Enter Alibaba'S "Rhinoceros" Platform To Create A New Garment Manufacturing Industry

Order 100 pieces and deliver them within 7 days at the earliest. Alibaba builds a new manufacturing platform -

A rhinoceros in garment industry

After operating in a state of secrecy for three years, Alibaba's rhinoceros intelligent manufacturing factory has attracted great attention. As the landing application of "new manufacturing" in Alibaba's "five new" strategy, rhino intelligent manufacturing uses digital technology to deeply reconstruct the traditional garment manufacturing industry, and helps small and medium-sized businesses to achieve on-demand production, production by sales and rapid delivery. At the same time, rhinoceros intelligent manufacturing gives "smart brain" to production, creates highly flexible supply chain capacity, realizes the digitalization of production end-to-end and full link, and also provides reference for the transformation of manufacturing industry.

On September 16, Alibaba Group's new manufacturing platform, rhinoceros intelligent manufacturing, which had been kept secret for three years, was officially unveiled. On the same day, the rhinoceros intelligent manufacturing factory of "No.1 Project" was officially put into operation. The factory shortens the process of ordering 1000 pieces and delivering them in 15 days to 100 pieces and 7 days, providing small quantity, multi batch, high efficiency and high quality production options for small and medium-sized enterprises.

The appearance of "rhinoceros factory" means that after "new retail", Alibaba's "five new strategies" will come to the next city. Alibaba will apply digital capabilities to industrial manufacturing, further ease the inventory pressure of small and medium-sized garment enterprises, reduce the threshold of entrepreneurship, and explore a new model of digital transformation of China's industry.

Meet small orders and fast production

What is the difference between the mysterious rhinoceros factory and the traditional manufacturing industry?

"Last night it was sold out. Let's go after it today.". When visiting the rhinoceros factory, an Economic Daily reporter met a brand leader of the famous anchor "lieerbei" team. He said that after the live pre-sale of Taobao last night, he placed a small order for 200 pieces of rhinoceros overnight, "these clothes will be worn on consumers from all over the country in seven days, just in time for the new autumn clothes." A few months ago, a batch of "rhino baby" T-shirts were customized. "With 12 constellations, different colors and sizes, only 5000 pieces are produced. There are hardly any factories in the market that can take orders until the rhinoceros factory appears." The person in charge said.

In the "rhinoceros factory" workshop, more than 10 such small orders were started at the same time. Different brands of shirts, T-shirts and other autumn products were produced in turn on the same production line. But at this time, other large factories in China will see that the clothing is being produced next spring. By comparison, rhino factory has obvious "new manufacturing" style: small orders, seasonal styles, ready to sell, and rich brands.

The core competence of "rhinoceros factory" is "customized on demand, with 100 pieces ordered and the fastest delivery within 7 days". In short, it only takes 7 days from placing an order to wearing it on consumers, which is 7 days faster than the production and sales cycle of famous fast fashion brand Zara. To know that the past autumn clothing is actually the summer production of "futures", less than 2 months, more than 6 months. "Order production two months in advance, but who knows what will sell after two months?" in Yao Kun, CEO of tmall clothing brand cotton warehouse, the production arrangement of traditional clothing industry is a bit of a gamble.

When garment manufacturing is no longer stupid and thick, it can be customized and flexible manufacturing, which brings great help to the production and operation of small and medium-sized businesses. After Taobao fashion women's clothing brand Xiaochong became the first batch of pilot cooperative businesses of "new manufacturing", it has been a "repeat customer" of "rhinoceros factory", and there is basically no inventory pressure. "New manufacturing" sounds "high and high". In fact, it is a smart sharing factory that undertakes small and urgent orders. So most of the customers are small and medium-sized businesses, especially new e-commerce brands. " Wu Xuegang, CEO of rhino Intelligent Manufacturing Co., Ltd., said that rhino intelligent manufacturing hopes to liberate small and medium-sized enterprises from heavy production, so that entrepreneurs can focus on their own advantages and business innovation, and also help them build the key ability to compete with large enterprises.

To be a factory is to be a platform

Rhino intelligent manufacturing is not only a factory, but also a platform. The digital chemical factory said that it specially receives small orders and serves small and medium-sized businesses, industrial belts and entrepreneurs. To achieve this goal, what is the foundation of "rhinoceros intelligent creation"?

