When the post-85s in the factory “touched the net”, Yiwu Express Packaging Factory started an alternative rush.
Editor’s note: This article is from the WeChat public account “Edge Code Story” (ID: tech-kk), author: Xiaoyu.
Yiwu, Zhejiang, a city of express delivery and a city of packing boxes.
In 2020, 24.69 million couriers will be sent from Yiwu to all parts of the country every day. In the past year alone, the newly added production line can create 30 to 40 million small express packages a day. Since the beginning of this year, the low-price competition in the express delivery industry has triggered a blowout, and has also triggered the expansion of express packaging plants’ production capacity. But this has always been an industry with a very low degree of informatization.
In the early years, the owner of the packing box factory relied on handwritten digital faxes to do business. Every month, tens to millions of business transactions, from placing orders, delivering goods, and checking bills, all relied on handwriting. Informatization is coming here slowly and urgently. Until 2021, with the introduction of new technologies, traditional packaging companies have finally started to stumble into the Internet.
Master Tian, the oldest employee in the factory, has been making packaging for more than 20 years. More than 20 years of factory life has given him rough and dark skin, a loud voice and a casual personality. This is an “occupational disease” left by the factory. If you don’t speak loudly, people will not hear you.
In February 1998, after the Spring Festival ended, the fellow introduced Master Tian into the first factory and entered the packaging industry by mistake. It was the first time that he had “entered the company in a straightforward manner”. It was of great significance to him. In Fujian, he worked as a small worker on a construction site and as a door guard in a factory. He felt that they were all jobs with little technical content. This time, Master Tian decided to work hard.
This upright company can be called a bad environment at that time. The factory’s machinery was running, the exhaust pipes were blowing towards the ground, and all the dust on the ground was lifted into the sky. After working all day, I touched my nose. It’s dark, and it’s hot in summer and crowded with people, and it’s “terribly stuffy”. The machine is also noisy. Two people have to be close to each other to talk. Some people have to plug their ears with tissues.
Master Tian cherishes this job, When he first entered the factory, the leader was not worried about handing over the work of operating the machine to these hairy boys. First, he started as an apprentice, sweeping the floor, sorting the materials, and taking the initiative to help wherever he moved. When there is a master operating the machine, Hold on to the side and watch. After watching it for a year and a half, Master Tian was familiar with the operation, and the foreman of the workshop felt that he was doing things very seriously, so he got him on the machine for the first time and controlled it by himself.
According to the supply list, “the paper is thick or thin, kraft paper or cardboard paper. According to the needs of customers, we put this paper on the machine. After high temperature and compression, the cardboard becomes soft. It can be pressed into a fixed shape,” from a one-and-a-half-height paper tube weighing hundreds of kilograms to the corrugated paper of a packing box.
Starting as an apprentice, then the captain, the team leader, and the foreman. In 2006, the scale of the factory has not developed and expanded. “That kind of old factory, just a few fixed customers, did not think about me. How big we need to expand and how many customers we need to expand.” He decided to leave the factory that he had been doing for eight years and came to Zhejiang from Fujian.
In the past few years, the packaging industry has developed slowly and steadily. Since the early 1990s, when Master Tian first entered the industry, it was also a period when the packaging industry slowly emerged. In the early days, factory machinery and equipment were not as advanced as they are today. Most of them were semi-automated. One tile line required dozens of people. The market was not very competitive, and it was a profitable business. After 2000, as market competition intensified, equipment had to be updated, efficiency increased, and labor costs decreased.
In 2006, when Master Tian moved from Fujian to Zhejiang, he already had mechanized equipment. Like Master Tian, most of the people who entered the industry were friends and friends, and fellow villagers. “At that time, we didn’t have the skills. Talent enters the factory, learns a craft, can mix and eat.”
In 2008, business was particularly good. When we waited in the factory, there were orders proactively looking for them. “We don’t need sales staff to go outside to run customers. It’s all customers who call or come to the door to place orders.” Some The reputation of the company is not good, and the funds are not enough. “People won’t give you, he is picking customers here because there are too many customers.”
Even old customers who have worked together for many years do not accept the extension of the billing period, and cash will be delivered soon. “His goods are in short supply. It is not a long-term customer, he can’t do it for you.”
The planning department is responsible for receiving orders. As usual, a production line can have a production capacity of about 80,000 square meters per day, and the planning department can receive more than 200,000 orders a day. “Obviously, the orders received in one day cannot be produced, and they are already fully loaded. Now.” The boss at the timeSeeing business opportunities, the two production lines have stockpiled tens of thousands of tons of paper. All employees work in two shifts. They have to start work during the day and night, and produce 24 hours a day. “It is equivalent to doubling the production capacity at once.”
Because of the good days of 2008, more and more people have entered the packaging industry. Now the owner of Fengshou Packaging Factory, Zhou Ran (pseudonym), used to do business in the construction industry. Huang Binbin, his nephew who has been in the packaging industry for several years, tried his best to persuade him when he returned to his hometown for the New Year. The future of the packaging industry is good. “How much money does this boss make, and how fast the development is.”
