as Asda ("Asda Wal-Mart" in some branches), in Japan as Seiyu, and in India as Best Price. It has wholly owned operations in Argentina, Brazil, and Canada. Wal-Mart's investments outside North America have had mixed results: its operations in the United Kingdom, South America and China are highly successful, while it was forced to pull out of Germany and South Korea when ventures there were unsuccessful.
Wal-Mart Corporation
Organisational Information
Wal-Mart is the largest retail company in the world, larger than Carrefour, Metro AG, and
Royal Ahold combined.1 The company controls approximately 20 percent of the retail grocery
and consumables business in the United States, making it the largest grocery retailer in the
country. Wal-Mart’s large size enables the company to purchase supplies at low prices
through bulk purchases, thereby providing lower prices to consumers but forcing many
smaller retailers out of business.
Sam Walton founded Wal-Mart in 1962 in Arkansas, United States. After the company went
public on the New York Stock Exchange in 1969 providing it with an influx of capital, the store
expanded operations throughout the United States. While having mixed results internationally
having recently closed operations in Germany and South Korea, the company still boasts
almost 6,500 stores in 15 countries.
Headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas, U.S., Wal-Mart employs more than 1.8 million
people worldwide, and earned more than US$11.2 billion in operating income during 20062.
Wal-Mart did not actively engage in the data collection process for the 2006 Global
Accountability Report. Indicators were therefore scored based solely on public information
and data collected from independent experts and stakeholders of the company.
Transparency | Participation | Evaluation | Complaint and Response
Organisational Structure
Wal-Mart’s governing body is the Annual Shareholders Meeting, which is responsible for
electing directors to the Board of Directors, ratifying the appointment of the external auditor,
voting on shareholder propositions and amending the Articles of Incorporation.
The executive body is the Board of Directors. As of early 2007, the Board had 14 members,
10 of which are independent. The Board is responsible for developing strategy and policies
for Wal-Mart. Supporting it are five committees: Audit Committee; Compensation,
Nominating, and Governance Committee; Executive Committee; Stock Option Committee;
and Strategic Planning and Finance Committee. Wal-Mart separates the function of
Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer (CEO).
Transparency Dimension
Wal-Mart rank ninth among the ten assessed corporations for their transparency capabilities
with a score of 15 percent.
Wal-Mart does not have an information disclosure policy, but makes an aspirational
commitment to transparency in its Statement of Ethics. The Statement pledges accurate and
fair disclosure, however, this commitment only pertains to reports and documents filed with
the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and ‘other public
communications.’ Wal-Mart should, at minimum, make a commitment to transparency that
goes beyond SEC documents and commits to transparency in all activities and operations.
Preferably, the company should develop a transparency policy that clearly identifies what
when and how information will be made available and includes good practice principles that
provide a commitment to respond to all information requests within a specified timeframe.
Participation Dimension
Wal-Mart rank sixth among the ten assessed corporations for their participation capabilities
with 43 percent.
External Stakeholder Engagement
While Wal-Mart lacks a policy that guides engagement with external stakeholder, they do
make a commitment to engaging in community dialogue. The company makes this on their
website under ‘Our Commitments.’ This commitment however is not expanded on in any
other public documentation and fulfils none of the good practice principles on stakeholder
engagement.
Based on publicly available information, no evidence was found to suggest that Wal-Mart has
a senior executive overseeing community engagement or stakeholder engagement more
broadly, or that employees are trained on stakeholder engagement. Similarly, Wal-Mart has
not institutionalised the involvement of any external stakeholders in corporate decisionmaking.
Member Control
Wal-Mart’s governing articles provide for relatively equal member control. The company
bylaws allow all shareholders to attend the Annual Shareholders Meeting and enable them to
add items to the meeting’s agenda. Shareholders are also able to recommend candidates for
Board of Director elections by writing to the Compensation, Nominating, and Governance
Committee, and remove Board Directors at any time with an affirmative vote of at least a
majority of capital shares. Wal-Mart also follows the one-share, one vote principle. Wal-Mart
could improve shareholder control of the executive however, by requiring a majority vote in
electing candidates to the Board of Directors instead of a plurality.
Evaluation Dimension
Wal-Mart ranks ninth among the ten assessed corporations in evaluation capabilities with 15
percent.
The low ranking reflects the fact that Wal-Mart does not have a policy guiding its evaluation of
environmental and social impact (or at least does not make it publicly available). There is
evidence that Wal-Mart assesses aspects of its social impact as the 2005 Report on Ethical
Sourcing identifies Ethical Standards Audits. The audits are produced by regional audit
teams that observe violations, conduct worker interviews, and review documentation across
different factories. The audits are based on information in the Code of Conduct that describes
health, safety, environment, and labour issues. The information found publicly on the Ethical
Standards Audits did not include a commitment to any good practice principles.
Based on publicly available information, no senior executives were identified that oversee the
audits process. However, evidence was found to suggest that Wal-Mart has an auditors
training program where auditors are tested every six months on specific situations and
violations. Auditors who score below a minimum score are removed from auditing and retrained
until their score improves.
