1998, RT Mart opened its first hypermarket in Shanghai. In the following ten years, RT Mart achieved explosive growth with the strategy of opening stores in second-and third-tier cities, extremely refined store operation, and mixed management mode of centralized headquarters and decentralized stores.
By 2009, RT Mart had opened 143 stores in 2/kloc-0 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions, with an annual revenue of 40.4 billion yuan and a single store performance of over 300 million yuan.
As an independent retail brand, RT Mart has surpassed Carrefour and Wal-Mart to become the largest and most efficient retailer in China. In fact, since then, RT Mart has maintained its position as a leading retailer in China.
However, just as RT Mart ascended the throne of retail industry, a great change was brewing in the consumer market environment in China. The rise of e-commerce has not only brought new retail formats, but also changed consumers' shopping habits.
These changes soon spread to RT Mart. Since 20 1 1, although the total revenue of RT Mart has continued to grow, the growth of same-store sales, as the most important operating index of supermarkets, has slowed down, and it has entered a negative growth in 20 14.
RT Mart's parent company, Gaoxin Retail 20 14, reported that the same-store sales growth declined, mainly due to the slowdown of the overall consumer market growth and more diversified consumption channels.
In the face of the continuous loss of young consumers, where should traditional hypermarkets go?
Huang Mingduan, then the chairman of RT Mart, knew very well that in order to survive, hypermarkets must be transformed and upgraded, and the core issue was how to establish connections with young consumers. Since young consumers are online, hypermarkets must also be online.
So, at the end of 20 13, RT Mart launched its own B2C e-commerce flying cow net, and began to explore the Internet and digital intelligence. However, this road is not easy. High storage cost, high performance cost, high flow cost and low distribution efficiency make flying cow net fall into the dilemma of sustained losses.
Three years later, flying cow net was transformed, with the mode of integration of stores and warehouses, and the soldiers were divided into two ways to explore online and offline integration.
All the way is to develop RT Mart Youxian App to provide B2C fresh food 1 hour home service for customers within 5km around the store to meet the shopping needs of young consumers. Another way is to launch RT Mart E Road App to provide B2B purchase service for small and medium-sized supermarkets, restaurants, entertainment, enterprises and institutions around the store.
At the end of 20 17, Alibaba invested in Gaoxin Retail, and the digital and intelligent transformation of RT Mart entered the fast lane.
Today, all the 465,438+04 hypermarkets opened by RT Mart in Chinese mainland have been digitized. In addition to RT Mart Youxian App, it also provides customers within 5km of the store with 1 hour home service through Ali's Taoxianda, Hungry, Tmall Supermarket and other ports, and provides customers within 5km to 20km with half-day service.
Up to now, there are more than100000 online members in RT Mart, of which 20%~30% coincide with offline store members. Online daily orders are close to 400,000, and online sales account for 20% of total sales. I hope it will reach more than 50% in the future, which is equivalent to creating an online version of RT Mart.
In 20 19, fresh e-commerce in RT Mart achieved full profit, and the same-store sales growth index began to turn positive after five consecutive years of negative value.
RT Mart stores are located in five regions: East China, North China, Northeast China, Central China and South China, serving 29 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions, with more than 654.38+million employees, more than 654.38+million shopping guides and serving more than 4 million customers every day.
In order to facilitate management, and to avoid the possible impact of network disconnection on store business, the infrastructure system in RT Mart adopts a distributed architecture. Regional headquarters system, store system and POS system are relatively independent, and basically each store has its own server.
The headquarters system and the store system are not online in real time, and the information exchange between them is uploaded or distributed in batches in the form of daily statements.
When the new era promotes the transformation and upgrading of traditional retail enterprises and requires them to do business online and realize online and offline integration, a hurdle is placed in front of them-the distributed architecture cannot support online business and cannot adapt to online and offline integration.
Chen Yu 'an, CTO of RT Mart, explained that if retail enterprises want to provide home service for users around stores based on LBS, they not only need centralized architecture to undertake all users' apps or third-party platforms, but also need data interaction between the business systems deployed in centralized architecture and the systems of various stores, thus forming a mixed architecture, that is, some business systems are in centralized architecture and some business systems are in online distributed architecture.
In 20 16, the box horse appeared. This new retail model, which centers on stores and integrates online and offline, gives RT Mart an opportunity because it matches RT Mart's core strengths-supply chain and store network.