The reporter learned that "rhinoceros intelligent manufacturing" has realized the digitalization of production end-to-end and full link, so it has a highly flexible supply chain capability, which can produce on demand, determine production by sales and deliver quickly. It can directly connect the data insight of the sales side with the design and production side, and can accurately predict how many pieces of a single product can be sold in the next month. This innovation mode can also reduce the waste of resources in the chain of clothing and textile industry, effectively reduce the inventory cost, and reduce the threshold for small and medium-sized enterprises to start their own businesses.

Behind the innovation model, "rhinoceros intelligent manufacturing" provides new technology and new energy development results. It is understood that 60% of the members of Alibaba's new manufacturing team are engaged in technology development. The "brain" with powerful data analysis supports the platform's production process and flexibly mobilizes production capacity. Among them, edge computing, machine learning, image recognition and other technologies are the pillars, and order requirements can be accurately distributed to all production links through the Internet of things technology.

These innovative capabilities are making the clothing industry more sensitive, breaking the traditional clothing production order cycle is long, relying on mass centralized production and other constraints, to adapt to the small batch, rapid response of personalized production needs. Not only small and medium-sized garment manufacturers, but also entrepreneurs, anchors and designers on Taobao platform will benefit from it.

At present, with the further deepening of digital technology, digital economy has penetrated from the field of consumption to the field of production, and extended from the virtual economy to the real economy. The 14th meeting of the Central Committee for comprehensive deepening reform stressed that "with intelligent manufacturing as the main direction of attack, we should accelerate the innovation and development of industrial Internet, and accelerate the fundamental transformation of manufacturing production mode and enterprise form". Therefore, as a representative of "new manufacturing" and "digital chemical plant", rhino factory combines cloud computing, Internet of things, artificial intelligence and other technologies to form a strong intelligent manufacturing capacity, and the production and operation efficiency has reached 4 times of the industry average level. "Rhino factory strives to combine the advantages of China's Internet and manufacturing industry, and accurately connect the supply and demand sides with data-driven, so as to provide reference for the exploration of Intelligent Manufacturing in the digital era." Wu Xuegang said.

Why aim at the clothing industry

In 2016, Alibaba founder Ma Yun proposed that in the next 30 years, the development of "five new" - new retail, new manufacturing, new finance, new technology and new energy will profoundly affect the future of China, the world and everyone. As an important part of Alibaba's exploration of deep digitalization on the supply side, why does new manufacturing choose garment manufacturing as a breakthrough?

Back in August 2017, Alibaba Group launched the rhinoceros intelligent manufacturing project. As for which industry the rhinoceros should be launched, Zhang Yong, chairman of the board of directors and CEO of Alibaba, and the rhinoceros team reached three consensus: firstly, the industry should focus on a large industry; secondly, the industry should have a deep "pain point"; secondly, the industry should have a deep "pain point"; Third, Alibaba has a comparative advantage in this matter.

At that time, China's clothing industry had the top three trillion yuan in scale. At the same time, the unique fashion attribute of clothing industry makes its product life cycle long and waste phenomenon prominent. For a long time, the clothing industry has been based on the mode of production and sales. There are a series of "pain points" in the production and supply chain of small and medium-sized enterprises, such as the difficulty in predicting the pre-sale, the difficulty in quick response, and the difficulty in digesting inventory. But in the clothing industry, it can collapse.

Although there are many small workshops in the clothing industry to accept small orders, there is a lack of intelligent platform for sustainable acceptance of small orders and rapid production, which is just an opportunity for Alibaba to take advantage of the situation. As the sales volume of tmall Taobao clothing platform is more than one trillion yuan, Alibaba can use the platform digital technology to carry out consumption insight, sales forecast and design, open up the production end, realize the upstream and downstream interconnection of the supply chain, predict the future sales volume of a single product, and greatly reduce the threshold for merchants to launch popular money. The small batch and fast response digital flexible supply chain of "rhino factory" can also reduce the trial and error cost and inventory pressure of enterprises to the greatest extent, and improve the risk resistance ability of small and medium-sized enterprises. At the same time, the ability of intelligent manufacturing and digital service is also the advantage of Alibaba.

"Today, all walks of life are moving towards digitalization and intellectualization in an all-round way, and the use of digital technology innovation has become a social consensus." Zhang Yong said that facing the future, digitalization will become a new ability for small and medium-sized enterprises, brands and all walks of life, and even more a new ability of the times.