Complaints and Response Dimension
For complaint and response capabilities, Wal-Mart ranked ninth among the assessed
corporations with a score of 28 percent.
While Wal-Mart does not have a policy for handling complaints from external stakeholders, for
employees, the company has a Statement of Ethics that outlines its whistleblower principles.
The Statement includes some good practice principles such as assurances of confidentiality
and non-retaliation, independence of investigators, and a clear description of how to lodge a
complaint and how it will be investigated. Wal-Mart could improve its whistleblower
protections by explicitly stating that those proven to have retaliated against a complainant
face mandatory discipline, and that all negative consequences suffered by victims of proven
retaliation are reversed.
In regards to Wal-Mart’s internal complaints systems, the ethics office has oversight
responsibility of ethics violations. Additionally, guidance on resolving ethics matters will be
sought from the Legal Department. Whether Wal-Mart provides training to employees on
whistleblower policies or if those conducting investigations were trained on policy
commitments could not be confirmed based on publicly available information.
Below is a description of Wal-Mart’s operating structure which was published in a court document in 2003. The only advantage to reading the text here is that I removed all of the legal cross references and footnotes to make the text readable. [The following should be taken with a grain of salt in that this information was produced from an anti-Wal-Mart lawsuit and does not come from the company's official filings.]
There are a total of 41 regions: 35 Wal-Mart regions and six Sam's Club regions.
Each region is supervised by a Regional Vice President (RVP), who is based in Bentonville and travels for three weeks out of each month to the region.
Because the regional management is based in Bentonville, Wal-Mart has an unusually high concentration of executives and managers based in the Home Office.
Regional management meets at least weekly with Bentonville-based corporate and executive leadership to discuss developments in the individual stores.
Each region, in turn, contains approximately eleven districts; each district contains approximately six to eight stores.
Each district is run by a District Manager, who lives in the field.
At Sam's Club, district managers are called Directors of Operations, but the job responsibilities are identical.
On personnel matters, District Managers work in conjunction with Regional Personnel Managers (RPM).
The RPMs are based in Bentonville and are responsible for recruiting and assist in selecting store management and monitoring personnel policies.
RPMs visit the stores on a weekly basis and submit reports to five People Directors in the Home Office.
Each Wal-Mart store has the same job categories, job descriptions and management hierarchy.
At the bottom of the ladder, the primary entry level hourly positions are cashier, sales associate and stocker.
The first step up is hourly Department Manager.
Other hourly supervisor positions include Customer Service Manager (CSM), known as Check-Out Supervisor (COS) at Sam's Club.
The highest level hourly manager at Wal-Mart is Support Manager.
The next step up is to management trainee, a four-to-five month program which prepares employees for positions as Assistant Managers.
The first salaried management position is Assistant Manager.
Each store has several Assistant Managers, varying with the size of the store.
The next level is Co-Manager, a position used only in larger stores.
The top store position is Store Manager, called General Manager in Sam's Clubs.
CEO
Mike Duke
Chairman of the Board
Rob Walton
4
Director
James Cash
3
Director
Aida Alvarez
2
Director
Roger Corbett
2
Director
Allen Questrom
2
Director
Linda Wolf
2
Director
Gregory Penner
Director
Jim Walton
3
Director
Douglas Daft
4
Director
Steven Reinemund
2
Director
Arne Sorenson
Director
Lee Scott
3
Director
James Breyer
4
Director
Michele Burns
8
Director
Christopher Williams
3
Chief Financial Officer
Thomas Schoewe
Legal
Jeffrey Gearhart
CIO
Rollin Ford
Corporate & Government
Leslie Dach
2
Human Resources
Susan Chambers
2
Legal, Ethics & Secretary
Thomas Hyde
International
Douglas McMillon
2
Sam’s Club
Brian Cornell
Replenishment, Pricing & Pla...
John Westling
2
Walmart U.S
William Simon
2
Global.com & Global Sourcing
Eduardo Castro-Wright
Walmart U.S
Bill Simon
Finance & Treasurer
Charles Holley
Control
Steven Whaley
2
Wal-Mart Brazil
Marcos Samaha
2
Wal-Mart Canada
David Cheesewright
Wal-Mart China
Ed Chan
Seiyu
Ed Kolodzieski
2
Walmart Asia
Scott Price
Latin America
Eduardo Solorzano
3
Merchandising, Sam's Club
Linda Hefner
2
Marketing & E-Commerce, Sam...
Cindy Davis
Operations, Sam’s Club
Ignacio Perez Lizaur
Wal-Mart Realty, U.S.
Eric Zorn
Wal-Mart West
Raul Vazquez
Administration, Wal-Mart U.S.
Thomas Mars
4
Marketing, Wal-Mart U.S.
Stephen Quinn
4
Merchandising, Wal-Mart U.S.
John Fleming
Grocery, Wal-Mart U.S.
Jack Sinclair
Supply Chain, Wal-Mart U.S.
Johnnie Dobbs
Mexico and Central
Scot Rank
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