Therefore, RT Mart decided to transform and developed RT Mart Youxian App and E-Road App to provide door-to-door and purchase services for consumers and corporate customers around the store respectively.
Because online orders need to be delivered in offline stores, the online retail business system centrally deployed on the hybrid cloud needs to interact with the business systems of various stores in terms of membership, payment, inventory, marketing, logistics and other data, thus forming a hybrid system architecture, which includes both the distributed architecture of the original stores and the centralized architecture of the cloud that can realize online and offline integration.
At the end of 20 17, RT Mart began to migrate the systems and equipment deployed on the third-party cloud to Alibaba Cloud after obtaining the investment from Alibaba. The original cloud architecture in RT Mart has thus become a hybrid cloud of local IDC+ and Alibaba Cloud.
Of course, neither hybrid system architecture nor hybrid cloud is the ultimate goal of RT Mart. Chen Yu 'an revealed that the mixed architecture of RT Mart is quite complicated, and the data flow needs to go from headquarters to stores, stores to cloud intermediate stations, and cloud intermediate stations to Ali intermediate stations. As long as there is a disconnection in the middle, the whole system will go wrong.
So they want to simplify the data flow path, and to do this, they can only concentrate all systems on the cloud, so they can operate directly in the cloud.
To this end, RT Mart is prepared to move all the original offline systems to Alibaba Cloud in two or three years, and upgrade the current distributed and centralized hybrid system architecture to a centralized architecture deployed in the cloud.
At the same time, the current IDC will not buy new machines after the server expires, and the business systems deployed in IDC will be migrated to Alibaba Cloud. By then, the hybrid cloud configuration of IDC+ Alibaba Cloud will become pure Alibaba Cloud.
RT Mart introduced ERP system at the beginning of its establishment. With the ERP system, coupled with years of functional development and optimization, the business processes of offline stores in RT Mart have basically realized informationization, and data such as supply chain, commodities, transactions and members are all deposited in the system.
In 20 13, faced with the fierce impact of e-commerce, RT Mart began to explore online retailing, and launched its own e-commerce in flying cow net, reaching the growing online consumer groups.
However, flying cow net's model is too challenging. After losing money for several years, RT Mart saw new retail opportunities, so he gave up the idea of self-operated e-commerce and transformed flying cow net into an online and offline integrated store distribution business.
Consumers can enjoy the 1 hour home service of the nearest store through RT Mart Youxian App, and merchants can send the App through RT Mart E Road to get the next-day purchase service of the nearest store.
However, whether it is RT Mart Youxian or E Road, the ability to pull new products is limited, and most of its users come from the original users of offline stores. Ali's investment has opened up a vast online market for RT Mart.
2065438+March 2008, RT Mart began to access Taobao's Taoxianda project. Like RT Mart Youxian, Taoxianda Project is also a fresh 1 hour home service. So for RT Mart, it is equivalent to adding a port to reach online consumers on the basis of RT Mart Youxian App.
More importantly, this port is located on mobile phone Taobao, and its huge traffic not only brought considerable online sales to RT Mart stores, but also enabled RT Mart to quickly gain a large number of new users.
Since then, RT Mart has once again entered the Hungry Platform, and reached a "shared inventory" cooperation with Tmall Supermarket, providing 1 hour service for users within 5 km around the store and half-day service for users within 5 km to 20 km, further expanding the online traffic and the number of users in RT Mart.
So far, RT Mart's new retail business has four online ports, and consumers can choose any port to place an order. After receiving orders from different ports, the store will deliver the goods through the same fulfillment system.
"Our front end is different, and the back end is exactly the same. We synthesized a batch of orders from surrounding communities and gave them to a younger brother. Orders are dense enough and the delivery efficiency is high. " Chen Yu 'an explained.
Up to now, all the 4 14 stores in RT Mart have access to 1 hour door-to-door delivery service, and more than 200 stores have launched the half-day delivery service of Tmall Supermarket. The number of online users exceeded 33 million, and the number of active users exceeded100000; The number of e-road merchants exceeds 530,000, and the number of active merchants is close to 240,000.
According to Wu Chunxiang, general manager of RT Mart New Retail Division, although the user groups of the four online ports partially overlap, the overall separation is obvious.
