Supply chain transformation in the 5G era: Who can become the next Apple?

When the iPhone 12 series was criticized by consumers due to problems such as ghosting, interruption, battery life, etc., Apple's stock price rose all the way to US$120.3, aspiring to be the world's most valuable capital darling of technology companies with US$1.97 trillion.

This kind of apple has nothing to do with Cook, who has been criticized for "lack of innovation."

"Jobs allowed Apple to achieve a breakthrough from 0 to 1, and Cook allowed Apple to complete the accumulation of 1 to 100." This sentence is used by many people to describe the difference between Jobs and Cook.

It may also be said that Jobs is an outstanding innovator, and Cook is a successful businessman. Jobs made Apple have amazing products, but Cook is the creator of Apple's world-class supply chain.

The optimization of the supply chain verifies the development possibilities of a company from excellence to excellence.

Comparison of inventory turnover days between Apple and other hardware companies (2020), image source: financial report

Looking at the current manufacturing industry, in fact, it is no longer a closed production workshop or factory, but a complex process of integrating online and offline multiple channels and full-scene business ecology through openness and technology. At the same time, with the continuous upgrading and transformation of the industry in the future, the competition in today's manufacturing industry is essentially a competition between one supply chain and another.

With the advent of the 5G era, the supply chain is no longer "inventory" in the traditional sense, but an "industrial cluster" formed by the combination of "material flow", "information chain" and "value chain". Core enterprises provide help for upstream and downstream partners in digital transformation, and the supply chain empowered by the Internet is helping the construction of smart hospitals and Internet hospitals across the country enter the "fast lane" of development.

Behind Apple's summit, the ultimate excavation of the potential of the supply chain

For the exploration of the supply chain, it seems that every company has its own history of blood and tears.

In the 1930s, the Ford Group’s self-manufacturing rate of auto parts was around 70%. This self-manufacturing method of the supply chain caused problems of high cost and low efficiency. With Japanese automakers entering the United States, such problems have seriously affected Ford's competitiveness.

In 2004, after Lenovo acquired IBMPC, its competitiveness was also affected by supply chain issues. The supply chain cost rose from 1% to 6% of the total cost. At the same time, the agility has been greatly reduced. A senior Lenovo executive once publicly mentioned, “The back-end often encounters a situation where the back-end is out of stock for several weeks. The first time the product arrives, the account managers of each division even Need to grab the goods."

Ford Motor Company’s supply chain management focuses on its strong logistics and information flow

If Lenovo does not solve the agility problem of its supply chain in time, the consequence may be that a certain computer has turned from a best-seller to a slow-selling, and the popularity continues to recede. At the same time, the parts produced for it are still sent to the factory continuously, becoming a dead end. The tragedy of sluggish inventory.

When there are uncertain fluctuations on the market and production sides, the agility of the supply chain is almost decisive for the efficiency of the entire process.

When talking about the role of supply chain in enterprise development, Hou Kai, the person in charge of YT Pallet, said, “In the past, different companies had different choices in their supply chain strategies. Agile and cost-based are the two main choices. Some companies It will also adjust different supply chain choices according to the different cycles of product introduction, development, maturity, and decline."

"But today in the 21st century, in the current global overcapacity and accelerated competition, products are being introduced faster and faster, and agility has become the first choice for more and more manufacturing industries, even at the expense of profits and expanding orders. The supporting factories should also be required to carry inventory and even carry out production. Apple is the leader and benchmark in this regard."

Apple is Hong Kong's largest customer of Cathay Pacific Airways. In order to achieve agility in the supply chain, Apple transports products at a cost nearly 50 times higher than that of shipping. In exchange, Apple has never dropped the chain at critical moments such as new product releases, and has never been overwhelmed by inventory brought by "black swans" such as the financial crisis and the new crown epidemic.

By strategizing on the entire production chain, with the aura of having the most perfect supply chain, Apple and first-class suppliers have created countless first-class products.

Who will "stop the bullet" for small businesses that are difficult to choose?

The requirement for higher agility is digitization. This reflects the urgent need of the core factory: to ensure its own safety by controlling the entire supply chain. "Enterprises' overall cost control is also a part of reflecting the perfection of the supply chain. Therefore, realizing the whole process of visualization and digitization of products from production, transportation to sales is an important basic condition for the current enterprise supply chain iteration." Hou Kai mentioned digitization of zinc scale. The significance of improving the supply chain.

The small ant tray opens up the digitization of in-transit information, providing full name visual tracking and in-transit warning

Indeed, Manager Chen, the production leader of a large chemical company in Shenzhen, told Zinc Scale, “The supply chain of the chemical industry is very tight, and the proportion of order-based production is small. The interruption crisis brought about by the epidemic has made the entire company shaky.”

However, whether it is to update equipment or build a three-dimensional warehouse, it takes hundreds of millions of dollars of capital investment. Therefore, looking for solutions that can more flexibly improve the level of digitalization and customization needs has become an urgent need for enterprises exploring digital development.

