Inventory Problem Is Hard To Solve. Bosideng 3000 Stores Can Give You The Answer.

The staff of headquarters data management big data center light up a few mouse, and the information of the more than 3000 stores in the whole country is like a detailed operational map, which is presented in front of the director of Bosideng information GUI Yilong.

"Now, if I want to see which one, I can see which one."

He chose a store in his home town of Changsha.

The data displayed on the page show that the store sold more than 70 thousand yuan on the previous day, and accumulated more than 20 thousand yuan in sales on that day. A well selling black down jacket has sold 13 items in the past 7 days, and there are 11 items in stock.

"It's not enough to sell for a week."

Gui Yilong whispered.

As if to verify this, he knocked down the number and color of the best - selling down jacket on the keyboard. The stock of all the Changsha stores was quick at a glance: the down clothes did sell well, and some of the stores had already broken out.

But he was not worried about it.

"The automatic replenishment system will fill them up."

He turned off the page and left the rest of the work to the system. "The automatic replenishment system gathered all the stores' sales and inventory data every evening, combined with the regional warehouse data, and replenished the stores automatically according to the replenishment logic."

A vicious circle of backlogs and backlogs.

As the chief information officer of Bosideng, Gui Yilong did not always get such a good start from the beginning.

This famous brand, which has a history of 40 years and has a main down jacket, has been established from 11 farmers and 8 sewing machines. The Hong Kong stock listed companies with a market value of HK $about 6000000000 can not be described as brilliant. But after the rapid development of the last ten years, Bosideng is also faced with many severe challenges like most traditional apparel industry brands.

"Doing retail is a tough job but it has to be done."

Gui Yilong sighed with emotion.

With more and more market supply and fierce competition, the increase in rents and human costs of the stores is amazing. These are obvious difficulties.

At the same time, the cost of electricity supplier flow is also rising. Simply eating Internet dividends has not been able to work. "This is a competition for brand enterprises. At the same time, they are competing for the online and offline service consumers."

The era of brutal growth of channels has passed, and the era of consumer sovereignty is coming quietly. In this new competition, "change" is not enough to win.

This is not only the judgment of Bosideng, but also the common judgement of many traditional industry brands.

The change of business model was first put on the agenda. An unconfirmed data showed that the proportion of XTEP's direct operation increased from 10% two or three years ago to 55% now, and the proportion of Anta's direct operation has now reached 90%.

In fact, since 2013, Bosideng has begun to increase the proportion of Direct stores.

"The traditional agency distribution mode is not suitable for enterprise development because it is too slow to respond to consumer feedback or supply chain system."

"Slow" will bring many problems. The most important thing is inventory.

Also in the winter of 2013, the most popular season of down jacket sales, Bosideng encountered a "strange" shortage of goods: on the one hand, stores were out of stock, and on the other hand there were many stores.

It sounds incredible.

Since there is stock, why is it still out of stock?

This is because for a brand shop with more than 3000 stores, "it is very difficult to predict where and where to move the goods accurately."

Gui Yilong referred to this shortage as a "structural shortage". The goods were there, but they did not appear at the right time in the places where the consumers needed them. They could not be sold where there was enough supply, but others could not buy them.

High inventory "frozen" has kept the cash flow of enterprises, and the high shortage has seriously affected the user experience.

In fact, the whole garment industry has been trapped in such a paradox. The chief culprit is the "futures" business in this industry.

The new product of each season will be fixed 8-9 months before the listing, and the distributor will book the goods 4-6 months ahead of schedule.

But after half a year, are these styles over?

How is the weather this year? Does the market require thinner clothes or thicker ones?

No one knows.

But there are things that can help people predict and prepare ahead, that is data.

Five months to set up a retail cloud platform

Dealing with data is Gui Yilong's old line.

Before entering Boston, he worked in an enterprise software management company for ten years.

Boston used the database of Oracle (oracle bone inscription), and the retail system adopted the structure of periodically updating data synchronously by off-line client and background server.

This kind of work is like the client of every store regularly reporting to the backstage server, and this "report" is not instantaneous. After a store is out of stock, the background server may have to wait for a long time to realize it. It is too late to arrange the replenishment of goods.

Moreover, off-line data can only be used for post hoc analysis. It is very difficult to analyze and predict online, and can not serve consumers online and offline.

The operation efficiency and feedback mechanism of the whole system need to be improved urgently. "We need to know the market demand in time and change the production mode according to the demand."

In 2015, GUI Yilong and the team began to consider the establishment of a new retail system structure.

A very casual chance, they saw a circle of friends who introduced the enterprise middleware. The publishers were their acquaintances, who worked in Ali cloud enterprise Internet architecture department. They solved the problem of Oracle database carton five or six years ago.

