Wal-Mart accounts for more than 10 percent of America's productivity growth over the past decade. One way it accomplishes this is by enabling its suppliers to possess deep intelligence on how products move in its stores.

The company's partnership with Procter and Gamble has proved particularly powerful in this regard. As Paul Solmon's recent piece on the News Hour discusses, the sharing of store-based scanning data enables suppliers such as P&G to monitor each sale and keep shelves stocked in a precise way.

P&G's Mike Graen explains that he sets up in "Vendorville," a satellite office near Wal-Mart's headquarters, to "make sure that orders that we get from Wal-Mart are coming in seamlessly, they're flowing directly to our plant in an automated fashion; we're turning around and filling those trucks and getting into the Wal-Mart store shelves as quickly as possible."

Ultimately, such practices -- known as "vendor managed inventory" -- enable Wal-Mart people to dramatically reduce back office work such as ordering inventory. "They spend more time out here with the customers on the floor," says Linda Dillman, Wal-Mart's chief information officer. "As a result, that brings more customers into our stores. They buy more, and it just continues."