GSSC Series: JD Empowers Industries Through Supply Chain Solutions

Posted on by Hui Zhang

by Hui Zhang

JD has helped the automotive and FMCG（fast moving consuming goods) industry improve efficiency through supply chain solutions, said Zhenhui Wang, CEO of JD Logistics, at the 2020 Global Smart Logistics Summit (GSSC) on Oct. 22.

The automotive industry is a complex industry with a long and multi-linked supply chain. The process of making a car which consists of tens of thousands of parts and components usually involves hundreds of suppliers, resulting in opaque information, inefficient supply chains, and excess inventory.

Relying on its strong supply chain capabilities, JD Logistics helped to improve the supply chain efficiency of a renowned domestic auto manufacturer. In order to do this, JD Logistics integrated different data into the auto manufacturer’s order distribution platform so as to solve the problem of upstream and downstream information fragmentation.

Additionally, JD Logistics incorporated capabilities such as intelligent inventory forecasting and enabling accurate replenishment recommendations to help the enterprise significantly reduce overall fulfillment costs and inventory by 30%, and increase the order fulfillment rate by 10%.

“We’re opening our technology to help different industries improve efficiency by utilizing technology to reduce cost and improve consumer experiences,” said Wenming Zhe, chief architect and head of logistics R&D at JD Logistics. “JD Logistics is offering strong technical support for various of industries and working together with them to improve people’s lives with technology.”

Wang noted that the industrial park of a FMCG enterprise usually covers a large area with many goods, personnel and vehicles working in the park. In the past, the management of such an industrial park has been a traditional manual management mode, with the scheduling of personnel, vehicles and goods relying on the experience of the park manager, and the transfer of information among different sections relying on printed or written documents. This piecemeal approach inevitably brought about problems such as low management efficiency, chaotic vehicle deployment, and more.

Now, JD Logistics has leveraged its technology such 5G, IoT and blockchain, which has been widely applied at JD’s Asia No. 1 Warehouse in Beijing, to help an FMCG enterprise in making their industrial park intelligent.

JD’s use of 5G in the park enabled the FMCG enterprise to dramatically increase the efficiency of its IoT fulfilment capacities on a large scale, facilitating instantaneous communication between human employees and smart machines, while enabling holistic monitoring of the site’s operations. The technology also enables real-time monitoring of location and routes for forklifts and pallets, and provides preemptive alerts if something abnormal arises.

E-signature chain is another technology that JD Logistics provided to the FMCG company. The E-signature chain utilized blockchain and digital signature technology to break through the traditional paper model, by implementing digital operations in order to help the company avoid inefficiency and wasted cost. The new system also radically improves the pain point of complicated document review and endless account settlement, ensuring that business transactions are secure and properly regulated.

The technology transformation provided by JD Logistics has fully automated the FMCG’s industrial park, saving 60% of labor costs and 50% of document management costs for the park.

“We leave complexity and difficulties to ourselves and simplicity and convenience to customers,” said Wang. “Through simple and optimized logistics technology products, we tackle complicated problems throughout the supply chains of different industries while improving circulation efficiency.”

 

(zhanghui36@jd.com)

GSSC Series: JD’s Smart Cloud Warehouse Project Helps Boost Local Industrial Economy

Posted on by Ling Cao

by Ling Cao

As some of China’s lower tier counties and districts embrace e-commerce, JD has leveraged its capabilities in supply chain to help them realize an integrated and efficient fulfillment process. By cooperating with JD’s Smart Cloud Warehouse project, Pingyi county has set an example for other counties in Shandong province in this field.

JD has helped Pingyi build a smart cloud warehouse system for local enterprises that extends across more than 40,000 square meters, featuring automatic storage, sorting, and recording. The project uses four self-developed technological products of JDL, namely: AS/RS (Automated Storage and Retrieval System), Tianlang shuttle system, Dilang AGV and cross-belt sorter. In addition to these hardware technologies, software management systems such as CLPS, WMS, TMS, and WCS will be widely used to realize automation and other intelligent processes.

Pingyi is setting an example for other counties which also want to help their local enterprises transition to ecommerce, but may currently face challenges on the logistics side from non-standard fulfillment infrastructures in their districts.

