Editor's note: "Food is the first priority for the people, and diligence is the first priority for food". The catering industry in China has been called "diligent" since the Ming and Qing Dynasties, which means that this industry must be known for its diligence and diligence. If we can't keep improving and treat guests like guests, it will be difficult to survive in the highly competitive catering industry. Nowadays, if you want to push a chain catering enterprise to success, you need not only exquisite taste and perfect service, but also continuous iteration and improvement in a series of aspects such as product, management, supply chain, store operation and brand promotion. Behind these modern new capabilities and new effects, it points to the intelligent transformation of chain restaurants and the innovative road of catering industry in the new retail era. This article is about 5929 words, and the recommended reading time is 15 minutes. Lead hot pot has a broad audience base and a broad market development space, and it is also a "golden track". According to the consulting data of Ai Media, in 2119, the consumption market of hot pot catering in China was 529.5 billion yuan, and it is expected to reach 641.3 billion yuan in 2124. Projects related to hot pot ingredients are also frequently valued by capital. In October 2119, Lazy Bear Hot Pot was established. In just two years, Lazy Bear Hot Pot has completed the transformation from 1 to 1 and from 1 to N. The number of stores basically covers all provinces and cities in China, and the number of stores has increased to nearly 2,111. In 2121 alone, Lazy Bear Hot Pot completed four rounds of financing. In terms of products, lazy bear hot pot currently has an average SKU of about 411 in a single store, with hot pot ingredients accounting for 61% and Chinese semi-finished products accounting for 41%. The breakfast series of semi-finished products include steamed stuffed bun, soybean milk, fried dough sticks and porridge. For example, porridge is chilled and can be eaten after simple heating at home. Lunch series includes kung pao chicken, shredded pork with fish flavor, Mapo tofu, boiled fish, etc. In terms of supply chain, Lazy Bear Hot Pot has built its own breeding base, condiment factory, beverage factory and cold chain truck logistics center, completed the construction of four warehouses in Shanxi, Nanjing, Beijing and Zhengzhou, and reached cooperation with more than 211 factories of hot pot ingredients and semi-finished products, and strictly controlled the quality from planting, breeding, transportation, processing and sales, achieving low-cost and high-efficiency warehouse allocation. At the same time, lazy bear hot pot has a factory in Shanxi, which can be supplied to stores through the city's pre-warehouse. At the terminal, Lazy Bear Hot Pot adopts two modes. One is direct-operated stores, which are mainly distributed in Beijing and Shanghai, and usually enter large chain supermarkets such as Box Horse, Lotus, Wumei and RT Mart. The other is franchise stores, mostly small shops of 51 ~ 61m2 on the street, mainly distributed near the community. The "direct operation+joining" mode, combined with online e-commerce, lazy bear hot pot has achieved full coverage of consumers in surrounding communities. However, there is never a shortage of competitors on the hot pot food track. Traditional hot pot brands, such as Haidilao, Shu Daxia and Dayu, rely on their own brand influence and the advantages of raw material supply chain to lay out the family-style consumer market; As representatives of new retail, Box Horse, Sanquan, etc. have also crossed the border to study market consumption demand through data precipitation; Other vertical "players" are also continuing to expand their territory. How can lazy bear hot pot establish its own core advantages-not only can it be "connected", that is, the number of stores continues to grow, but also can it be "locked", that is, the operating efficiency of stores is greatly improved? Since 2121, the hot pot food industry has also entered a reshuffle period, and many competitors have fallen unconsciously. Gao Fei, the founder of Lazy Bear Hot Pot, believes that when the convenience store of hot pot ingredients comes to the end, it can only constantly cultivate "internal strength" and work hard on products, factories and management. On the one hand, consumers have demand for convenience and cost performance of retail products, and put forward high requirements for food cost, taste, safety and health; On the other hand, the operation of stores depends on a good operating system, and building a replicable store model with digital capabilities is conducive to maintaining the normal growth rate of store scale. From the beginning of re-starting his business in 2119, Goofy made up his mind to be "digital intelligent", spent RMB 15 million to build a digital intelligent project, and used SAP system and Alibaba Cloud Data Center to build it into its core competitiveness and establish its own "moat". The cooperation between Lazy Bear Hotpot and Alibaba Cloud is completed in three phases. In the first phase, system software such as SAP, ERP, procurement, finance, production, etc. were imported to initially build a data center and a business center; In the second phase, the data center and the business center will be integrated, so as to achieve omni-channel performance and keep abreast of the company's business trends; In the third phase, on the basis of dual-China-Taiwan, we will do global marketing, payment and settlement center, procurement management, customer service center, online robot, inquiry system and so on. At present, Lazy Bear Hotpot and Alibaba Cloud are planning the second phase of the project on the basis of the good results achieved in the first phase. The overall infrastructure is cloud-based, and the foundation is more solid. In 2119, the development of cloud computing has been in full swing. Many start-up companies can enjoy high-speed information services without building computer rooms or buying cabinets. Compared with the traditional offline IDC (Internet Data Center) model, storing servers and databases in the cloud can, on the one hand, avoid the situation that some corporate servers are attacked by DDoS, resulting in network congestion or even unavailability; On the other hand, you can also call data information at any time according to