This year, "enhancing the core competitiveness of the manufacturing industry" was written into the government work report for the first time, which is more determined to improve quality and efficiency compared with last year's "maintaining the basic stability of the proportion of manufacturing industry".
Once, with the demographic dividend, China became the world's largest manufacturing country with cost advantages. However, since more than a decade ago, China's cost advantage has begun to lose, according to media reports, the cost of Chinese manufacturing has risen from 0.75 in 2005 to more than 0.95 in 2008, according to media reports.
If the previous logic of China's manufacturing industry development is the "scale narrative" under the low-cost orientation, that is, the pursuit of scale growth, the final result is large but not strong, then the current quality improvement is to go to a higher end of the industrial chain, to a higher scientific and technological content, the essence is to seek a larger profit scale, that is, the "profit narrative" under the efficiency orientation.
The generation of profits has open source, throttling two paths, in the case of irreversible rise in labor costs, logistics has always been regarded as a cost item, is undoubtedly one of the core of throttling. According to the statistics of the China Commercial Industry Research Institute, the logistics cost per unit of GDP on the mainland is 1.85 times that of the United States, 1.74 times that of Japan and Singapore, and 1.68 times that of Germany and the United Kingdom.
With the transformation of China's manufacturing from "scale" to "profit", logistics is also transforming to intelligence under the blessing of "double dividends" (huge engineers and perfect supply chain). "Technology-driven, leading the global efficient circulation and sustainable development", Hu Jinchen, who has been in the logistics industry for many years, summed it up - he and his JD logistics are one of the epitomes of "double dividends".
Not satisfied with warehousing
Since the epidemic, the automobile, electronics and other manufacturing industries have stopped work and production, and only one industry is still growing rapidly, that is, warehousing and logistics.
Online consumer demand is strong, brands and platforms take delivery timeliness as one of the main competitive points, it can be said that logistics upgrades have become part of the consumption upgrade. According to the China E-commerce Logistics Index, the average of the total index in 2021 is 110.3 points, up 2.4 points from 2020, and the growth rate of total business volume and rural business volume on the demand side is more than 20%.
At the same time, it is also part of the manufacturing upgrade in China. According to the data of China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing, the total logistics of industrial products in 2021 increased by 9.6% year-on-year, and the growth rate was 6.8 percentage points faster than that of the previous year, of which the logistics demand of equipment manufacturing and high-tech manufacturing increased by 12.9% and 18.2% over the previous year, which was 3.3 and 8.6 percentage points higher than the total industrial average.
Manufacturing, as the name suggests, is the process of processing raw materials into finished products, but in fact, the China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing has counted that in product production, the time for materials to be used for processing and inspection is only 5%, and the remaining 95% of the time is in the state of storage, loading and unloading, transportation and waiting for processing.
For a long time, Chinese manufacturing enterprises have "heavy product production, light logistics management", resulting in problems such as insufficient warehouses or full, too many things or out of stock, what they want cannot be found, and what they do not want cannot be lost. A coal mine in Yulin, Shaanxi Province, is facing such a situation, in the past, workers needed to report plans in advance for consumables used to go down the well, and more plans caused a backlog of materials, and less plans affected the use.
"The efficiency of the traditional warehousing mode of people arriving and picking up goods is very low, the picking shelves can only be 2-3 layers, the storage space is very wasteful, and there will be a situation of picking errors when picking goods." Hu Jinchen, product manager of the tian wolf product team of JD Logistics, also observed this problem.
With the "Made in China 2025" and the digitalization and intelligent upgrading of enterprises in various industries, traditional warehouse management has not kept up with the needs of enterprise development. Even if a well-known domestic home appliance company Shunde kitchen appliance production area has carried out network transformation, it is still unable to effectively track and locate people, machines and things, and cannot meet the demands of consumer order process tracking under the service of manufacturing industry.
If the impact of the Internet on various manufacturing industries, especially consumer goods manufacturing, in the past decade or so is in sales, then, with the increase in the proportion of e-commerce, digitalization has also penetrated from the product sales end to product production, transportation and even the procurement of raw materials in the upstream, thus putting forward higher requirements for warehousing digitalization.
At the same time, one of the core of China's manufacturing transformation is to improve quality and efficiency, and manufacturing costs come from both the product production link and the material circulation link, in the context of the increase in the price of raw materials in the production link and the increase in labor costs, the profit from the logistics link has become one of the ways out.
Taking the 3C electronics industry as an example, supply chain management is difficult, logistics costs are relatively high, and there is a large room for improvement. According to data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, although the profit growth rate of the electronic information manufacturing industry has been higher than that of industrial enterprises in the past ten years, the profit margin has continued to be lower than that of the latter, and in 2021, the profit margin of the electronic information manufacturing industry above designated size will be 5.9%, 0.9 percentage points lower than the latter.
