verticalfocus
BY DAVID MALONEY, SENIOR EDITOR
RETAIL
Home Depot’s
For three decades,
the world’s largest
home improvement
chain operated
without anything
resembling a
conventional
distribution network.
Now it’s scrambling
to turn that
fixer-upper system
into a showplace.
supply chain
remodel
THE REMARKABLE STORY OF THE HOME DEPOT HAS MANY CHAPTERS.
But supply chain excellence never made the book.
For its first 30 years, a period in which the company set all kinds of retail growth
records, the Atlanta-based home improvement giant virtually ignored its supply
chain—a fact even its top supply chain executive freely acknowledges. “Supply chain
had not been the focus of the company for many years,” says Mark Holifield, who
joined Home Depot as senior vice president of supply chain in 2006. “Management
instead had [its] focus on growing its stores.”
Holifield defends the company’s emphasis on expansion as right for the time,
which is hard to argue with given the retailer’s history of double- and even triple-digit annual growth. But by the time he arrived at Big Orange, times—and market
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE HOME DEPOT