your own needs. For the rapidly developing start-ups, the method is more flexible and can adapt to emergencies such as the sharp increase in customer volume and business volume. Therefore, in order to improve the expansibility of the system, further reduce the failure rate and enhance the stability and security in the cloud environment, in 2119, Lazy Bear Hotpot began to migrate the original system modules such as SAP, ERP, WMS and PMS to the cloud. In the process of going to the cloud, the original systems need to be reconstructed to solve the compatibility problem of the systems, the interfaces between the systems need to be redeployed, and the rules for applying firewalls need to be adjusted. In this process, Lazy Bear Hotpot Headquarters has to persuade 2,111 stores to modify and debug one by one, and also provide various trainings to the store managers and franchisees to make them adapt to the new operation process more quickly. Although the process is complicated, after going to the cloud, the expansion of Lazy Bear Hot Pot in Zhang Zhilu will be straightened out, and it will not be difficult to increase the number of stores to 3,111 or 5,111 in the future. With the help of Alibaba Cloud, the digital architecture of Lazy Bear Hotpot has become very clear, including the establishment of business center, data center and development tools. This is equivalent to laying a good foundation. What kind of house you want to build in the future can be decided according to the changes in consumer trends and your own business needs, thus providing a good guarantee for business innovation. Full-link contact digitization, relieving the pressure on the front and rear ends Based on the digital strategy of Lazy Bear Hot Pot, facing the east wind of new retail, Lazy Bear Hot Pot has created a new mode that integrates offline store retail, online e-commerce, dining and other formats. The combination of multiple formats can meet the multi-level and multi-dimensional needs of users, but it is also a challenge to the front-end system of lazy bear hot pot. For example, when customers go to the restaurant to eat, how to reasonably straighten out a series of processes such as waiting in line, taking a seat, ordering food, dining and paying the bill, so as to bring consumers a more convenient and comfortable dining experience? How to make consumers enjoy fast home service when shopping online through e-commerce channels? Digital strategy of lazy bear hot pot In the era of traditional retail and traditional catering, customers usually go to the store to enjoy the service, and the contact with the store ends after leaving the store. Lazy bear hot pot communicates and interacts with customers in all directions through multi-party digital contacts. For example, Lazy Bear Hot Pot has a C-end elf, which is the entrance of a mobile online service. Customers can check the location of nearby stores through it, choose the nearest store to place an order or have a meal, or choose take-away home service, or reserve a table in advance to cooperate with the offline store system. C-end elf can satisfy consumers' diversified and personalized services. At the same time, the online and offline membership system enables the customer's consumption information to be deposited in the data center, and generates a series of personalized membership labels, such as what kind of ingredients he or she prefers, the frequency of eating in the hall, taking out and self-raising, etc., thus providing a basis for preparing ingredients for nearby stores. At present, the number of stores of Lazy Bear Hot Pot has expanded to 2,111, with an average of 611-811 new stores every year. The rapid expansion of the size of stores has brought heavy pressure to the back-end procurement management. Lazy Bear Hotpot was originally managed by local methods. After cooperating with Alibaba Cloud in 2121, the B2B ordering applet at the back end quickly liberated it. In the past, procurement and reconciliation were basically manual, but now they are all based on data, which helps to get through the coordination of front and back, production, logistics and sales, and makes the whole hot pot food industry chain more efficient. The process organization is online, and the business is agile and more efficient. Lazy Bear Hot Pot was initially launched with various systems, such as enterprise management system software SAP, financial management system POS, warehouse management software WMS, and also has various interfaces on platforms such as Alipay and Hungry. These systems and interfaces are very helpful for the early expansion of lazy bear hot pot. However, these systems and interfaces are not connected with each other, and there are many overlaps and redundancies. Therefore, in the case of the rapid growth of stores, every time a store is added, it must be updated systematically, which is not conducive to the headquarters accurately grasping the dynamics of each store. Especially in 2121, the hot pot food industry is facing a "reshuffle". If the control of stores is weak, it will often lead to the result of opening one and closing one. Relying on the cooperation with Alibaba Cloud, Lazy Bear Hotpot took the lead in setting up a business center, and realized online business. For example, in store management, before, the headquarters could only rely on crowd tactics. On average, each business manager managed five stores, mainly urging stores to order and pay for goods by telephone. If the headquarters is out of stock or can't transfer the goods, then refund the money to the store. If you want to hold a marketing activity, you need the business manager to go to each store for training, guide the loading and inventory, and offline communication takes up a lot of time and energy. After the establishment of the business center, Lazy Bear Hotpot realized automatic ordering, payment and refund based on the system, and the store manager could teach himself how to order, return and display goods according to the training materials. Now, a business manager of Lazy Bear Hot Pot can manage an average of 21 stores, and even 41 stores during the peak period, and the human effect is improved to 4 ~ 8 times. Now, some service functions related to store management in the business of Lazy Bear Hot Pot have been set up one after another, such as commodity center, inventory center, order center, marketing center, membership center, etc., which