The transformation from traditional warehousing to intelligent warehousing has become the trend of the times. After the above-mentioned mining company cooperated with Jingdong Logistics to transform the warehouse, the original dozens of people were responsible, and now 7 people can complete the material management and warehousing of 3500 square meters and nearly 4000 warehouses.
Warehousing, promising!
A changemaker with the same destination
In the battlefield of intelligent warehousing, there are changeables with a variety of backgrounds, either starting from their own business, or starting from digitalization, or starting from logistics, such as home appliance companies and beauty companies that achieve digital production, start-up companies that hold frequent financing with AI, and logistics companies that provide warehousing to help warehouse transformation.
Among them, JD Logistics is a special one. The special experience of self-operated e-commerce and self-built logistics makes it have both business background, understanding the industry, and logistics experience, understanding warehousing, and can transform the experience of the industry and logistics into an algorithm with digital capabilities, landing as a solution and intelligent device, thus further affecting the industry and logistics.
In 2007, Jingdong's business volume began to take shape, almost every day can receive users about slow arrival, cargo damage complaints, warehouse explosion incidents also occur repeatedly, and at that time China's logistics development is in its infancy, can not rely on external forces to solve these problems, Jingdong decided to build its own logistics.
After that, it accumulates data in the digital world, does research and development, recruits couriers in the physical world, builds warehouses, and combines its own understanding of the digital world and the physical world to do logistics warehousing systems, do algorithms on the top, and do equipment on the bottom.
For example, the Jingdong logistics warehousing system, which was launched in 2009, is xuanwu system, which only supports simple hardware equipment from the beginning, introduces electronic tag review, conveyor line confluence and other equipment, adds functions such as warehousing appointment and inventory in the warehouse, and then adopts the international mainstream SOA service architecture to introduce highly intelligent automation equipment such as hoists, stackers, sorters, and conveyor lines.
With the rapid development of e-commerce business, JD.com has precipitated a large number of supply chain enterprise resources, accumulated industrial cognition of 3C electronics, industry cognition of warehousing and logistics, and digital capability reserves. Under the intelligence of upstream enterprises and their own expansion needs, it tries to share the "knowledge" of intelligent logistics. In 2017, JD Logistics was established and fully opened to the outside world.
After accumulating a certain amount of customer service experience externally, it systematizes "knowledge". According to the 2021 annual report, the revenue of JD Logistics's external customers accounted for more than half for the first time, reaching 56.5%. Among them, the number of external integration supply chain customers was 74,602, an increase of 41.7% year-on-year, and the revenue was 25.5 billion yuan, an increase of 54.7% year-on-year.
So, what is the "knowledge" of JD Logistics? It is a three-in-one supply chain logistics technology with software, hardware and system integration, and is a technical product and solution covering all aspects of the park, warehousing, sorting, transportation, distribution and so on.
Taking the wolf in the warehousing link as an example, it is composed of a combination of a variety of automation hardware equipment and software systems, and is an important part of the technical system of the trinity supply chain of Jingdong Logistics.
The hardware mobile equipment of the Sirius system is composed of a horizontally handled shuttle, a vertical handling hoist and a workstation integrating picking and inventory; the software part is composed of a self-developed warehouse management system WMS, a control system WCS and a monitoring system 3Dscada; between the hardware and software, it is the unmanned warehouse scheduling algorithm of the Sirius system.
Of course, on top of the hardware and software, is the unmanned warehouse scheduling algorithm of the Sirius system. It realizes complex multi-agent task allocation and path planning, solves the optimization problem of tens of billions of complexity in milliseconds and gives the optimal solution, and finally forms a large-scale robot scheduling system, which can command the robot to complete the order picking within a few minutes of the consumer's order.
On the consumer side, logistics efficiency has been promoted by JD.com to same-day delivery and next-day delivery. With the continuous efforts of JD Logistics and others in the field of warehousing and logistics, this efficiency is penetrating into the manufacturing end and production end. JD Logistics, which started from China's consumption upgrade, was finally integrated into China's manufacturing upgrade.
Digital "Craftsman"
Warehousing has always been regarded as the cost center of the enterprise, specifically, its cost is composed of rent and labor. Therefore, in order to reduce costs and increase efficiency, it is necessary to start from reducing rent and labor. Among them, to reduce the rent, it is necessary to be three-dimensional, and more materials or products are put down within the unit area; to reduce labor, it is necessary to automate and unmanned.
This is also the reason why Sirius aimed at "greater storage density, higher picking efficiency and accuracy" at the beginning of the project, and the product form is "an automated goods-to-person system composed of three-dimensional shelves, shuttles, elevators, etc."