RT Mart Youxian is mainly a home user, and most of them are loyal users in RT Mart. Taoxianda and Tmall supermarkets are mainly white-collar workers; Hungry belongs to a younger take-away group, mainly buying snacks and fruits.
In addition to the online digital port, RT Mart is also trying the community group buying mode to reach more users.
On the one hand, RT Mart cooperates with the rookie, and the rookie develops the rookie station webmaster into a group owner, allowing them to set up an operation community to buy a group, and then place an order in a small program, which is uniformly distributed to the community by RT Mart stores.
On the other hand, RT Mart has also set up a special team development team leader, and the business representative of E Road Development can also develop the team leader.
While expanding online sales ports, RT Mart has also implemented a new retail transformation for all stores, enabling them to operate online. The store used Alibaba Cloud POS machine and self-service cash register, which not only opened up the goods and inventory data with Ali, but also turned the store payment link into a digital contact for consumers.
In order to improve the picking efficiency, the picking in the store is completed within 20 minutes. The store installed a suspension system and deployed a quick pick-up warehouse.
Chen Yu' an explained: "Shop goods, especially fresh products and fast-moving consumer goods, are basically used online and offline. For goods with fast turnover, there may be cases where online customers place an order, the goods are bought by the store customers before they can pick up the goods, or the goods have been put into the shopping cart by the store customers, but the online inventory still shows the goods are available. In order to avoid similar shortages, we don't divide the long-tailed goods with slow turnover, and for the goods with fast turnover, we specially set up a quick picking warehouse for physical segmentation. At present, the out-of-stock rate of our shipments is around 0.6%. "
In order to ensure the efficient and smooth operation of online and offline omni-channel business, especially in RT Mart, where there are multiple retail ports on the line, connecting the distributed systems of the stores, RT Mart needs an intermediate system to realize online and offline docking and interaction.
When RT Mart Youxian App and E-Road Fa App were launched on 20 17, RT Mart established such an intermediate system, and called it RT Mart Zhongtai. The middle platform of this service is deployed on the hybrid cloud of RT Mart IDC+ third party cloud.
After receiving the investment from Ali, RT Mart accelerated the process of digitalization and intelligence, introduced Alibaba Cloud POS machines into stores and connected to Taobao's Taoxianda project, so it moved its business center to the hybrid cloud of IDC+ Alibaba Cloud to interact with Ali's center.
In the future, when the hybrid cloud becomes all Alibaba Cloud, the middle office of RT Mart business will also be concentrated in the cloud.
Now, the business desk interacts with RT Mart Youxian App, Hungry, Ali Zhongtai in real time at a second speed, and also interacts with the business systems of all stores to obtain data such as inventory, price, goods and logistics.
It's just that the ERP system in RT Mart stores is a stand-alone system, and there is no service capacity, so RT Mart has deployed a local system in each store as a transit point for the business center and store system.
Through the business center in the cloud, RT Mart has realized multi-channel business online at the same time, which can carry out unified resource management, data management, operation management and business management, effectively promoting the stable growth of the overall business. By the end of 20 19, the online retail business in RT Mart has achieved profitability, and the same-store sales growth in stores has also started to turn positive.
While the omni-channel new retail business is fruitful, RT Mart is also using digital and mobile means to reconstruct the bottom efficiency of stores.
In the past, due to the adoption of ERP system, the mobile management of stores was less. Every day, basically, a lot of reports are printed in the morning and distributed to the corresponding personnel in the store. They take the report to do the tasks listed above, and then send it back after all the tasks are completed.
Now, RT Mart uses PDA equipment to make stores receive goods, tally goods, put on shelves, pick goods, package, distribute goods and manage inventory in a mobile way.
"A lot of work can be assigned to the PDA of the corresponding person through the system. They receive the task and complete it, and then click on the report directly on the device. " Chen Yu 'an explained.
RT Mart has also developed an App for ordinary store employees, so that stores can check their sales and performance on their mobile phones at any time.
ERP system has basically realized the informationization of stores in RT Mart, and RT Mart has established a very strong commodity management capability by using the data deposited in the system. However, in addition to invoicing, other data, such as membership, are more often just data.
In 20 14, RT Mart launched flying cow net and started to do online. "We know that on the Internet, people and transactions are related, and they are transactions between a single person and him, so we need to extract all transactions." Chen Yu 'an said.