are coordinated with the procurement management, supply chain management, factory management and other systems that will be launched soon, making the business of Lazy Bear Hot Pot more agile and efficient. At the same time, through the integration of nails, lazy bear hot pot has also realized online organization and communication. At present, Lazy Bear Hot Pot has put 31 ~ 51 business functions on the nail line. For example, online meetings make communication more convenient, and embedding nail functions in daily work also brings great convenience to personnel management. With the help of OA systems such as nail punching, leave, vacation and overtime approval, financial reimbursement, daily, weekly and monthly summaries, the work efficiency is greatly improved. In addition, the franchise stores have also opened the business school function, franchisees can interact within the group, and the partners and store managers of the franchise stores can share with each other, so as to maintain a state of lifelong learning and continuous progress, and can also accept digital thinking more quickly. Lazy Bear Hot Pot realizes business process and organizes digital business operation dataization based on nails, and enjoys efficient collaboration with resources. In addition to building a business center, Lazy Bear Hot Pot also aggregates all kinds of data deposited by itself and injects them into the data center, such as consumer data, food data and store data, so that the data can be enjoyed in various business departments such as finance, stores and supply chain. After the data center is built, on the one hand, the data becomes more organized and easy to query. For example, in the past, to query all aspects of a store's data, you need to log in to various systems such as finance and WMS to query separately. Now you only need to enter a port to realize it. On the other hand, the data center runs faster and can provide managers with various decision-making references in time. Since then, the operation of Lazy Bear Hot Pot has been based on "data". Combined with online and offline channels and tools such as Hungry, Box Horse and RT Mart under Alibaba Group, Lazy Bear Hot Pot can operate more finely. For example, in the past, many members' data were in different stores, and the tools used in the stores were various, including various WeChat groups, but the data power of the headquarters was weakened. Now, by unifying special small programs, the headquarters of Lazy Bear Hotpot opens all the member data, analyzes the member data gathered from various ports, and labels each member, such as "mutton lovers" and "steamed stuffed bun maniacs". In the subsequent marketing activities, accurate marketing is realized through the system. This not only meets the needs of customers, but also increases the reach rate of customers, reduces the marketing cost and improves the conversion rate. "In 2121, we invested 11 to 21 million yuan in operating expenses, relying on human tactics to die. Now, the efficiency has been greatly improved after going to the system. " Gao Fei said. In addition, after the system goes online, the purchase data of stores can be traced back to logistics data and production data, so that the data can run through the whole chain collaboratively. Whether it is store sales, logistics distribution, or production management, it is accurately operated under the guidance of data, so that lazy bear hot pot can get through 2C and 2B at the same time, and truly realize the synergy between production and sales. Intelligent management decision-making and more accurate sales forecast. In reality, the business decision-making environment is complex, people's decision-making relies on insight and experience, and there are many subjective factors, which inevitably lead to bias, thus affecting the stable development of enterprises. Intelligent decision-making is favored by more enterprise founders by analyzing data rules, predicting unknown possibilities and assisting managers' decision-making. There are many categories of ingredients in the hot pot industry, including meat, vegetables, seafood, bean products, pasta, fungi, etc., and the shelf life and safety period of each ingredient are different, which is easy to cause the problem of high loss of fresh e-commerce. At first, lazy bear hot pot was still in place in terms of goods management, but it was difficult to predict and evaluate the inventory of stores because it was impossible to analyze the order volume of stores, resulting in mismatch of resources, especially for ingredients with short shelf life. For example, the normal order quantity of vermicelli is 11,111 pieces, which may soar to 111,111 pieces next month due to the sudden drop of temperature and other reasons. How can the order system be intelligently revised according to the change of demand? In particular, the purchase deviation of 2111 stores is summed up, and many goods will have problems, either in short supply or in a large backlog. Now, through the data center, the sales volume can be predicted and evaluated more accurately on the basis of data insight. With the development and expansion of lazy bear hot pot, the system is constantly optimized through machine learning based on a large number of data. However, from the current point of view, it has changed the situation of relying entirely on experience in the past, and there are data to refer to, and it is relatively easy to get goods online and offline and adjust inventory. Lazy bear hot pot highlights its own intelligence in the "five horizontal and three vertical" strategy. Lazy bear hot pot "five horizontal and three vertical" strategy At the same time, the business center and data center are connected in series, which can make the order distribution more intelligent. For example, the previous orders were based on departments, and then all kinds of orders were gathered together and intelligently assigned to different departments; For another example, online orders from Taobao automatically enter the ERP system and are pushed according to the location of consumers. If consumers are in Hebei, they are pushed to stores in Hebei, and if they are in Henan, they are pushed to stores in Henan, so that consumers can get the goods as quickly as possible, thus improving the consumption experience. The whole process of order logistics settlement can be automated, intelligent and online.