The Million $ Map that helped Walmart build 5000 Stores

This story begins with me, in Ohio, after the housing crisis, about to go into foreclosure and with $1.69 in the bank.

Some years prior I jumped off the corporate ship and started building Low Code applications using Quickbase for a variety of clients along with 3 other adventurers. At first things progressed and then the economic downturn hit and for nearly a year we had almost no income. Somehow we scraped by and in the darkest of times, early winter of 2009, we got a call from Quickbase. They needed us to help a big important client.

It turned out to be Walmart. We quickly jumped on a call to learn more and were offered $15k to fly out to Bentonville for three days to scope a super important project. Cha ching!!!!!

Discovery by Mapping

By that time we’d worked out a pretty solid Discovery process, built on a concept we called Data Entity Mapping and which we used to create a preliminary Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) that gave us a pretty good feel for the scope of a project.

The Discovery went smoothly and on the evening before the final day, my partner in crime on the project Mike Hansborough and I knew they would ask for a price to complete the work from us verbally, before they let us leave the building the next day. Up to this point our largest project was about $30k so we ran our numbers and came up with $45k. Sounded about right … but my I had a bad feeling about how much work it might really be so I suggested we double it to $90k. Locked and loaded.

So, the final day of Discovery ended, and Kevin, the Real Estate IT Director says, “Boys, you knew this moment was coming … what’s the price going to be?”. I paused for a moment to think and in a spur of the moment doubled again, $180,000. They asked us to send a Solution Proposal, which we did by the end of the week, ERD included, and the following Monday they asked us how soon we could fly back down and get started.

Months later, we learned they had almost declined the project because they couldn’t image how we could possible deliver what they needed at such a low price. By the time we finished work and released on time to meet their schedule, we’d about doubled the revenue due from change orders and acceleration fees, and made about 70% gross margin on the work.

The Story of this ERD

After Walmart accepted our proposal, we flew back down to Bentonville and they locked us in the dungeon. Pretty much literally. The IT department sat in a brick cube with essentially no windows, and we were situated somewhere in the middle.

We got down to business, working with the Walmart team assigned to the project, a mix or IT and Real Estate Department SME’s. We focused on further hashing out the ERD to cover everything we needed to build to solve their challenge. One special addition, the circles, represent Functions that require advanced interactions or calculations that can’t be performed on a Entity UI.

We learned that they had paid $4M and spent 3 years working on a failed version of this project with Cap Gemini, and that no one on the Walmart team was getting their bonus if we failed to deliver the project within 4 months.

When we finished the full ERD, we suggested that we print it, and everyone on the team should sign it as a commitment to making sure we delivered on time. We all signed it, and we got the job done. In fact, after the project completed they invited us back for a big celebration, Arkansas style, crawfish boil.

The Map worth $1M

Well, this map tells the story of SPOCK (Store Planning Online Collaborative Knowledgebase). Please, don’t even ask how it got that name. It definitely wasn’t my idea.

SPOCK managed the domestic remodels and upgrades for Walmart stores. After we finished building that system, they asked us to build the other failed project they had queued up for domestic new store construction. After that went live, Walmart International Real Estate got wind of our success and invited to us to help solve their challenges. In the end, I estimate our system supported the development or about 5000 Walmart stores worldwide and generated millions in revenue and profits for MCFTech. And, it all started with a map.