At that time, architects in Bosideng IT team had spent more than half a year researching open source database and made some progress. But enterprise middleware has attracted more interest from Gui Yilong. In order to further understand what middleware can do, he personally went to Ali with development, Yun Wei and architect.

"Decisions are done quickly."

Bosideng IT Department staff recalled that because the system was born out of Ali's own business, it has undergone many years of practical tests, including the extremely rigorous double 11 exams. "At that time, since Ali was able to use it, our problems should also be solved."

According to Zhao Jiehui, general manager of the business department of aliyun enterprise, "let the traditional industry have the ability of Internet Co to go to the cloud".

Ali cloud enterprise Internet architecture wants to do is to use Ali's own, tested system architecture, quickly copied to other enterprises, so that these enterprises also have the ability of Internet Co.

Bosideng made a decision to "go to the clouds".

The result of cooperation between Bosideng and Ali cloud is to make use of enterprise Internet architecture technology as a "retail cloud platform".

This decision was made in early 2016. In just 5 months, GUI Yilong sits in his office and can monitor the inventory and sales data of more than 3000 stores in real time.

This global function relies on the "inventory center" on the retail cloud platform. The "inventory center" integrates inventory data stored in warehouses and stores scattered around the country, as well as online inventory data that are cut off under the line.

"You don't need to check data in every system anymore. You can see it all at any time."

"Inventory center" is an integral part of "Zhongtai" created by Ali Yun for Bosideng.

According to Ali cloud Internet middleware "thick platform, thin application" concept, the platform was built very "thick", in addition to the stock center, it also includes the global shared user center, trading center and order center.

That is to say, people, goods and trading information in the entire paction chain are converged into an instant dynamic "pool", and the "water resources" in the pool can be used for business modules and business processes at the upper level at any time.

With the automatic replenishment system based on the stock center, Bosideng boldly shifted the inventory back to the dealer warehouse in the pilot area, and automatically replenished the dealer stores and direct stores.

If there is a shortage of a certain color product in a store, submit a full channel order and payment on the Xiang Yun platform. The platform will automatically find the most suitable inventory party, inform them of the quick delivery, then deduct the available stock of the inventory, calculate and distribute the performance.

See the true chapter under the final examination

Boston's retail cloud platform was launched in mid 2016, and the first big exam it faced was double 11 this year.

Double 11, in order to pull new, Bosideng planned a "shouting red envelope" activities, "shouting" red packets of real gold and silver into WeChat wallet, and even do not force consumers to use the money to buy Bosideng products.

"It's advertising cost."

Gui Yilong said that in the current high cost of electricity supplier flow, the new package "new cost is much lower than the electricity supplier."

The publicity shop was out, the money was ready, the red envelope was punctually opened and robbed, and the first minute was all right. Then, the system got stuck.

"There are more than 20000 people in the first minute, and the front desk only has two servers."

If a physical store has such a large crowd, I'm afraid I have to queue up outside the shop, but on the Internet, tens of thousands of concurrent visits are likely to occur at any time.

What saved the situation is the new online retail cloud platform. The IT department monitors the shortage of resources through the cloud platform system, and immediately adds resources to complete the deployment of more than 10 cloud servers' hardware and software in half an hour.

"Such activities can not be carried out frequently."

Gui Yilong recalled that this activity was still a bit of a lingering fear. "But it turned out to be a test of our system. At least so many people visited the system at the same time."

In this year's double 11 business peak hours, cloud platform withstood the test of 18 thousand visits per second.

The "middle stage" of the enterprise Internet architecture is like a soft and resilient cloud, which will take the huge flow pressure to be invisible.

Let IT departments change from money to making money

Today, the retail cloud platform has brought many visible results to Bosideng: the intelligent replenishment system of the inventory center has effectively reduced the shortage loss by 21%, and the sales rate has increased by 10% over the same period last year. The member center has helped establish a member community and a member club to achieve an interactive activity with the 5 million members, so that the membership repurchase rate reaches over 20%.

But for GUI Yilong and his team, what is more important is that this platform has improved the combat effectiveness of the entire IT team. "Before, the IT department is a spending department, in addition to operation and maintenance, it is to apply for new servers."

Now, with the help of new energy and new technology, this platform has improved business synergy and operational efficiency, and has also helped the brand enhance its profitability. It has made the IT sector the hub of "making money".

For many old enterprises, especially the manufacturing industry, the new retail business will face more challenges than the new ones.

"Up cloud" is the only way.

Gui Yilong said, this kind of IT structure level innovation, the effect is not immediate, "more like using Chinese medicine to help enterprises do the overall conditioning, takes a longer time, but this is to help enterprises consolidate the foundation, and turn the power of data into the power of enterprise gear rotation."

The traditional retail industry is still a long way to go, but in any case, he and Bosideng have taken the first step.