After partnering with JD’s Smart Cloud Warehouse project, Pingyi’s warehouse for local enterprises is significantly more efficient. In particular, the automatic storage system allows a storage capacity of 11,000 cubic meters. As a result, the warehouse can serve both 2B and 2C businesses. Once the goods arrive, the staff can start selection, achieving a goods-to-person model with 100,000 orders processed each day. Local enterprises can also choose to take advantage of JD Logistics’ last mile delivery services, making the process even more efficient.

Zhenhui Wang, CEO of JD Logistics said at the 2020 Global Smart Supply Chain Summit held virtually today, “The Pingyi Smart Cloud Warehouse is a benchmark project of smart cloud warehouses for products’ places of origin. In the future, we will copy the successful story of Pingyi Smart Cloud Warehouse to more industry belts. Our wish is to empower local communities by a smart supply chain system and help the local economy take off.”

Officially launched in December 2017, the JD Cloud Warehouse project aims to help partners upgrade existing warehouse management systems. Partners can also benefit from co-branding with JD, as well as have the option to use JD’s ultra-efficient delivery service, with products marked as “Delivered by JD Logistics” on JD’s e-commerce website to provide customers with peace of mind. The program aims to achieve full coverage of all districts and counties across the country within three years.

Wang added, “We manage low-frequency products in a centralized manner, deploy warehouses of high-frequency products closer to customers, and deliver goods from their places of origin regardless of the scale of the goods. In industries such as FMCG(fast-moving consumer goods), electronics, energy, industrial products, and automobiles, we will empower the industries through supply chain solutions to improve efficiency.”

 

(ling.cao@jd.com)

JD Accounts for a Quarter of Home Appliance Sales in China from Jan to Sept 2020

Posted on by Rachel Liu

by Rachel Liu

In the first three quarters of 2020, China’s home appliance market both online and offline totaled RMB 597.2 billion yuan, of which JD took 26.97% market share , according to a report released by the China Center for Information Industry Development (CCID Group) on October 19th.

COVID-19 has spurred the growth of China’s online market, as customers stayed indoors for most of the time earlier this year. Despite the influx of new online consumers, JD was able to ensure product supply and provide steady services for customers.

JD has also strengthened its offline presence, providing customers with integrated omnichannel services. As of July 7th, the number of JD Home Appliance stores has surpassed 15000, covering over 25000 townships and over 600,000 villages across China. In August, JD announced that it will make 5STAR a wholly-owned subsidiary to strengthen omnichannel presence. Last November, JD opened its first JD ESPACE store in Chongqing, a 50,000 square meter offline experience store for electronic products. This year, JD opened several home appliance flagship stores in cities including Ma’anshan and  Bengbu in Anhui province, Jiaozuo in Henan, Deyang in Sichuan, Nanjing in Jiangsu and Kunming in Yunnan.

In these stores, customers can experience the products first hand, by washing their clothes in the washing machines, for example, or playing video games using the gaming TVs. JD also deepened its partnership with Gome to jointly purchase electronics products from brands.

During this Singles Day Grand Promotion, JD will provide attractive benefits for home appliance customers, such as over 100,000 best sellers and over 10 million small kitchen home appliances to further expand JD’s competitive advantages in the home appliance industry.

 

(liuchang61@jd.com)

GSSC Series: JD Announces World’s First Level-4 Autonomous Delivery Vehicle Application at Scale

Posted on by Yuchuan Wang

by Yuchuan Wang

At Global Smart Supply Chain Summit held by JD Logistics on October 22nd, Zhenhui Wang, CEO of JD Logistics, announced that a city-level autonomous delivery robot project is being operated on a daily basis in Changshu, Jiangsu province, a top 5 county-level city by GDP in China. JD plans to put 100 autonomous delivery robots into operations in the city by the end of this year to facilitate Changshu in building smart city.

The robot drives itself, unsupervised, from JD’s delivery station loaded with parcels and plans its own route based on the parcels’ addresses. It will send messages or phone calls to recipients with a verification code so that they can pick up their packages. It waits a certain amount of time at every stop, such as a residential compound or an office building, before moving on to the next stop.

JD plans to put 100 autonomous delivery robots into operations in the city by the end of this year to facilitate Changshu in building smart city.

According to the State Post Bureau of China, as of October 18th, China has delivered over 60 billion packages in 2020. Thirty-eight days prior, the number was only 50 billion. Nearly 50% of couriers in China work 10 to 12 hours a day. As the delivery amount skyrockets, automated solutions are considered a viable way to ease the stress of both the industry and couriers.

