Nowadays, the integration of chains and networks is becoming the development direction of the integration of digital and real industries in more and more industries. The integrated supply chain that fully integrates advanced digital technologies will give full play to its unique

Nowadays, the integration of chains and networks is becoming the development direction of the integration of digital and real industries in more and more industries. The integrated supply chain that fully integrates advanced digital technologies will give full play to its unique value in the process of helping the development of the real economy and provide solid support for the steady and long-term development of China's economy.

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Around seven o'clock in the morning, Feihe Harbin Central Ware, which is more than 24,000 square meters, was empty. Amid the roar of the machine operating all night, Cao Linzhong walked into the gate of the central warehouse and reviewed the on-site operation of the previous day on the one-stop monitoring screen built by JD Logistics. A 24-meter-high stacker stands in the central warehouse, and the circular shuttle truck weaves it into an orderly net, where the land wolf transport robot accurately picks up, dismantles and delivers goods. Cao Linzhong needs to record the decision information feedback from the monitoring large screen, find out where the supply chain was not running smoothly the day before, and then decide how to optimize the process today.

Cao Linzhong is 42 years old and has been engaged in dairy supply chain for nearly fourteen years. He feels that his work has never been as efficient as it is now. Logistics, efficiency, and personnel, things that used to occupy the focus of his work are now replaced by automation equipment and digital computing. There are more than 30 people in the Central Warehouse Office, responsible for operations, technology, logistics, warehousing, etc. There are not many people, but through digital supply chains and logistics infrastructure, the huge central warehouse can still maintain an efficient operation speed every day.

In June this year, Feihe Dairy’s intelligent warehousing project located in Harbin Intelligent Industrial Park was officially delivered, marking the official opening of Feihe’s modern national central logistics distribution center. In Cao Linzhong's view, behind the Harbin Central Warehouse established in cooperation with JD Logistics is a new transformation in the dairy supply chain.

Fresh and Quality Safety

In 2004, 24-year-old Cao Linzhong entered the dairy industry after graduation and worked in a dairy company. At that time, Cao Linzhong was responsible for the sales of yogurt products. He remembered that yogurt was an emerging consumer product at that time, but during the marketing process, the team repeatedly changed its marketing methods, but the sales of yogurt always stagnated.

Cao Linzhong realized that there is a close connection between the marketing end and the supply chain end of the dairy industry. Procurement, supermarket entrance, store price negotiations, Cao Linzhong gradually discovered that most of the work of dairy procurement and marketing is related to logistics: after negotiation of a truck of goods, or even a business, he must dominate the back-end delivery and pick-up. "Some problems in the supply chain have brought some difficulties to the sales policies on the marketing side. It feels very difficult to simply make efforts on the marketing side." After

, after four years of dairy sales, Cao Linzhong turned to the logistics side and was responsible for managing the transportation fleet. "There was no such thing as supply chain at that time. We called fleet management, which is a complex, which manages vehicles and warehouses."

Feihe Harbin Central Warehouse Operation Director Cao Linzhong

The most important thing about yogurt is freshness. From the raw materials at the front end of yogurt, to production and transportation, to the consumer's dining table, the timeliness required were very urgent. Cao Linzhong gradually realized that under the current market and technology situation at that time, the entire industry was far from reaching the high timeliness required by the yogurt supply chain.

In 2008, in order to seek better development, Cao Linzhong chose to join Feihe Group and engage in milk powder logistics management.

Cao Linzhong said that the two key points of the entire dairy supply chain are the freshness of the products and the quality and safety of the quality, which is also the long-term pain point of the dairy industry. At that time, Feihe Logistics was relatively traditional. After production from the factory, the complete vehicle was shipped to several warehouses across the country, and then shipped to dealers across the country through these warehouses.

In actual operation, Cao Linzhong’s biggest feeling is that each business node is “doing its own affairs”. Because each has its own demands, many problems often arise in mutual coordination. The inventory layout is also too scattered - due to the diversified consumption, the warehouses each have independent inventory of different products, which leads to relatively scattered inventory, which cannot efficiently gather inventory together, nor can it radiate to the whole country."Only by relying on express delivery or express delivery, it often forms accumulation and cannot reach the consumer side in time, which will affect the fresh problems of dairy products."

