The Second Half Of The Internet Industrial Internet To Build A Digital Clothing Industry Chain Becomes The Core

In August, nearly 80 garment factories in Lusong District, Zhuzhou City, Hunan Province announced their participation, which enabled the founders of "Zhiyi 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 Clothes New Quality Demonstration Factory" in the Baiguan Garment Industrial Park of Lusong District, and more than 60 garment factories have signed contracts. It became their core work in August to recruit staff and go to various places to discuss cooperation. Long Zhi said that with the assistance of the local government, he expected to facilitate the complete transformation of the old clothing base as soon as possible.

Pain spot

Zhuzhou is the largest clothing distribution center in central and southern China. The local clothing market has grown from the station roadside stall in the early years to the largest clothing wholesale market group in central and southern China with 38 professional markets and nearly 10000 business entities today. This is also Zhuzhou's second industry with a total scale of more than 100 billion yuan.

With the advent of e-commerce era, this industry has undergone earth shaking changes. The supply and demand of clothing no longer follow the simple closed-loop of single design, batch manufacturing and sales of manufacturers. In the user centered consumption era, mass production has been replaced by personalized customized production, and the amount of money for mass production sales gambling (based on production and sales) has been replaced by small batch test quick return (based on sales and production).

The production cycle is getting shorter and shorter, and the quality demand is getting stronger, which puts forward higher requirements for the production precision, process control, cost control, supply and demand information circulation efficiency and other capabilities of garment factories.

The subject of cost reduction and efficiency increase and internal potential tapping is before every factory. Local enterprises all understand the urgency of transformation, but few find a breakthrough direction.

A few years ago, at the sales end, Long Zhi, who founded a large clothing brand company in Guangzhou, was also in great trouble.

Long Zhi used to be the senior director of NetEase UGC and the head of NetEase News App operation. In 2015, he founded the largest large-scale female community platform in China, with more than 5 million accurate large-scale female users, and invested tens of millions of yuan in e-commerce industry. Starting from incubating big online celebrity anchors, we blazed a new trail into the big clothing market.

At the beginning, life was very comfortable. Slowly, however, the crisis began to approach. With the arrival of the era of live broadcast, the "small order quick reaction" mode has impacted the traditional clothing supply chain. The new reform has put forward higher requirements for the factory's production accuracy, visibility and controllability of links, cost control, and information flow efficiency on both sides of supply and demand. Thus, a new term - C2M (Customer to Factory) mode appears. Users directly connect with manufacturers, that is, consumers directly arrive at factories, emphasizing the connection between manufacturing and consumers.

The fierce competition makes the time that the platform gives stores to deliver goods shorter and shorter, and flow restriction and score deduction become common. The supply chain involves many links such as raw materials, clothing, printing and dyeing. The chain is long and the practitioners are scattered, so they cannot keep up with the fast pace from receiving orders to output. However, they often ask businesses for more capital turnover.

Under the double attack, they had to withdraw.

Meet again in the transformation of an industry

When Long Zhi was struggling in business, He Bingjie, a classmate of Hunan University of Technology and a doctor of computer science, focused on industrial Internet. Under the leadership of the tutor, he has successively won the second prize of Hunan Science and Technology Progress Award, "National Industrial Internet Excellent Solution Provider", "Hunan Industrial Internet Platform Enterprise" and other honors. Its main product is an information support and collection system loaded on various industrial equipment. Through the transmission and analysis of information, it provides a production management scheme for the person in charge of the enterprise.

He Bingjie and his tutor patiently recommended their technical products to enterprises in Zhuzhou. Although the technology is good, the project progress is still not smooth due to the lack of product landing scenarios. He never thought that the team's research results could bring thinking and turning point to his classmate Long Zhi.

Long Zhi and He Bingjie are not the same major, but they are like old friends at first sight. The two got acquainted with the recruitment activity of the student news agency of the school newspaper, and then they started their first business - a paid magazine for college students.

"After graduation, everyone will walk into the society. I want to provide a platform to learn about the society in advance, and magazines are the carrier. This is why we must pay. If we think something is valuable, someone must be willing to pay for it." Long Zhi said that the magazine was still in the conceptual stage, and they persuaded four advertisers, The first batch of 1500 magazines were printed and soon sold out.

This is undoubtedly a bold and successful attempt in the real environment where domestic university newspapers and journals are free of charge and are all supported by the government. Many people benefited and were encouraged.

Many of the students who participated in the founding of the magazine later became university professors, media directors, financial investors and technical directors of central enterprises. He Pinjie is one of them.

Later, Long Zhi was admitted by the newspaper and officially entered the media. He Bingjie continued to read master's and doctoral studies and devoted himself to 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 the research achievements of the student team, and also saw its weakness - this information management system can use digital technology to deeply reconstruct the traditional clothing manufacturing industry, and create a flexible supply chain through the digitalization of the whole industry chain. However, selling each set of product and equipment alone cannot bring its potential into play, because it is unable to participate in enterprise management in depth and does not take into account the product use scenarios, so it is difficult for the market to land.

After discussion, they focused on the integration and improvement of Zhuzhou garment industry chain.

New model brings a new world of industry

Hunan Yuanying, a local old brand clothing enterprise in Zhuzhou, has become the first enterprise to take advantage of the cooperation between clothing selection and Zhiyi technology. The landing of the 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.

