Original title: Take advantage of digital and intelligent convenience stores to strive for "freshness"
The industry believes that the future commodity trend of convenience stores is gradually clear, that is, taking fresh food as the core, and pursuing standardization and diversification. For this reason, convenience store enterprises are constantly strengthening the supply chain to improve the quality of goods, enrich the variety of fresh food, meet the dining needs of consumers in different periods of time, and achieve seasonal differentiation of self-developed goods. However, fresh food is not a good business, which greatly tests the refined management ability of merchants and store staff. Some of the leading convenience store enterprises boldly use digital tools to realize the intellectualization of the fresh food supply chain, thus realizing the overall improvement of the store operating efficiency.
Kaihui Convenience, a famous chain convenience store brand in Guizhou, has more than 900 stores in total, and most of the stores are equipped with distinctive fresh food, because the fresh food category has the characteristics of high frequency, rigid demand and high gross profit margin, and can continuously drive the sales of other goods in the store. However, the problem of fresh food business continues to challenge the operational capacity of physical retail - too much production, resulting in loss of reporting; The production is too little and the display is not full, which affects the transformation; Premature production affects the taste.
Kaihui Convenience, together with Haiding, a digital solution service provider, realizes the intellectualization of fresh food production through the dual wheel drive of "algorithm+process", integrates various data such as historical sales, inventory, promotion and weather, forms future oriented accurate sales forecast, pushes intelligent decision-making results to the execution terminal, and scientifically decomposes them into production tasks by time period. At the same time, the implementation results are digitized to achieve a closed loop.
The strengthening of intelligence enables fresh food to be sold in the best taste period, ensuring sufficient fresh food display when customer traffic arrives, and improving sales; Driven by the algorithm, the optimal production quantity of intelligent push reduces the loss reporting rate. The data shows that the sales growth rate of smart stores with high execution figures is 48.16%, nearly 20% higher than that of smart stores with low execution figures. In addition, the loss reporting rate of high performance smart stores decreased by 1.05% while their sales grew the most.
Due to the characteristics of fresh food short guarantee commodities, such as short shelf life, easy loss, frequent replenishment, and complex scenarios, Qianhui, a convenience store brand rooted in Changsha for more than 20 years, has encountered the problem of replenishment in many stores in the process of promoting the operation of fresh food short guarantee commodities, which often leads to the shortage and loss of commodities due to improper replenishment decisions. The main challenges include that it is difficult to grasp the timing of fresh food replenishment, determine the quantity of replenishment, make inventory management difficult due to short shelf life, and make replenishment decisions manually, which are costly and prone to errors.
For the pain point of Qianhui, digital solution service provider Dian San launched intelligent supply chain services for it. Through big data analysis and simulation of the business data, sales impact factors, sales trends, demand fluctuations and other multidimensional factors of Qianhui stores, the optimal replenishment/purchase decisions are generated in real time, and orders are placed with data intelligence driving instead of manual experience. While ensuring the sales volume of goods and the fullness of the layout, it effectively reduces losses, helps Qianhui successfully solve the problem of replenishing fresh food with short-term guarantee, and comprehensively improves the operating efficiency of the store.
One month after using the intelligent supply chain service, the return rate of fresh food under short-term guarantee in the pilot store of Qianhui dropped from 6.1% to 5.6%, and the return rate dropped by 8% month on month. Moreover, the intelligent replenishment service reduced the workload and difficulty of fresh food replenishment in the store, reduced the dependence on the personal ability of employees, replaced artificial experience with data intelligence drive, and realized the double upgrade of replenishment efficiency and quality.
Pei Liang, honorary president of China Chain Store Association, said that digitalization will play an increasingly important role in building commodity power. "Capturing customer demand, commodity development and management, store ordering, inventory management, promotion and price management can all be optimized with the help of digital and AI technology." At present, there are great differences in the degree of digital application of convenience stores. Most enterprises are still at the basic application level, and mainly rely on third-party institutions for development and implementation. With the rapid development of cloud computing and AI technology, the specialization level of third-party solutions is also in rapid iteration and upgrading. (Reporter Yan Mi)