Coincidentally, when the big data technology was mature, RT Mart used the big data development framework to build a data intermediate platform on its own hybrid cloud. However, this development framework adopts open source system, which has certain security risks.
So at present, RT Mart is cooperating with Ali to rebuild the data intermediate platform on Alibaba Cloud by using Ali's DataWorks big data development platform and MaxCompute big data computing service.
It is expected that this year, RT Mart will first import relevant data such as membership, transactions and performance into the new data center. By then, RT Mart will be able to use more fine-grained online member portraits to achieve personalized and precise marketing.
With the help of Ali's products and tools, RT Mart can predict how many users are around the new store and in which areas. After opening a store, you can clearly know how much the surrounding users have developed, how penetration rate is, how often they buy, and which categories they prefer.
For online order fulfillment and delivery, RT Mart and Hummingbird cooperate with each other, and the whole process is completely driven by data.
When the RT Mart store system receives orders from multiple online ports, it will automatically assign the orders to the pickers, who will pick the goods according to the order information displayed on the PDA. After picking up the goods and packaging, the picker clicks Finish on PDA, and the order information will be automatically transmitted to the hummingbird intelligent dispatching system, and the system will automatically inform the rider to send the order.
Hummingbird customized the in-store delivery mode for RT Mart to improve the delivery efficiency and service quality. At present, the on-time delivery rate is 99%.
At the same time, the hummingbird system will collect multiple orders in the same area according to the order coverage area and distribution route, and hand them over to a rider for distribution, which not only greatly improves the distribution efficiency, but also increases the rider's income.
In Chen Yu 'an's view, the direction of IT technology development in the next decade is intelligence. Once the ability of digital intelligence has settled down in the company, there are many things that can be done.
Although RT Mart has a complete ERP system, which can produce many reports, these reports are only data and information. It is up to people to read these materials and information and then turn them into appropriate decisions.
Of course, decision-making is also divided into different levels, some of which belong to daily decision-making, some belong to business decision-making and some belong to strategic decision-making.
After realizing intelligence, daily and business decisions can be replaced, which will make the operation more efficient.
For example, there are two important things for RT Mart to do one-hour home business. First, the inventory should be accurate, because the customer will deliver the goods one hour after placing the order. Second, there must be enough manpower to deliver orders.
To meet these two conditions, it is necessary to reserve inventory and manpower in advance. However, how much is enough? To answer this question, RT Mart must forecast orders as accurately as possible.
At first, RT Mart predicted that all online orders were placed manually, one week in advance, one store at a time, with an accuracy rate of about 90%. Early last year, RT Mart began to try to use Ali's intelligent system to make predictions.
"In the beginning, intelligent prediction was a bit stupid, with an accuracy rate of 70%~80%, and sometimes only over 60%, because many decision-making factors need to be considered and data are constantly used for training." Wu Chunxiang said.
After nearly a year's adjustment and study, on April 1 this year, RT Mart began to use intelligent system to forecast the daily orders of each store, and the accuracy rate has exceeded that of manual work.
"Through accurate order forecasting, we can prepare inventory and manpower in advance, and our operational efficiency will be optimized. After that, we will continue to adjust the intelligent system and let it learn new things. I hope that the future forecast will reach the hourly level. " Wu Chunxiang added.
Chen Yu' an believes that intelligence brings efficiency improvement.
RT Mart is a dealer, with one end connected to the consumer and the other end connected to the supplier. It is like a pipe between two ends, and there are often places to pile up. How to use a more efficient system, so that there is no accumulation between the two ends, and the circulation is smooth, is what RT Mart has to do.
For example, at present, the interaction between stores and headquarters is daily. It may take two or three days for the headquarters to collect information and feed it back to the manufacturer, and then it may take a week for the manufacturer to deliver the goods. The information flow in this supply chain is actually very slow.
In the future, under the framework of internet and intelligence, if the information flow can become second-level, what impact it will bring to the whole supply chain and enterprise management is worth discussing.
Therefore, in the digital and intelligent transformation, what RT Mart will do next is to build a more active and intelligent IT system based on cloud architecture, and at the same time, use Ali's resources and capabilities to cultivate RT Mart's intelligent ability.
"When we have this ability, our decision-making will be faster than other retail enterprises. After a long time, the gap will get bigger and bigger. " Chen Yu 'an said.