In addition, due to the need to rely on manual handling, loading and unloading, there are many factors that are subject to control. Cao Linzhong said that the labor costs in Southeast, East China and South China are high, and they have invested a lot of management energy. "But problems still appear continuously, with low efficiency and high costs."

raced against time

Cao Linzhong remembered that around 2014, he became the person in charge of Feihe's national logistics and warehousing, and Feihe's sales were growing rapidly at that time. During the Spring Festival travel rush, problems occurred in the Huazhong Warehouse in Zhengzhou: during the Spring Festival travel rush, the transportation manpower dropped sharply, and a large amount of freight could not be transported out. "It is almost impossible to find someone to ship goods during the Spring Festival travel rush. However, there is demand on the consumer side. All marketing activities require the support of the logistics backend. The goods must be delivered to the store before the store can do marketing. However, after searching for a few times, no one can find people. No matter how much money it costs, no one is willing to do it." The demand on the consumer side of

has increased, and Cao Linzhong has tried all his strength in logistics, but he cannot complete the transportation. Cao Linzhong remembers that just transporting more than 3,000 boxes of goods from Zhengzhou to more than 20 customers in nearby cities, this is usually not possible during the Spring Festival travel rush. After all the products are finally sold, the competition has already begun.

"This end has stimulated us deeply. The supply chain problem has had a substantial impact on the marketing end. After all, consumer demand does not wait for anyone."

Since then, Feihe began to try various methods to improve the efficiency of the supply chain end and race against time.

is first of all, a problem with warehouse network layout. Cao Linzhong said that the dairy industry has its own unique industry characteristics, and the core of warehouse network layout is to solve the problem of where to store inventory. He explained that for example, Feihe Dairy's golden milk source belt is 47 degrees north latitude, such as Qiqihar and other places. Feihe builds factories around these locations and produces milk powder that is more suitable for Chinese babies' physique based on high-quality milk sources. "Because of the special geographical location, our warehouse network layout must be scientific. In terms of logistics, Feihe has also tried various logistics mode changes. It has been relatively controllable in terms of timeliness, distribution and quality and safety, but it has solved the problem of delivery quality and speed, but it still cannot solve the freshness problem. In order to ensure the timeliness of order delivery, the safety inventory coefficient of each warehouse has been increased, resulting in the problem of freshness being unable to be solved for a long time.

The safety of dairy products is the most concerned issue for consumers, and it has also become a pain point that Feihe urgently needs to solve in logistics. Cao Linzhong said that due to scattered orders, it is often used for LTL logistics or dedicated market distribution, and the logistics cannot be monitored in real time, and the risk of distribution is very high. "For example, during the delivery process, we have no way to know what kind of food we put together, which leads to a sudden increase in safety risks. "

Cao Linzhong felt that in the background at that time, the entire team was waiting passively. "Waiting for the problem to arise before solving it. Either transfer goods from each warehouse, or speed up production from the production side. If you only deal with problems, you will do things that you realize later, and your reaction speed will slow down. "

" The demand from the consumer side forces our supply chain to be continuously upgraded, such as how to connect the logistics side? How to configure warehouse inventory? How to make up for a product to the warehouse? When doing these things, it is always in scattered, and this is the current situation at that time. "Cao Linzhong said.

" Back to the core root cause, it only changes in the form of logistics shipment. It seems that it can solve the problem of rapid logistics delivery and product safety problems, but it only solves the single-point problem, but the fresh problem cannot be solved. Supply chain change must be to find a more balanced point between theory and practice. "In Cao Linzhong's view, the most core problem behind it is the lack of an efficient and collaborative supply chain.

Changes in the supply chain end

and JD Logistics have become an important turning point in the upgrade of Feihe Dairy's supply chain.

Cao Linzhong remembers that the initial cooperation with JD Logistics was mainly to solve logistics problems.During the cooperation process, Cao Linzhong gradually discovered that JD Logistics' management concept, warehouse network layout and data prediction and analysis capabilities are exactly in line with Feihe's demands on the supply chain and logistics side. "We don't need to solve the problem in a single point. What we need more is how to solve the problem as a whole. JD Logistics' past experience can meet our needs."

