American Lighthouses – Walmart’s Vision

Strengthening our commitment to American jobs and communities – We are providing more value to our customers and improving the way we do business Walmart’s vision and role in the development of American Lighthouses is to foster a stakeholder involved environment for long term investments in American Manufacturing, to develop manufacturing ecosystems that will create high-quality and innovative products, and to regenerate regional economies and our environment and support American jobs. Overview Walmart’s goal is to help identify and overcome top-down barriers to U.S. production. The American Lighthouse initiative will be a collaborative approach involving multiple stakeholders who share a common goal — supporting more American jobs . The idea behind the lighthouses is simple — get the right players from the right places at the table. By bringing together key regions and various stakeholders, we can make the supply chain more efficient. The aim is to bring U.S. manufacturing back in a sustainable, long-term way. Walmart’s Role By using Walmart’s scale, American Lighthouses can to bring together public and private stakeholders in order to create a vision for the future of textiles manufacturing in the United States that can be scaled and sustained. In specific regions of the country, we will bring together participants from academia and government; suppliers; manufacturers; NGOs; and local economic development groups. This collaboration will truly provide “lighthouses” to illuminate the path ahead and scale in the future. We will start with the Textiles Supply Chain We will build a neutral multi-stakeholder, public and private “facilitated network” to help define the roadmap, identify location, opportunities, and barriers We will be agile and iterative Initially participants in the network will be invite only The effort will be regenerative by design We will create shared value for Walmart, Manufacturing Partners, Communities and Customers The supply chains will be scalable and sustainable We will incubate a supply chain in a location and scale to enable broader economies of scale that allows demand beyond Walmart’s customers to be serviced What is a U.S. Manufacturing Lighthouse? A Product/ Category specific approach to solve system-level challenges to growing US Manufacturing and addressing barriers to reshoring with place-based approaches. Why it matters? Drive Surety of Supply by developing new sources of supply and incubating critical industries/ capabilities Create shared value for Walmart and our external stakeholders and communities Promote regenerative efforts American Lighthouses will be Regenerative by Design Walmart has been committed to American purchases and continuing is efforts to grow American manufacturing From the “Bring it Home to the USA” initiative launched by Sam Walton in 1985 to our 2013 commitment to invest $250B in products made, grown, or assembled in America. As we continue to track to that commitment, we believe we can do more. We will spend an additional $350B. To enable that goal we are launching a concept called “American Lighthouses”. Why this new concept? Our prior initiatives have given us a lot of successes, and also taught us one big learning. For American manufacturing to be scalable and sustainable, we need to partner with a broader group of stakeholders to solve for some important top down barriers: Access to skilled labor Access to financing Access to RM and components Trade policy and regulations Other lessons learned are: Tackling all issues at once across all supply chains is very challenging Solutions require public and private partnerships We need to work locally in a specific place to incubate and then scale The American Lighthouse will create “supply chain in place” for each one of the priority supply chains Why Now? Automation, energy, other input costs have continued to narrow production cost gap across locations Recent shocks to supply chains have exacerbated supply and availability and reinforced the need for supply chain resilience There are now good starting points for American manufacturing in the prioritized supply chains and the American lighthouses can help build these industries here Manufacturing is a great way for Walmart to make a contribution on growing American jobs and reducing emissions What are the impacts? Grow manufacturing ecosystems Final assembly Key components and inputs Support creation of new jobs – contribute to the goal of creating more than 750,000 new jobs through additional spend on products made, grown or assembled. Contribute to the 100M metric tons of CO2 emissions avoided by sourcing closer to customers having a positive impact on the climate and emissions. Increases speed, agility, responsiveness, and resilience enabling supply chain efficiency. Rejuvenated communities and improved availability drives customer satisfaction. Learn more about […]

Click here to view original web page at American Lighthouses – Walmart’s Vision