Bio: Ram Rampalli is a hands-on product manager working on large scale data projects
for @WalmartLabs and Walmart eCommerce. A true believer in crowdsourcing, Ram
has spent the past five years of his career leading and supporting initiatives
that use the power of the crowd to help solve problems for consumers and the
Walmart eCommerce business.
Most of us know the saying “many hands
make light work,” meaning that the more people who work on something together,
the easier and faster it is to complete. This simple saying defines the concept
and the appeal of crowdsourcing in today’s digital world. At a global company like Walmart, tapping into
the crowd around the world for online crowdsourcing helps us achieve things
more efficiently than we ever thought possible.
What does crowdsourcing at Walmart mean?
It means we’re working with people all over the world to help us with tasks like
quality evaluation and product data collection. We need this data to help make
sure the products on Walmart.com are easy to
find and that searches on the site deliver the best results. It also means that
tasks that once took weeks to complete are now ready in days. I rely on people
all over the world every day to help me solve global business problems like
this and more.
You can imagine how having a huge online
crowd to help with this is driving all retail companies to work faster and
smarter. At Walmart, it is helping us take a localized approach to solving
global issues, too, since we can work with crowds all over the world to address
needs in specific locations.
Our @WalmartLabs team uses
crowdsourcing all the time. The Get on the Shelf program
encourages creative minds to submit product ideas, helping the team tap into
this audience to uncover the next big items to hit Walmart’s shelves. They rely
on crowdsourcing to test enhancements to walmart.com, help classify products
correctly and more. These are just a few ways the team uses people across the
globe in their everyday work.
Looking ahead, I see crowdsourcing
becoming an even bigger part of the work we do @WalmartLabs and in retail. As
eCommerce software becomes more complex and global, we will rely even more on
the crowd to help us with things like product classification in multiple
markets. For instance, we’ll need crowds in Europe to help us find or validate EAN
numbers rather than UPC’s that we use in the U.S.
I believe crowdsourcing is a better way
of getting things done. By using the many hands – and knowledge – of the crowd,
we can work faster and smarter to benefit customers everywhere. Learn more
about crowdsourcing and the other work we do @WalmartLabs on our website.
