using the industrial internet to create a digital clothing industry chain platform - big intelligence empowers small workshops to take off
2024-09-19
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he pinjie (first from left) and long zhi (first from right), the two founders of zhiyi technology. photo provided by the interviewee
in august, nearly 80 garment factories in lusong district, zhuzhou city, hunan province expressed their intention to join, which allowed the founders of "smart clothing technology" long zhi and he pinjie to once again verify the market popularity of the new industrial model.
since june this year, they have launched the "smart clothing new quality demonstration factory" in baiguan garment industrial park in lusong district, and more than 60 garment factories have signed contracts. recruiting employees and visiting various places to discuss cooperation have become their core work in august. long zhi said that with the assistance of the local government, he hopes to promote the complete transformation of this old garment base as soon as possible.
pain points
zhuzhou is the largest clothing distribution center in central and south china. the local clothing market has developed from roadside stalls at the station in the early years to the largest clothing wholesale market group in central and south china with 38 professional markets and nearly 10,000 business entities. this is also the second industry in zhuzhou with a total scale of over 100 billion yuan.
with the advent of the e-commerce era, the industry has undergone tremendous changes. the supply and demand of clothing no longer follows the simple closed loop of single design, mass production and sales by manufacturers. in the user-centered consumption era, mass production is replaced by personalized customization, and mass production and sales for hot products (production determines sales) is replaced by small batch testing and quick return of orders (sales determine production).
the production cycle is getting shorter and shorter, and the quality requirements are getting stronger and stronger, which puts higher demands on the clothing factory's production accuracy, process control, cost control, and supply and demand information flow efficiency.
the issues of reducing costs, increasing efficiency and tapping internal potential are facing every factory. local companies understand the urgency of transformation, but few have found a breakthrough direction.
a few years ago, on the sales side, long zhi, who founded a plus-size clothing brand company in guangzhou, was also struggling.
long zhi was netease's senior ugc director and head of netease news app operations. in 2015, he founded the largest plus-size women's community platform in china, with more than 5 million accurate plus-size female users, and invested tens of millions of yuan to enter the e-commerce industry. starting from incubating plus-size internet celebrities, he took a unique approach to enter the plus-size clothing market.
at the beginning, life was comfortable. however, slowly, the crisis began to approach. with the advent of the live broadcast era, the "small order quick response" model has impacted the traditional clothing supply chain. the new changes have put forward higher requirements for the factory's production accuracy, link visibility and control, cost control, and information flow efficiency on both the supply and demand sides. so a new term emerged - c2m (customer to manufactory, editor's note) model, where users directly connect to manufacturers, that is, consumers directly connect to factories, emphasizing the connection between manufacturing and consumers.
fierce competition has led to platforms giving shops shorter and shorter delivery times, with traffic restrictions and deductions becoming commonplace. the supply chain involves multiple links, including raw materials, garment making, printing and dyeing. the chain is long and the practitioners are scattered. they are unable to keep up with the fast pace from ordering to production, but often require merchants to have more capital turnover.
caught between two attacks, they had no choice but to withdraw.
reunion in the midst of an industry transformation
while long zhi was struggling in the business world, his classmate he pinjie from hunan university of technology, a phd student in computer science, focused on the industrial internet. under the guidance of his mentor, he won the second prize of hunan science and technology progress, and was awarded the honors of "national industrial internet excellent solution provider" and "hunan industrial internet platform enterprise". its main product is an information support and collection system loaded on various industrial equipment, which provides production management solutions for enterprise leaders through the transmission and analysis of information.
he pinjie and his mentor patiently recommended their technology products to companies in zhuzhou. although the technology was good, the project was still not going smoothly due to the lack of product landing scenarios. he never thought that the team's research results could bring thinking and turning points to his classmate long zhi.
although long zhi and he pinjie were not in the same major, they hit it off right away. the two met at a recruitment event for the school newspaper's student news agency, and then they started their first business - founding a paid magazine for college students.
"everyone will enter society after graduation. i want to provide a platform to understand society in advance, and the magazine is the carrier. this is why you have to pay for it. if you think something is valuable, someone will be willing to pay for it." long zhi said that when the magazine was still in the conceptual stage, they convinced four advertisers. after school started, the first batch of 1,500 copies of the magazine were printed and quickly sold out.
in the current environment where university newspapers and magazines in china are free and all rely on official support, this is undoubtedly a bold and successful attempt. many people have benefited and been encouraged.
many of the students who participated in the founding of the magazine later became university professors, media executives, financial investors, and technical executives of central enterprises. he pinjie is one of them.
later, long zhi was admitted by the newspaper as an exception and officially entered the media, while he pinjie studied for a master's and doctoral degree and immersed himself in scientific research and invention. coincidentally, more than 10 years later, they met again in the transformation of an industry.
long zhi saw the potential of his team's research results, but also saw its weaknesses - this information management system can use digital technology to deeply reconstruct the traditional clothing manufacturing industry and create a flexible supply chain through the digitization of the entire industry chain. however, selling each set of product equipment alone cannot realize its potential, because it cannot deeply participate in enterprise management and does not take into account the product usage scenarios, making it difficult to land in the market.
after discussion, they turned their attention to the integration and quality improvement of zhuzhou's clothing industry chain.
new model brings a new world to the industry
hunan yuanying clothing, a local and established clothing company in zhuzhou, chose to cooperate with zhiyi technology and became the first company to try it out. the establishment of this demonstration factory has become an important window for investors and government departments to observe the digital transformation of small and medium-sized clothing factories in zhuzhou.
inside the factory workshop, the cutting machines move back and forth, the workers are focused, and the hangings above their heads flow in an orderly manner. on the surface, it seems to be no different from a traditional garment factory.
however, in the background, the entire factory production process, including material procurement, material usage, worker labor, product quantity and even finished product delivery, has already generated data that can be checked in real time via mobile phones.
clothing production is "non-standard production" with complex processes and tight procedures. many links cannot be separated from people, making it difficult and complicated to "digitalize". the old way of "production relying on manual labor and decision-making relying on experience" has been followed for decades.