In the factory workshop, the cutting bed reciprocates, the workers are attentive, and the overhead hanging moves in an orderly manner. On the surface, it seems that there is no difference from the traditional clothing factory.

However, in the background, the whole production process of the factory, such as material purchase, material use, worker labor, product quantity and even finished product delivery, has already generated data one by one, which can be checked in real time through mobile phones.

Garment production is "non-standard production", with complex processes and tight processes. Many links are inseparable from people, which makes its "digitalization" difficult and complex. The old way of "production depends on handwork and decision-making depends on experience" has been going for decades.

"It turns out that there are at least 15 times of work and production delays caused by raw material procurement mistakes every year. Although a lot of electronic equipment has been installed, the data cannot be used in series," said Zhong Jianxiang, the person in charge of the demonstration factory and Hunan Yuanying Clothing.

In short, the transformation of the demonstration plant revolves around two main lines.

On the one hand, information means are used to replace extensive labor, such as data statistics and consumption of various processes, to support the payroll accounting system to replace manual payroll, and the inventory warehousing system to replace manual counting.

On the other hand, we should break through the data barriers of various electronic equipment, so that factory data can be connected and concentrated. At present, under the framework of the smart clothes platform, the demonstration factory has realized the data control of the whole process from design, order placement, production, purchase and delivery, and connected with the third-party hanging, cutting machine and sewing machine systems. The factory has realized transparent production.

After all the process data, capacity data and production line data are connected, all the data will be summarized on one screen. From the last 12 hours to weeks and months, from the planned output of the work order to the completion progress to the qualification rate, it is clear at a glance. "Now we can make orders and arrange production through mobile phones. All decisions are supported by basic data and will not rely on experience as before," Zhong said.

Various production indicators of the demonstration plant have improved significantly. The average processing time of conversion orders has increased from 30 minutes per order to 6 minutes per order, and the per capita output has increased from 39 pieces per day to 76 pieces per day.

According to an internal magazine sponsored by Zhuzhou Municipal Bureau of Industry and Information Technology, the technological "digital" transformation has solved the pain points of local garment processing enterprises. Industrial chain enterprises take technological transformation as the core, accelerate the digital and intelligent process of the garment and textile industry, and lead the industry to achieve a magnificent transformation from "backward technology" to "new quality productivity".

A government official in Lusong District said frankly: "This is an industry platform that has not been seen in Zhuzhou for many years!" He believed that the current industry quality improvement and enterprise transformation are facing new challenges, and more intellectual and technological forces are urgently needed to accurately help enterprises and optimize industries.

Industry upgrading

Long Zhi said that at present, Zhiyi Platform has carried out strategic cooperation with the team of Academician Sun Jiaguang of Tsinghua University and the team of Wang Jianmin, Dean of School of Software of Tsinghua University, to carry out in-depth collaborative research and development in the fields of industrial Internet data security, as well as the development of time series database of the Internet of Things.

When multiple links in Zhuzhou garment industry chain are visible, transparent and data sharing, efficiency improvement is inevitable.

"That can make the parallel operation of multiple orders more orderly and save time. The market sales data and the factory production link are connected, so that the factory can flexibly schedule production according to the off-season and peak season, and businesses can find factories that meet their own tastes." Zhong Jianxiang said.

According to relevant data from the National Bureau of Statistics, from January to July this year, there were 13641 enterprises above the designated size in China's clothing industry (with annual main business income of 20 million yuan and above). In the domestic garment industry, there are 170000 enterprises in the garment manufacturing sector alone, as well as a large number of enterprises in the raw materials, surface and auxiliary materials, printing and dyeing sectors. On the one hand, the production pressure of small, medium-sized and micro enterprises with such a large scale can not be ignored when the industry changes dramatically. On the other hand, e-commerce enterprises such as Alibaba, JD and Pinduoduo rely on massive consumer data to empower factories, manufacturing enterprises such as Sany Heavy Industry and Haier take the lead in transforming production lines, and a large number of 5G, AI and cloud computing enterprises have taken the lead in "Internet of Everything".

In the second half of the Internet, a "factory revolution" had already begun.

Long Zhi believes that the goal of "digital intelligence" transformation of small and medium-sized enterprises is not only to access electronic equipment and collect data, but also to allow data to provide sufficient support for operations, and ultimately form their own data assets; On the other hand, thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises in the clothing industry will be gathered together to transform them into "digital and intelligent" boutique factories, and finally build a digital and intelligent integrated service platform for textile and clothing in Zhuzhou, which can not only meet the needs of many large e-commerce platforms, but also provide the basis for the government to issue policies based on the large-scale user data of multiple industrial links of the smart clothing platform, Provide industrial chain financial support for small and medium-sized garment enterprises.

"There are thousands of garment factories in Panyu District, and there are many surface and auxiliary material enterprises in Foshan, all of which are willing to cooperate. If we can join, our platform will become three-dimensional in the whole industry." The two founders said that their goal is to build an Internet platform for the textile and clothing industry, and open up the production of raw materials in the upstream, the circulation and service of finished fabrics in the midstream, As well as all links of the downstream garment manufacturing industry chain, it helps garment enterprises stride forward in the direction of digitalization, intelligence and clustering.

(Source: China Youth Daily)