JD debuted its very first autonomous delivery robot in September 2016. After years of research and iterations, JD Logistics revealed its 4.0 robot last year and became the world’s first company to apply Level-4 autonomous driving technology on public roads without any human interaction. In February this year, this robot was put into use in Wuhan, the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak in China, to ensure contactless delivery from delivery station to hospitals and residential compounds. During its 107-day deployment, the robot traveled over 6,800 kilometers and delivered more than 13,000 packages.

JD debuted its very first autonomous delivery robot in September 2016.

The core of JD’s autonomous delivery robots is the autonomous driving system developed in-house and its arithmetic logic unit which has lowered the power consumption to 10% of the industry average, and is equivalent to that of a standard lightbulb.

JD also researched a cloud simulation platform which has accumulated the historical operations data and is able to discern how the robot should behave in numerous traffic scenarios which largely raises the vehicle’s ability to drive safely on open roads.

In addition, JD also launched a delivery robot “adoption plan”. In Changshu, couriers can apply to adopt the delivery robots to facilitate their work. “We expect JD’s delivery robots to largely improve couriers’ working efficiency and enable them to have more time to provide more caring and customized services to consumers, transforming their job from operations to management,” said Qi Kong, Chief Scientist and head of Autonomous Driving at JD Logistics.

Jie Wang is a courier at JD’s Dongnan delivery station in Changshu. He adopted a delivery robot in August. He said that by employing the robot for part of his deliveries his monthly salary increased by over 30% in September alone. “It saved me plenty of time for delivery so that I am now able to put more of my attention on parcel collection,” said Wang.

Jie Wang, JD courier

Jie Wang, JD courier

“We will continue to increase the investment in logistics technology and we will also make logistics technologies available to the general public, facilitating social infrastructure upgrades,” said Zhenhui Wang, CEO of JD Logistics. “In terms of the application of technology, more than 100,000 robots will join our family in the next five years, greatly enhancing the customer experience and alleviating the workloads of our front-line brothers and sisters.”

 

(yuchuan.wang@jd.com)

JDer Lab #8 with Jeff Chai: Embracing Changes and Challenges

Posted on by Kelly Dawson

by Kelly Dawson

JD.com’s more than 280,000 employees range from warehouse workers to nation-renowned doctors, with a wide range of backgrounds and areas of expertise. In the next installment of our JDer Lab series, we speak to Jeff Chai, a management trainee in JD’s strategy division.

 

When Chai graduated from an American university in 2017 with a master’s degree in applied analytics, most of his peers chose to pursue finance or investment banking. But he wanted a different path, one that explored new territory and innovation in an evolving industry. Later that year, he joined JD’s headquarters in Beijing.

“I chose JD because I wanted to challenge myself, and because I wanted to do something different,” he said. “I got what I wanted at JD.”

In his time at China’s largest retailer, Chai has tackled many challenges, but 2020 has been a particularly meaningful year. As COVID-19 has accelerated around the world, JD has participated in various initiatives to support virus-fighting efforts.

“We spent almost 3 weeks, day and night, to generate a final solution to send masks from China to Europe and Latin-America to help them fight COVID-19,” Chai recalled. “Every person’s work, every small challenge was tough to overcome, but with passion and responsibility. I think everyone is proud of what JD did. I think this is how a company shows its social responsibility.”

For Chai, the emotion and pride of realizing the masks had successfully arrived in Europe, and were in the hands of people who could now face the virus safely, contributed to his best day so far at JD.

There have been other highs too, but one thing has remained constant: change. “Here at JD, everyone is used to changes, not only from the inside, but also from the outside world. The world is changing fast, so we have to embrace change.”

In his experience, some companies don’t encourage evolution, or their employees don’t have the confidence to adapt to evolving circumstances. But at JD, those changes are expected. JDers don’t fear change because they are aiming to be pioneers in the industry, Chai said.

This quality defines his colleagues, Chai said—along with intelligence, passion and professionalism. In his first year at JD, his small team did not have quantified KPIs, but every member of the group pushed above and beyond to achieve their goals. They didn’t want to settle for being “working machines” simply going through the motions, he said.

“They wanted to push themselves,” Chai said. “They hoped to do better, not just good. Those are JDers.”

