How Walmart Uses Digital Twin Technology to Optimize Operations and Enhance Decision-Making

Making sense of siloed facilities data was a major difficulty at the global retail giant, slowing decision-making and leading to costly downtime. Willow’s digital twin technology transformed the company’s approach. Compiling and visualizing all Walmart built-asset data allowed the company to decrease the cost of downtime, move from reactive to proactive operations, and empower its workforce to make data-driven decisions.

Making timely decisions from a sea of data

When you’re the world’s largest retailer, everything happens on the grandest scale. In the US alone, Walmart has 4,700 stores and another 300 supply-chain assets. Add 8 million square feet per year, plus another 650 stores remodelled annually, and it’s a major operation for Hunter Hart, SVP of Walmart’s US real estate team, to keep an eye on.

Facility maintenance is a huge cost, particularly when issues arise. “Ultimately, the biggest value lever for us is downtime,” RJ Zanes, VP of Facility Services, explains. Optimizing uptime is therefore paramount, but Walmart ran into another challenge of scale. Its built assets fed company HQ a ton of data, but much of it was siloed within disparate and unaccessible systems.

John Crecelius is the former SVP of Associate and Next Generation Product at Walmart, now retired. He remembers the difficulty of connecting data from various systems, which hindered its decision- making ability.

“You don’t always see the relationships between decisions until they’re made,” he says. “You see the outcome and you have to go back and figure out what you need to change.” In a retail industry where making the right decision quickly can prove pivotal, Crecelius dreamt of a way to pull all of Walmart’s facilities’ data together and make sense of it.

Zanes, meanwhile, wanted to flip the script on facilities management: from cost center and necessary evil to exciting opportunity for optimization. He also saw a looming workforce challenge: In the next five years, 20% of skilled tradespeople in the US will retire. Building maintenance relies on these trades.
Walmart realized an opportunity to not only develop the next generation of tradespeople, but arm them with the information they needed to make the right decisions.

A digital twin helps Walmart find opportunity

Walmart found the solution Crecelius once dreamed of in Willow’s AI-driven SaaS platform using digital twin technology. Compiling static and live data from various building systems, sensors, and devices, the Willow platform transforms and visualizes that information on a live building model. According to Crecelius, the ability to understand complex relationships and automate decisions using Willow’s AI is a big benefit.

The digital twin makes leading indicators of failure instantly obvious and gives skilled tradespeople a clear idea of how to address the issue before it becomes a real problem. Hart likens the digital twin’s ability to minimize downtime to a radar map that gives people enough time to prepare for a coming storm. “It puts our business in a much better position,” he says.

Zanes agrees, using the example of how Walmart’s supply chain can now check a specific refrigeration case’s status before shipping frozen food. But he also points out that it’s more than keeping ahead of failure—there’s opportunity to optimize operations across the business.

Walmart chose Willow for several reasons. Its relationship with Microsoft gave Willow immediate credibility for reliability, security, and being able to meet Walmart’s needs at Walmart’s scale. “It’s like an aircraft carrier and a speedboat,” says Brian Clark, the Global Managing Director for the Walmart Business Unit at Microsoft. “It’s a nice marriage of Willow’s agility in innovation with the foundation of trust that Microsoft brings.”

Another deciding factor was the relationship Willow developed with Walmart and the flexibility and adapability that Willow brought to the partnership. “From day one, it felt like the vision was a common goal,” Hart emphasizes. Unlike other vendors Walmart has encountered, Willow listened, worked diligently to customize the solution that Walmart needed, and hustled to get the platform implemented quickly.