The Sirius system was launched in 2016 and has undergone three iterations so far: the first generation of sirius system was released in October 2016, and the wolf warehouse was put into operation in 2017; in 2018, the second-generation sirius system started research and development, focusing on optimizing hardware performance and software architecture; in 2021, in line with the trend of Jingdong logistics opening up to the outside world, the third generation of sirius system was released, and upgraded in combination with the characteristics of various industries.
"The initial challenge of the Sirius system is how to meet jd.com's twice-yearly promotions and massive SKUs, which is simply to solve the problem of storage density and efficiency." Hu Jinchen concluded, "With the continuous maturity of technology and the opening up of JD Logistics, different industries have put forward higher requirements and challenges for Sirius. ”
Yi'an Warehouse, located in Humen Town, Dongguan, formerly known as the Supply Chain Business Department and Warehousing and Logistics Department of China Electronics Information Industry Group (CEC), serves 100 upstream component manufacturers and more than 5,000 downstream electronic equipment manufacturers, with a warehouse area of 20,000 square meters, a bonded warehouse area of 24,000 square meters, a non-bonded 9,039 square meters, and a total height of 23.8 meters on five floors.
Through preliminary research, Jingdong Logistics found that it has several prominent problems: the effective utilization of warehouses is insufficient, tax and bonded goods are physically isolated by floors, most of them are stored on pallets or partition shelves, and tens of thousands of SKUs use manual handling, replenishment, and picking methods. Overall, space utilization is insufficient, manual operation efficiency is low, and three-dimensional and automation space is large.
Therefore, Jingdong Logistics helped it build a 20-meter-high Wolf three-dimensional warehouse, under the premise of fire safety, using double-extension stackers and dense storage of multi-layer containers to maximize the storage capacity of pallet and box-type cargo spaces. In the end, the storage area increased by more than 10,000 square meters, the picking efficiency increased by 80%, and the accuracy rate increased to 99.99%.
As a set of warehousing system, sirius of course needs not only the perfection of software and hardware products and the application of solutions, to achieve system optimization, but also to strive for excellence in each software and hardware product to achieve product optimization within the system. In this way, the system is optimal to exert its maximum effectiveness.
From one generation to three generations of Sirius, Jingdong Logistics is like a "digital craftsman", polishing little by little and improving everywhere. According to Chen Ruyi, chief electrical engineer of the Sirius product team, the research and development of Sirius products was launched in 2016, and stability problems occurred in 2017, and the problem was finally solved after four months and hundreds of thousands of simulation tests.
"(At that time) the number of errors reported by the shuttle truck to pick up the box was very large every day, and at first the reason could not be found, and then the reason was permanently stationed at the scene for more than 1 month, and finally the cause was locked on the displacement of the cargo box caused by the vibration of the shelf." Hu Jinchen recalled that after four months of simulation tests, "to make products is to have a craftsman spirit."
This little by little more real "craftsman spirit" is everywhere in the third generation of Sirius, mechanical engineers designed the industry's thinnest body, 1 second and 1 second to optimize the equipment operation beat, the pursuit of the ultimate mixed box storage density and the development of dynamic storage management functions, to improve the maintainability and flexibility of the equipment and the development of shuttle owner controller and third-generation communication protocol...
With the joint efforts of the "craftsmen", the third generation of Sirius has achieved the ultimate in storage density, picking efficiency and accuracy. The data shows that the system can help its warehouse picking efficiency increase by 3-5 times, the picking accuracy rate to 99.99%, and the storage density per unit area by more than 3 times.
By the end of 2021, this Sirius goods-to-person system has completed dozens of projects. This "Sirius" that has passed the turning point of input and output will accompany China's manufacturing upgrade and China's consumption upgrade for a longer period of time.
epilogue
In 1970, Osamu Nishizawa, a professor at Waseda University in Japan and an authoritative scholar of Japanese logistics cost theory, proposed the "third source of profit", in short, in the case of little room for manufacturing cost reduction, logistics is the third source of profit. At that time, Japan was just experiencing the Izano boom, and Japanese manufacturing was going global, reaching its peak in the 1980s.
The 1980s were also the time when China began to take over the spillover of its surrounding manufacturing industries due to its low cost. More than four decades later, the cost of Manufacturing in China has risen and there is little room for reduction, and the importance of logistics as a "third source of profit" has naturally increased.
Especially in the past two or three decades, the highly developed Internet has allowed China to accumulate a huge engineer dividend, and under the impetus of the "composite" role of JD Logistics, the engineer dividend and logistics meet, and Chinese manufacturing will accelerate from "scale narrative" to "profit narrative".