What Is Walmart?
Walmart is a multinational discounted retail store. Walmart supplies consumers with food, clothing, healthcare, beauty items, electronics and more. This capitalization of basic needs and wants has allowed Walmart to monopolize and continue expanding. The company first emerged in 1962 and in this time has opened over 11,000 stores worldwide.
Where Is Walmart?
The headquarters is located in Bentonville, Arkansas with over 1,400 workers. Total of 210 Walmart warehouses across the 24 countries.
Behind the Scenes
Walmart is a publicly traded family business, it was the largest grocery retailer in 2019, the business model revolves around brick and mortar retail.
How is the company funded?
Publicly traded to Stockholders/Partners who invest into the company, own a percent of the company and help set rules and standards:
- The Vanguard Group, Inc.
- BlackRock Fund Advisors.
- SSgA Funds Management, Inc.
- Geode Capital Management LLC.
- Northern Trust Investments, Inc.
- State Farm Investment Management. Rowe Price Associates, Inc.
- Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC.
- Dimensional Fund Advisors.
- GQG Partners LLC.
Around 2.3 million associates around the world and at least 1.6 million in the US alone. These associates include Truck drivers, Cashiers, Warehouse Workers, and more!
Behind Walmart’s Networking
The Walmart Corporation spans across 24 countries and needs to share the same efficient network to achieve tasks. A wide area network is needed to branch across all the countries Walmart has store locations in. Emails are needed to be exchanged information and communicate with each other in regards to company affairs. The headquarters are communicating through the private cloud within their data centers. Linked computers and the truck drives are communicating through file server and Web server. Walmart staffers use Workplace by Facebook to communicate. The world’s largest employer announced on Tuesday it has signed up for Workplace, the version of Facebook’s social network that’s optimized for businesses. The company does simplify the communication in terms of networks. Both local and global networks work smoothly, for which various types of media are used. At the physical level, wireless technology prevails, but wired is also used in some regions. Walmart subnets allow to create multiple logical networks within the same Class A, B, and C network.
Osi Model
STEP 1: Physical
This level is the lowest, and is responsible for bit synchronization, bit rate control, physical topologies, transmission mode and full duplex mode so information can be both sent and received. At this level, physical signals are exchanged between physical Walmart devices (Tikkanen, 2022). The information between them passes in the form of a set of zeros and ones, that is, bits. In the case of Walmart, a bit is a protocol data unit, abbreviated PDU (Protocol Data Unit). Each level has its own PDUs, presented in a form that will be understandable at this level and possibly at the next before conversion (Tikkanen, 2022). Work with pure data occurs only at levels from the fifth to the seventh. Walmart’s physical layer devices operate with bits. They are transmitted by wire (via fiber) and wirelessly (via Bluetooth, IRDA, Wi-Fi, GSM and 4G) (Tikkanen, 2022).
Step 2: Data Link
Walmart has made several changes in its data communication systems to improve its suppliers’ access to sales and inventory data. For example, the company added a customized Web site for its suppliers, such as Mattel, Procter & Gamble, and Warner- Lambert. Walmart’s goal is to improve efficiency in order to keep prices low and maintain a high level of customer service. With Walmart’s network, suppliers can access sales, inventory, and forecasting data over extremely fast connections. To ensure confidentiality of dafa, a sophisticated security system has been implemented to prevent suppliers from accessing data about one another’s products.
Walmart has also added Web-based access to its RetailLink system so suppliers can use information in the database. Other data communication applications at Walmart includeautomated distribution, computerized routing, and electronic data interchange.
Step 3: Network
At this level, a new concept appears — routing. For this task, third—level devices were created – routers. This level determines the path along which the Walmart data will be transmitted. Walmart routers receive the MAC address from the switches from the previous level and are engaged in building a route from one device to another, taking into account all potential network problems. At the Walmart network level, the ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) protocol is actively used. Using it, 64-bit MAC addresses are converted to 32-bit IP addresses and vice versa, thereby ensuring data encapsulation and decapsulation. Routers use protocols of this level for packet routing (RIP, EIGRP, OSPF).
Step 4: Transport
This layer is an intermediary between Host Layers and Media Layers, referring to the former rather than the latter, its main task is to transport Walmart packages. There may be losses during transportation, but some types of data are more sensitive to losses than others. Therefore, when transmitting Wal Mart data that is most sensitive to losses at the transport layer, the TCP protocol is used, which controls the integrity of the delivered information (Reiff, 2022). For multimedia files, small losses are not so important, the delay will be much more critical. To transmit such data, which is most sensitive to delays, the UDP protocol is used, which allows you to organize communication without establishing a connection (Reiff, 2022). When transmitting data over the UDP protocol, data packets are divided into datagrams. The main difference between datagrams is their autonomy. It contains all the necessary headers to reach the final destination.
Step 5: Session
The fifth level operates with pure Walmart data; in addition to the fifth, pure data is also used at the sixth and seventh levels. The session layer is responsible for maintaining a session or communication session at Walmart (“About Walmart,” 2022). The fifth level provides a service to the following: manages the interaction between Walmart applications, opens up the possibility of task synchronization, session termination, and information exchange. Session-level services are used in application environments that require remote procedure calls (“About Walmart,” 2022). They are employed to request actions to be performed on remote computers or independent systems on the same device when there are multiple operating systems.
Step 6: Presentation
The sixth level is engaged in presenting data (which is still a PDU) in a form understandable to humans and machines. The presentation level converts the Walmart data into the appropriate format. For example, when one Walmart device is able to display text only in ASCII encoding, and another only in UTF-8, text translation from one encoding to another occurs at the sixth level (Eide, 2020). The sixth level also deals with the presentation of images (in JPEG, GIF, etc.), as well as video audio (in MPEG, QuickTime) (Eide, 2020). In addition to the above, the sixth level is engaged in encrypting Walmart data, since it must be protected during transmission.
Step 7: Application
This level is what users of Walmart interact with, a kind of graphical interface of the entire OSI model, which it interacts with other layers at a minimum (Treiblmaier, 2019). Layer seven protocols do not need to provide routing or guarantee data delivery when the previous six have already have completed these processes. The user of Walmart can use their own protocols so that they see the data in a way that they understand. Protocols of this layer use UDP (DHCP) and TCP (HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP and DNS). This layer communicates user applications with the Walmart network. For example, it is responsible for browsing Walmart web pages (HTTP), sending and receiving mail (SMTP, POP3), receiving files (FTP, TFTP), remote access (Telnet), etc. (Treiblmaier, 2019).
References
About Walmart. (2022).
Eide, N. (2020). Walmart outlines cloud strategy to investors.
Reiff, N. (2022). How Walmart makes money.
Tikkanen, A. (2022). Walmart: History & Facts. Web.
Walmart Treiblmaier, H. (2019). Combining blockchain technology and the physical internet to achieve triple bottom line sustainability: A comprehensive research agenda for modern logistics and supply chain management. logistics, 3(10), 1-13.