Chen Sheng, chairman of No. 1 Foods, a graduate of Peking University who sells pork: Digital tools are like advanced weapons on the battlefield

Per reporter: Liu Ling Per editor: Liang Xiao

Since the beginning of this year, due to the influence of market supply and demand, pork prices have continued to decline. According to data from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, the wholesale price of pork this year fell from 46.71 yuan / kg in January to 21.51 yuan / kg in August, a decline of more than half.

Pork prices have had a big impact on many farmers. However, Chen Sheng, chairman of Guangdong No. 1 Food Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as No. 1 Food), said in a recent interview with the "Daily Economic News" reporter that No. 1 Food uses a digital system to predict the price of pork, thereby adjusting the supply and avoiding the risk of some price fluctuations to a certain extent.

Speaking of Chen Sheng, Guangdong people are not strangers, he is the Zhanjiang boy who sold pork after graduating from Peking University and became a billionaire. In April this year, the "Digital China Tower Building Plan" officially opened the collection of digital benchmarking cases, and Chen Sheng's No. 1 Food became the first batch of selected enterprises. According to Chen Sheng, with the help of digital tools and technologies such as weChat, No. 1 Food has opened up the whole process of pig raising, which can predict the estrus period and calving period of pigs.

In Chen Sheng's view, at the moment when thousands of industries are accelerating digital transformation, raising pigs with digital tools is the need to improve efficiency and competitiveness. Like modern warfare, digital tools are like advanced weapons on the battlefield, and if they are not used, they are likely to be eliminated on the battlefield.

<h2>Connect data scattered across systems</h2>

According to the data, No. 1 Food was established in 2004, is a collection of breeding research and development, breeding production, brand retail in one, the adoption of "company + base + professional households + chain stores" business model of agricultural enterprises, its leading brand is well known as "No. 1 earth pig".

According to Chen Wei, head of the No. 1 Food Information Department, the digital construction of No. 1 Food can be traced back to 2011. However, there were not many digital tools at that time, and enterprises mainly realized digitalization through a series of ERP systems such as production systems and financial systems.

"No. 1 Food belongs to a relatively traditional agricultural production, breeding and sales enterprise, so at the beginning we built a system more to consider the optimization of operations, such as how to improve the quality of pigs, how to reduce production costs, how to improve efficiency", Chen Wei said, "So, around these operational optimization goals, we have built a lot of systems, including production systems, financial systems and a series of ERP systems." ”

However, with the continuous expansion of the No. 1 food business, isolated IT systems have gradually shown their bottlenecks. Although the data is on the system, it cannot be used internally; under multi-layer management, the internal approval speed is also very slow, and the technical staff upload production, sales, finance and other data needs to be switched between different application systems, which is complex and has a high threshold for use.

"For example, the company's breeding pig fattening management system set up in 2013, when mobile office had not yet appeared, and if the tester wanted to understand the production data, he had to check it on the computer." Chen Wei told reporters, "And even if you are on the ERP system, there are not many people who can see the data, we want to know the real production situation, we can only understand through the weekly meeting and the monthly meeting, it is difficult to grasp the production situation in real time." ”

In 2016, with the rise of mobile office, WeChat, an enterprise in Guangzhou with No. 1 Food, was officially launched version 1.0 in April of the same year. At that time, in addition to some small companies, only a few products such as WeChat and DingTalk could provide platform and connection support for No. 1 Food, and connect the data scattered in various systems.

Chen Wei told reporters that The WeChat of The No. 1 Food Uses the company to connect the company's internal large and small systems, including the OA system and the ERP system, so as to realize mobile office and improve the efficiency of internal approval. "For traditional enterprises, in addition to making systems, we must also strengthen the connection of internal systems, so as to truly achieve the effect of cost reduction and efficiency increase."

<h2>Digital tools are like advanced weapons on the battlefield, and they do not have to be eliminated</h2>

After realizing the mobile office and improving the efficiency of internal trials, Chen Sheng began to consider how to put all the production-side data on the system to achieve the "second step" of digital pig raising. However, unlike the internal communication and management of enterprises, the digitalization of the breeding end faces more landing problems.

According to Chen Wei, in terms of production digitalization, it is more to empower front-line personnel. Due to the long breeding cycle of pigs, it takes about ten months for a sow to give birth to piglets. If data cannot be collected in real time, guidance on the production side is difficult.

At present, there are two main ways to collect data from No. 1 Food. The first is through the enterprise WeChat terminal, where technicians can enter data in real time using an online spreadsheet on the spot. The second is manual entry, pig farm keepers are generally older, not accustomed to operating mobile phones and entering data, you need to use paper forms to record, and then submitted to the statistician to enter into the system.

Chen Sheng told reporters that at present, each sow of No. 1 Food will have an exclusive breeding pig file card, and the technician will enter the information of the sow every day into the system, and the system can predict the sow estrus period and the expected date in real time. Not only that, the system also has an early warning function, if the sow has not yet given birth to the due date, the system will prompt the breeder and technician to check it.

According to No. 1 Food, through digital management and large-scale breeding, the average number of litters of No. 1 soil pigs has increased by 8% to 10%, and the survival rate of nursing piglets has increased by 18%. "Ten years ago, a sow could only give birth to six or seven litters, and after digital fine management, each of our sows can produce eleven or twelve litters, which is the improvement of digitalization in all aspects of fertility management." Chen Sheng said.

Not only that, with the blessing of digital tools, the current No. 1 Food, a sow farm with a scale of 2,000 heads, only needs a dozen breeders and a statistician to effectively manage. "How do you manage a dozen people to manage thousands of sows?" It is impossible to look at the data through the system, the collection of data and the reminder of timely data to guide technicians to form a closed-loop digital management of pig breeding. Chen Wei said.

After realizing the digitalization of the breeding end, Chen Sheng focused his digital eyes on the marketing end. In August this year, No.1 Food and the enterprise WeChat and Weisheng reached a strategic cooperation agreement, hoping to use the connection and technical capabilities of Tencent's industrial Internet to better reach and serve C-end users, including community, drainage, powder suction, build private domain traffic, and customize production by understanding what users want.

Chen Sheng bluntly said that at the moment when thousands of industries are accelerating digital transformation, raising pigs with digital tools is the need to improve efficiency and competitiveness. Like modern warfare, digital tools are like advanced weapons on the battlefield, and if they are not used, they are likely to be eliminated on the battlefield.

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