(kellydawson@jd.com)

 

Chinese Consumers Tagged JD for Three Keywords: “Trustworthy”, “High-End” and “Highly Efficient”

Posted on by Vivian Yang

by Vivian Yang

JD.com is rated as the most trustworthy e-commerce brand, according to a survey of Chinese consumers conducted by iResearch consulting firm. The ranking was released on October 20th as part of iResearch’s online consumption insights report, which aims to assess brand image among Chinese e-commerce platforms and to better understand the subtle relationship between consumers and these platforms.

The report indicated that 56.56% of respondents tagged JD.com with the keyword of “trustworthy”, which is a much higher rating than other platforms. The other two highest rated keywords for JD.com by consumers are “high-end” and “highly efficient”. This feedback is in line with JD’s long-term commitment to product authenticity and quality, as well as fast delivery and premier after-sales services.

The survey also found that the most popular product categories during this year’s Single’s Day shopping festival will likely be general merchandise and apparel. To encourage consumers to buy things more thoughtfully during the shopping extravaganza, JD will further enhance its services in providing helpful and timely support in the whole shopping process, in order to meet customers’ diversified demands and live up to their trust.

 

(vivian.yang@jd.com)

Nielsen: JD is Consumers’ First Choice for 3C Products In Singles Day Promotion

Posted on by Yuchuan Wang

by Robin Luo

Based on projections by the data analysis firm Nielsen, JD is expected to be the first choice of consumers buying 3C products (mostly computer, consumer electronics, and communication products) in this year’s Singles Day promotion.

As the annual shopping festival nears, consumers are starting to plan what they want to buy. 3C products are among their top choices. The Nielsen report reveals that although the 3C product market has taken a hit from the pandemic in 2020 H1, there are signs of a gradual recovery since the second quarter.

Home electrics won the favor of more consumers on JD, gaining a 28.9% year-on-year increase in market share.

Why is JD standing out in the crowded 3C products market? The reason is its firm and lasting commitment in promoting better, more innovative services to consumers, analysts said. Additionally, contributing factors to JD’s success in this area are the integration of an omnichannel retail ecosystem, acceleration of digital processes and pushing forward the sinking market strategy, which is a shift toward lower tier markets.  

The report also shows that consumers have now raised their standards for a pleasant buying experience. Besides the basic elements of brand and quality, they also focus on the service they get. To some extent, service has become a new core value of e-commerce.

In 2020, JD has remained in close cooperation with 3C makers, and built a service system that covers the entire sales process. The shopping experience of consumers has been greatly boosted with new features such as one-hour delivery, 30-day insurance, 30-day easy refund and more. These measures have helped JD remain a top choice of consumers in the 3C category, resulting in a leading share of the market.

(press@jd.com)

JD Super Boosts Development of Tea Industry

Posted on by Rachel Liu

by Rachel Liu

JD Super, JD’s online supermarket, has formed a tea industry alliance with the local government of Anxi, Fujian province and leading tea brand Bamatea (八马茶业). Anxi is the origin place of Tieguanyin tea, one of the most popular teas in China. Through this partnership, JD will leverage its big data platform to provide digital support for the transformation of the local tea industry. The three sides will also work together to build higher standards and a better environment for the tea industry.

Bamatea will leverage JD’s omnichannel ability by working with JD Daojia, SEVENFRESH, Yihaodian to achieve one-hour delivery in first to fourth tier cities, providing on demand service for customers.

JD Super will provide Bamatea with digitalized solutions and insights on customer profiles and shopping habits, in order to help the firm improve its service and products. In the next five years, Bamatea and JD will also co-build smart warehouses in mid-China to serve thousands of the tea brand’s offline stores.

“Tea is a very important category for JD Super, and it’s an important part of Chinese traditional culture,” said Xiaojun Wang, head of packaged food at JD Super. “As the leading supermarket in China both online and offline, we want to work more closely with our partners to achieve better growth. I believe under the partnership with Bamatea and Anxi government, the sales of Tieguanyin tea on JD will see another round of growth, and we can bring more tasty and healthy tea to our customers.”

JD Super and Bamatea have been partners since 2012. As of 2019, annual sales of Bamatea on JD Super have increased by 60 times. As of September 2020, customers who have become Bamatea’s members on JD have reached 1.05 million. JD Super is one of the fastest growing channels for Bamatea.

 

(liuchang61@jd.com)