Aug 27, 2021|
JD at Gartner Forum: Connecting Products, Places and People to Enable Better Fulfillment
by Ling Cao and Yang Feng
“As customers are continually shifting from a centralized platform to multi-end shopping places with increasing expectations of fulfillment capability, JD has implemented an omni-channel fulfillment model and redefined three core elements: Products, places and people,” shared Curtis Liu, president of intelligent supply chain at JD.com, during the Enterprise Supply Chain Leaders Peer Forum Asia-Pacific held by Gartner on August 24.
According to Liu, JD is building a closed loop experience including different online platforms and offline stores to provide a more convenient and better shopping experience for customers, such as online shopping, group buying, auctions, offline convenience stores and pharmacies. Customers can choose the preferred way to shop for products within JD’s ecosystem. “It is like using one membership card for every store in multiple shopping malls,” explained Liu.
Curtis Liu
As for products, JD is trying different practices to create more value to meet customers’ demand—Consumer-to-Manufacturer (C2M) is one example. By providing customer insights to manufacturers and fully supporting the whole process, from product design to sales operation, JD is able to launch more new products quickly and efficiently for both upstream and downstream stakeholders. Data shows that 40% of home appliances sold on JD.com in 2020 were produced through the C2M process, and more than 1,000 brands developed C2M products across over 900 different product categories during the year.
However, connecting the three categories of products, places, and people together requires a highly efficient fulfillment system. Liu shared, “Our intelligent fulfillment system is able to integrate and process huge amounts of different types of information simultaneously, such as order information, delivery capacity, and inventory availability, and output the fulfillment decision automatically.”
For example, during this year’s JD 618 Grand Promotion, JD’s intelligent supply chain made hundreds of thousands of decisions per day to improve the efficiency of replenishment, transfer, and fulfillment, making sure the process ran smoothly down to the last mile, even during peak times. The average time of producing fulfillment decisions can be as short as 50 milliseconds for tens of thousands of incoming orders at the same time.
“Going forward, we will focus on several areas, such as attaching services to products to produce more and better combinations; further developing our B2B business and building corresponding fulfillment capability; and extending our supply chain to upstream such as product design, raw materials supply, and manufacturing. Finally, we will also focus on both physical and digital areas,” shared Liu about the future plans.