The cooperation with Xiaoyi Tray gave Manager Chen full confidence. With the self-developed smart chip for pallets, YI pallets make factory warehousing and logistics more efficient, and cargo movements can be visualized and controlled. Functions such as historical trajectory, transportation vibration monitoring, temperature recording, extremely fast storage, and induction storage have realized a complete set of intelligent solutions.

“Digital upgrade is a difficult thing we wanted to do in the past but dared not to do it, but the competition in the supply chain has come to our eyes as the catalysis of the epidemic, and changes and upgrades are inevitable.” In the view of Manager Chen, no matter how big or small a company is, A smarter supply chain can lead to more stable development.

But the cruel reality is that only about 20% of core companies have the ability and resources to explore the direction of agility, intelligence, and digitalization, and transform the entire supply chain according to their own wishes.

Workers use intelligent equipment to grasp the entire cargo information

For small and medium-sized small and medium-sized enterprises, when the supply chain and sales forecasts are subject to great fluctuations, their traditional approach is often to invest more funds to increase inventory to deal with the huge uncertainty at both ends of supply and demand. This choice It's bulky, but at least cheap.

But this is often the worst choice. Once the market shrinks, the core factories will have flexible adjustment space, and companies that purchase cheaply, transport in bulk, and accumulate inventory will become crushed camels.

"In fact, what we need is a supplier who can carry inventory for us and'block bullets'." Zhou Qiang (pseudonym), the owner of a garment factory with 25 years of experience in garment manufacturing, does not understand the meaning of the supply chain, but for many years The inventory problems caused by market fluctuations gave him a clear appeal: to improve predictive capabilities and reduce inventory risks.

To some extent, Zhou Qiang’s demands represent the aspirations of most small companies. For them, increasing order volume and improving distribution efficiency cannot solve the fundamental problem, and the cost of the entire supply chain has not been reduced, only through big data. Analysis ability can get more accurate market feedback.

This demand is no longer a simple agility demand, but a further "digital" demand. From the advent of Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing, it is not difficult to see that upgraded intelligent equipment coupled with cloud computing, Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence technologies can enable small and medium-sized enterprises to achieve flexibility and rapid production.

This is also another breakthrough made by YI tray compared with other traditional trays on the market-tray smart chip. Hou Kai believes that the way of presenting data can not only allow decision makers to see the whole process information more intuitively, but also embodies the comprehensive empowerment of the whole process and the traditional logistics stage of making decisions based on experience. By farewell, the problems of "knapsack" and "bullet blocking" will be solved.

YI Tray Smart Chip

Is the digitization of the entire production chain the future of the factory?

In April 2018, Liu Qiangdong said at the "Internet + Digital Economy Summit": "JD is not an e-commerce company, but a company that uses technology to create supply chain services. It uses technology to provide supply to our brand vendors. Chain services, which is why we have spent more than ten years investing in building a logistics system."

With the emergence of JD Logistics and Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing, suppliers have shown that digitalization is not unattainable. At present, many factories have laid NB-IOT-based communication sensor equipment on their production equipment to realize the digitalization of equipment operation and analysis.

YI trays are used inside the factory

The intelligent update of production equipment is static, while the intelligentization of logistics is dynamic. In order to solve the digitalization problem in the warehousing and transportation process, many factories have begun to rent YI trays.

"In the past, we needed a vibration label costing about 20 yuan to monitor whether our electronic products encountered serious bumps during transportation. Now the YI tray can not only monitor the entire transportation process, but also timely when bumps occur. Early warning, and analyze whether the bumps come from improper operation of the driver or poor road conditions." Mr. Ba, who produces speaker parts in Zhongshan, Guangdong, told Zinc Scale.

"During cold chain transportation and loading and unloading, the demand for online temperature monitoring is also very strong." Manager E of the freshly squeezed fruit juice factory in Tongchuan City, Shaanxi, told the author, "Offline temperature recorders are actually very inconvenient, which makes it difficult for us to distinguish. In which part of the product deterioration occurred. Now with the use of YI trays, not only the supply chain trajectory becomes clear and controllable, but the internal temperature curve can also be controlled online." More importantly, due to recycling, the rental of YI trays is compared. Traditional wooden pallets are cheaper.

"The transfer of data from offline to online is of vital importance to many industries such as medical supplies, precision instruments, food, etc. The full-link data feedback system allows the'smart brain' to judge the implementation status by itself, and at the same time, when a situation arises Push alarm information to users in time." Hou Kai talked about the role of circulating trays on Zinc Scale.

"More importantly, the current C-end consumer market is increasingly dependent on big data and personalized analysis. Major platforms and stores require manufacturers to be able to match the'flexible production, rapid response, and data docking capabilities'. Demand will be passed on to the entire traditional manufacturing industry layer by layer, and the traditional manufacturing industry that cannot match this demand can only be abandoned by the times." said Hou Kai, head of the small ant tray.

In the era of Industry 4.0, the supply chain is no longer in the traditional sense of'purchasing, selling and storing', but an industrial cluster of'four flows into one'. Under the wave of major changes in the global industrial chain and supply chain, understanding the trend of the times and actively embracing changes may be the future of the factories...