Author: Madeline Jones Major: International Business

I interned for Walmart in Bangalore, India this summer. During my time there I was given a project to better understand their responsible sourcing portal for suppliers so that I could help them develop ideas that could make the portal more user friendly so that Walmart suppliers are more likely to use it. I learned so much about responsible sourcing and the process of training a facility to be aware of potential issues that can happen during factory work. I got to visit multiple factories that made textiles to see how those facilities are run and how Walmart manages their responsible sourcing tactics. When I traveled to one facility, I noticed small signs that responsible sourcing analysts are supposed to look for. At one facility, the fire evacuation area was being used for parking, which is a safety hazard. However, I noticed that the workers in the factory (most of whom were women) all had shoes and jewelry. The possession of personal items it a good sign that workers are being paid fairly.  

Once I began to better understand what kind of suppliers Walmart works with, I also began to better understand why Walmart’s responsible sourcing portal isn’t bringing in as much traffic as they would have liked. The portal isn’t extremely user-friendly and information is often much too consolidated. The suppliers don’t have time to spend hours combing through the portal for the information they need. To gain some more ideas, I took my own feedback and compared it with the feedback of two other focus groups I led. One of these focus groups consisted of people from various departments in the global sourcing office that I worked at, and the other group contained two participants from the merchant based office in Delhi. With their feedback and mine, I created a presentation on how to change the portal so that suppliers would utilize it like they were intended to. 

During my time there I would send my faculty mentor, Vikas Anand, a weekly report over everything I did during the week and get his feedback about my experience so that I could get the most out of my internship.