"JD Logistics has deployed so many warehouses across the country. Where is its inventory placed? How do we manage so many SKUs (commodity types)? What we value is its data management level. With such a large operating volume, although there are many employees, how are they transported out specifically? How to respond to holiday demands? These are supply chain problems that we need to solve urgently." Cao Linzhong said.

Based on the trust and expectation of early cooperation with JD Logistics business, Feihe's National Central Logistics Distribution Center project selected and cooperated with JD Logistics to jointly establish Harbin Central Warehouse. After cooperating with JD Logistics, the first thing we did was to jointly establish a national central logistics distribution center in Harbin with JD Logistics - Harbin Central Warehouse. "Because our factories are all in the Northeast, how to transport goods from various counties in the Northeast to the south is the inevitable bottleneck of leaving Shanhai. How to concentrate goods and exit customs is the problem we need to solve. Cao Linzhong introduced that after the establishment of the Central Logistics Center, it met the national business of centralized storage and distribution of nine milk powder production bases in Feihe. At the same time, the operating efficiency in the warehouse was increased by 40%, and the cost was reduced by 25%.

Feihe gradually built a supply chain of tiered distribution: the products of all factories were concentrated in the central warehouse of Harbin, and then distributed to eight regional warehouses downstream through intelligent allocation, and connected with the dealer end. Then, the transit warehouse closest to consumers is the transit warehouse. At this point, the new warehouse layout plan is completed.

In Cao Linzhong's view, the logistics link of the central warehouse seems to have experienced it. Multi-level operation actually greatly improves the turnover rate of each warehouse; it has touched the ultimate freshness of the cargo age.

The long-standing manual handling efficiency in the past has also been greatly improved by the automated logistics system. Cao Linzhong introduced that in view of the numerous SKUs in the dairy industry and the high freshness requirements, JD.com Material Control WCS system integrates a variety of automated logistics equipment to realize the full process automation application in the warehouse, which can meet the needs of massive SKU storage and short-term high-frequency out-of-warehouse. In addition, through intelligent scheduling algorithms, the automated picking and mixed code out-of-warehouse out-of-warehouses of robotic arms have been realized, which greatly improves the efficiency of warehousing operations. "Originally, Feihe's small warehouse has delivered 1000 tons of goods in a day, and with the rapid processing capacity of the central warehouse, it can now reach an average daily processing capacity of 1,000 tons, which has increased by more than 10 times. "

In addition, by using the 3D SCADA system, the project can collect the status of the entire warehouse equipment in real time and monitor the failure and operation status of the equipment in real time, realizing one-stop monitoring and management of warehousing.

" Since its cooperation with JD Logistics, such a large automated warehouse has been built. Whether it is the level of brand effect improvement or logistics turnover efficiency, it has been greatly improved, and real results can be seen. "In the subsequent optimization of warehouse network layout, Feihe will further learn from and learn JD logistics network planning and intelligent warehousing model.

Cao Linzhong feels that for him, for more than ten years of being engaged in supply chain, what has changed the most now is that he no longer needs to spend too much energy on personnel allocation and management, but can shift the focus to the process of studying supply chain. "In terms of algorithms and automated selection, I have more support, and I don't need to worry about what to do if there are so many mistakes and differences. "

In fact, Feihe is just a microcosm of JD's "use reality to help reality". As a new type of physical enterprise, JD has its own physical genes and a large number of physical application scenarios. Therefore, in addition to understanding the dreams, expectations and desires of physical enterprises, and constantly consolidating its own physical infrastructure, it can also provide solid support to real economic partners, including infrastructure, technology, and solutions.

For Chinese dairy companies represented by Feihe, in the face of increasingly diversified consumer demand, they need to actively seek change. They choose to work with JD Logistics to start with an integrated supply chain and create a more efficient and agile logistics system. This has not only become a powerful driving force for Feihe to achieve global digital transformation and upgrading, but also achieves seamless docking of "using reality to help reality", but also provides reference for the supply chain upgrade of the entire dairy industry.

Nowadays, the integration of chains and networks is becoming the development direction of the integration of digital and real industries in more and more industries. The integrated supply chain that fully integrates advanced digital technologies will give full play to its unique value in the process of helping the development of the real economy and provide solid support for the steady and long-term development of China's economy.

text丨 Beijing News reporter Zhou Siya

editing丨Chen Xiaoshu

proofreading丨Li Lijun