Going Rogue at Sam’s Club

Back in mid-1998, 3 high school geeks signed up for a year-long apprenticeship in the Sam’s Club home office as a part of a business program. We were assigned to different departments and tasked with updating the system with all of the markdown and liquidations that the departmental buyers approved (people in charge of a category like sports or produce). It was long grunt work on a 10-key.

We got the approved print-outs from an excel spreadsheet and entered them into a CICS mainframe emulator. My mentor had created a VBA macro that took the excel report generated at the beginning of the week and automatically formatted the report and calculated the standard markdown/liquidations. That was pretty cool to me. I had done some programming before that mostly in full VB, but never knew of VBA in Excel. My mentor showed me about it and I read through all the code. Excel by itself is pretty powerful, and to add programmatic automations to it is awesome.

On Ramp

After spending an entire week of 10-keying in markdowns and liquidations…that switch just went off saying “this is ridiculous and should be automated.” I tried interacting with the CICS emulator via Excel VBA. It worked, but it was screen scraping. That fact didn’t really seem to be a problem since I was just simulating what I was doing anyway. So I took off, live try/fail to find all the right commands, tabs, and enter keys.

It worked out great. It took a couple days but I knew I would be done before I had to have it done manually. Plus, it didn’t hurt to run the markdown process several times to test because it just set the price. The next week I ran it live as the brand new application it was. Five days turned into five minutes. Bam, awesomeness.

Since it had been so successful, I added some extras. First, I added a step which forced the changes down to the stores immediately instead of waiting for the nightly sync. As you can imagine, another great opportunity was had as markdowns/liquidations actually happened on Monday which resulted in usable square foot turnover because stuff that was stale started moving. Second, I added a visual progress bar where a picture of a car moves across the screen.

Propagate the wealth

Now with my new found success, I did what any dev should do…share so others can benefit. My work only covered the buyer’s category that I worked with. There were plenty more. In fact, my two other friends were doing the same manual process in their category, so I went to each group starting with my friends’ to help automate their job and show them how its worked so we could develop together. They had a similar programming background as myself before starting. It worked. Very soon all categories were using it.

While many other programs were made, that one had some good times. For one, we added a picture of a cow to flash on/off the screen only sometimes at 50% completion. The cow picture was for the meat department. I was told later that it made their day as they would huddle around the person running it that week and see if the cow popped up. A neat way to make their day. In a separate occurrence, the manager of the produce department told me the program solved his employee turnover problem which was really bad. People were appreciative of our efforts and that was awesome especially for some high school/college geeks. We even got a more official or traditional recognition. For myself, I had to be excused from my high school classes so that I could present the next version of that first program to the whole home office…or so I thought. I did the presentation and it went well. At the end, I was asked to come to the front where my mentor and boss presented me with a plaque.

The Mix-Up

As it happens in many dealings with people, a miscommunication was had. The arrangement from our high school to Sam’s Club was that we would work there full time over the summer and part time over our senior year of high school. Problem was, Sam’s Club came to the table looking for 3 candidates to do a summer internship. Miscommunications and misunderstandings happen. We pushed and so did our school for the summer internship to continue into the apprenticeship and for the three of us we were pushing for permanent employment of sorts. In the end, it worked. I’m not sure what our “official” employment status was, but from what I could tell and can reflect on…it was just permanent employment. To me, that was a great recognition of the work we had done just over the summer.

Unofficial Officialness — Forming the Team

As time moved on, we still had 4 separate bosses (#4 was a person who was already at Sam’s Club when we arrived). We were given a room where the 4 of us could sit together and work together. There was one other person in that room at the time, but he moved out. All 4 of us cranked away at stuff trying to help out where we could. At that point we had already been doing the job, just bunched together to potentially improve things.

Since Sam’s Club was a part of Walmart, the general view was that Walmart’s IT provided the “IT work” for both companies. This meant that there wasn’t a dedicated group to Sam’s Club before us, except for 2 guys that were “allowed” to provide localized help desk support. It was kind of unfortunate for them as there was a time where they were trying to learn more about system administration and an accident happened as it does when learning. It was quick to be fixed by IT, but they got their toys taken away. There had been some mention in the past of a person who knew something about technology and IT moved him/her into their division. So there was an under tone to people where they believed 1) once they have someone in IT they disappear and 2) we better make as much progress as possible while we have IT readily available.

We decided we needed to come together under a name. We each aspired to be “real developers” and such, so we were eager to put on that facade as much as possible too. We eventually came up with “Sam’s Application Development.” Yes, it can be shortened to SAD…but we felt it made the most sense. It was clean and stated what we were doing. At the time Sam’s Club had just started a new part of their business where they did custom embroidery on t-shirts, hats, and such. It seemed opportune so we were one of their first customers and had shirts made for each of us.

One of the technology classes I was able to take over in Walmart was their first introduction to our new group name. As we introduced ourselves there were several people looking around at each other saying “I’ve never heard of that group” and then dismissed it since the IT was already about 2k people.

At some point, as it does, the group felt it needed more formal leadership. At the time, a part of it was thinking management…not true leadership. Myself and the guy who was already at Sam’s Club when we arrived both vied for the position. The fact is, there was no position though. We wanted to be the “leader” but we each had our own bosses and they weren’t about to say 1 of the 4 people should be the manager. This was towards the end of the group anyway, but in the end no leader was appointed even within our group.

Beginning of the End

As we continued to work, I kept coming up with areas that it would be nice to have someone that was an expert with VBA and VB integrations with the CICS emulator…and possibly better interfaces. I went from cubicle to cubicle throughout a large portion of the Walmart IT division asking people if they had any experience in that field. People were very friendly and tried to point me in the direction of people who “might” be. In the end, I was a bit disappointed and very surprised that no one I could find had experience in that field.

The third run-in with IT, and the mark of the imminent demise of Sam’s Application Development, was during an all employee meeting for the Sam’s Club home office. IT spent time improving the CICS systems and….yes…the screens were majorly reorganized. Our team’s eyes went wide open as it “would” require almost all of our programs to change. Their IT staff was congratulated and helped answer questions after the demos were over and the meeting adjourn. We swiftly went up to them and asked what seemed like the most important question, when were the changes rolling out. Of course, the Friday meeting was to announce the improvements that would be available on Monday. We explained that we had several apps that would fail immediately and would have to scramble to get them fixed to match the new process.

This became the eye opening point for IT. The manager that was present at the demo went back and had conversations within the IT division to find out what was going on. For his own right, he had a very valid concern. His team appeared to have worked hard and IT had a change control process to help prevent these kinds of issues. They didn’t delay their roll-out and Sam’s Club was met with gains for the new system improvements and losses of all the automated productivity we had provided. Roughly 1–2 weeks from that demo, the 4 of us were officially moved to Walmart IT and reported to the manager we met at the demo who was over several functions.

Thus was the creation and destruction of the rogue development group called Sam’s Application Development. As of this post, my 3 friends have had successful careers in the company. I left the company to move where my future wife lived.

A few lessons learned to share

1. Torque is commonly focused on instead of the ability to turn the outside of the wheel
2. Everyone in the organization, including high school kids, can have a positive impact on your company
3. Providing quirky points of excitement in applications can have very positive side affects
4. Common everyday tools, like Excel, are often overlooked as a solution where an “official” application is stuck in people’s minds
5. Supporting all areas of your business, even those you don’t understand at all, can be important to success

Originally published: 9/1/2013