"it turns out that there are at least 15 delays in work and production every year due to errors in raw material procurement alone. although a lot of electronic equipment has been installed, the data cannot be used in series," said zhong jianxiang, head of the demonstration factory and head of hunan yuanying clothing.
in short, the transformation of the demonstration factory revolves around two main lines.
on the one hand, information means are used to replace extensive manual work, such as statistics and consumption of data from various processes to support wage accounting systems to replace manual wage calculations, and inventory warehousing systems to replace manual counting of goods.
on the other hand, the data barriers of various electronic devices are broken down, so that factory data can be connected and centralized. at present, under the smart clothing platform architecture, the demonstration factory has achieved data control over the entire process from design, ordering, production, procurement, and delivery, and has connected with third-party hanging, cutting, and sewing machine systems, enabling transparent production in the factory.
after the process data, capacity data, and production line data are all connected, all data are summarized on one screen, from the last 12 hours to the week to the month, from the planned output of the work order to the completion progress and the qualified rate, etc., all can be clearly seen at a glance. "now we can take orders, make orders, and schedule production through mobile phones. all decisions have basic data support, and we will no longer rely solely on experience as before." zhong jianxiang said.
the demonstration factory has seen significant improvements in various production indicators. the average processing time for conversion orders has increased from 30 minutes per order to 6 minutes per order, and the average unit output per person has increased from 39 pieces per day to 76 pieces per day.
an internal publication sponsored by the zhuzhou municipal bureau of industry and information technology stated that the resulting technological "digital" transformation has solved the pain points of local garment processing companies. with technological transformation as the core, companies in the industrial chain have accelerated the digitalization and intelligentization of the garment and textile industry, leading the industry to achieve a gorgeous transformation from "technological backwardness" to "new quality productivity."
a government official from lusong district said bluntly: "this is an industrial platform that zhuzhou has not had for many years!" he believes that the current industrial quality improvement and corporate transformation are facing new challenges, and more wisdom and technological power are urgently needed to accurately help enterprises and optimize industries.
industry quality improvement and industrial upgrading
long zhi introduced that at present, the zhiyi platform has launched strategic cooperation with the team of academician sun jiaguang of tsinghua university and the team of wang jianmin, dean of the school of software of tsinghua university, to carry out in-depth collaborative research and development in the fields of industrial internet data security and internet of things time series database development.
when multiple links in zhuzhou's clothing industry chain become visible, transparent, and data is shared, efficiency improvement is inevitable.
"that way, multiple orders can be processed in parallel in a more orderly manner and save more time. market sales data will be connected with the factory's production and manufacturing links. factories can flexibly schedule production according to the off-season and peak season, and merchants can also find factories that suit their tastes." said zhong jianxiang.
according to relevant data from the national bureau of statistics, from january to july this year, there were 13,641 enterprises above designated size (with annual main business income of 20 million yuan or more) in my country's clothing industry. in the domestic garment industry, there are 170,000 enterprises in the garment manufacturing link alone, as well as a large number of enterprises in the raw materials, surface and auxiliary materials, printing and dyeing and other links. on the one hand, the production pressure of such large-scale small and medium-sized enterprises cannot be ignored when the industry undergoes huge changes. on the other hand, e-commerce companies such as alibaba, jd.com, and pinduoduo rely on massive consumer data to empower factories, and manufacturing companies such as sany heavy industry and haier take the lead in transforming production lines, as well as a large number of 5g, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing companies rush to the "internet of everything".
in the second half of the internet, a "factory revolution" has already begun.
long zhi believes that the goal of "digitalization" to transform small and medium-sized enterprises is not only to install electronic equipment and collect data, but also to allow the data to provide sufficient support for operations and ultimately form the company's own data assets; on another level, thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises in the clothing industry will be gathered together and transformed into "digitalized" boutique factories, ultimately building a vertically integrated digital service platform for zhuzhou's textile and clothing industry. this will not only meet the needs of many large e-commerce platforms, but the scale of user data from multiple industrial links on the smart clothing platform can also provide a basis for the government to introduce policies and provide industrial chain financial support for small and medium-sized clothing companies.
"there are thousands of garment factories in panyu district and many fabric and auxiliary material companies in foshan, and they all have the willingness to cooperate. if they can join, our platform will become three-dimensional in the entire industry." the two founders said that their goal is to build an internet platform for the textile and garment industry, to connect all links in the industrial chain, including upstream raw material production, midstream finished fabric circulation and services, and downstream garment manufacturing, to help garment companies make a leap forward in the direction of digitalization, intelligence, and clustering.
china youth daily and china youth network reporter hong kefei source: china youth daily
(source: china youth daily)