In those days, entrepreneurship was not as focused as it is now. Market research and feasibility analysis were required. At that time, Zhou Ran first considered the biggest risk of this matter. He found that the packaging industry’s “only and biggest advantage is “Low risk factor”, although this is a traditional industry, it has huge market potential. “Even waste paper can be sold for money. The scraps of paper swept up on the ground are all money, and the loss is limited.” In this way, Harvest Packaging The factory was born.
The packaging market is large enough. From the perspective of end customers, it has a market size of 2 trillion yuan. As long as it involves transportation, packaging is inseparable. Packaging is an industry that is closely related to people. No matter how it changes, the packaging will definitely exist.”
Considering the transportation cost, the business coverage of Fengshou Packaging is about 100 kilometers in the surrounding area. Packaging is closely related to the level of local economic development. The economically developed Guangdong and Fujian regions are also the most developed in the packaging industry.
In the past five years, Jinhua has added hundreds of packaging companies. Master Tian also shopped online. After buying something, the first thing is to look at the quality of the packaging box. “The things we buy from the Internet now are basically packed in cartons, and we haven’t left this thing.”
Now, the factory is modern enough, and machines have taken the place of most people’s jobs. Just sit on a chair, manipulate a huge robotic arm, put the paper tube on the machine, heat it, shape it, and finally turn it into cardboard. The machine cuts the size into groups of ten, and then it is carried by people. On the car, the delivery can be completed on the same day.
Compared with the past, the physical work is much easier. It used to be carried on the shoulders and hands. Now only the buttons of the machine are needed, and there is no need to work in a dusty room. More and more people are entering the packaging industry, and they don’t pay attention to the apprenticeship system. As long as they are willing to learn, they are welcome to come at any time.
In 2014, smart phones have gradually become popular, and the Internet has become the main way to obtain information. At that time, the head of Fengshou packaging salesHuang Binbin relies on phone calls and door-to-door visits to connect with customers. Customers are mostly scattered in the surrounding villages. I saw a customer, drove for two hours, chatted for an hour, and then drove back for another two hours. The time was spent on the road. At the end of the day, I visited at most two or three.
Huang Binbin runs outside every day. Many third-tier manufacturers are located in villages and industrial parks. New customers can only be expanded by inserting needles. Some customers with small orders, or those who are too far away, have to give up.
In August last year, after Tencent Enterprise Point reached a cooperation with Yunyin, it began to visit third-tier factories in the packaging industry. After digging into the digital needs of the packaging industry, the two parties created a Juhaodan based on Tencent’s social IM, NLP (natural language processing) capabilities, and OCR (text recognition) open capabilities. Liu Hang, Director of B2B Ecological Industry of Tencent Enterprise Point, said that many bosses of third-tier manufacturers are still using QQ to place orders. “Maybe you can’t imagine it. Up to now, its invoices are still handwritten. Including that the reconciliation is also calculated by hand. , It’s actually very traditional.”
Imagine that today, many factories still use the most traditional way: QQ orders.
Write the list by hand on white paper and take a photo. Fengshou Packing Factory has 6 employees who specifically compare the length, width, and height data of these photos, and manually enter them into the machine. “One hundred people have one hundred fonts,” said Huang Binbin. There are always people who are scribbled. When writing it, it is 1, and the production process is regarded as 7, 1 becomes 7, and 2 becomes 8. When the delivery is completed, The two parties will have disputes because of this, and an order of tens of thousands of dollars will often be lost like this.
This is the time difference between traditional factories and modern technology: they are still in 2010, in the fax era before the popularization of mobile Internet.
Even in 2019, this is a very traditional company. Chen Lu joined Harvest Packing. At that time, his most important job in a day was to deliver goods. Each customer has an order plan. The order volume per day is as thick as three “Xinhua Dictionary” when printed. It would take three hours and hundreds of clips to tear off one by one.
The orders are torn down, divided into categories by region, and merged with the old orders of the same company, so as to arrange the production plan of the production line. He has to carry a pile of orders with him, and he can withdraw only after the goods are issued and the tickets are issued, and he continues to stare at the next one. There are too many orders, and sometimes one is lost, so he has to worry about a large loss.
Hundreds of customers in Fengshou Packing Factory, a little girl is busy distributing receipt information every day, and each receipt is signed by the customer, and some customers’ names are not very different, and the classification is often wrong. Huang Binbin said, ” If our customers increase to 1,000, the little girl who divides the order will collapse.”
On the one hand, there are traditional “hand-workshop-style” companies, on the other hand, the packaging industry is growing almost exponentially.
About 2012, Binbin Huang found that the number of customers in the market did not decrease, but the customer unit price decreased. “The entire market is expanding, and market demand is increasing, and supply is basically in short supply.” However, third-tier factories have more choices. A third-tier factory often cooperates with two or more second-tier factories. When I go to a third-tier manufacturer to discuss the price, the other party will say that your price is too high, and the other company gave me another price. When chatting with customers, they often mention that they have opened new factories and which ones have expanded their production capacity.
The production capacity of Jinhua has been increasing, especially in 2020, the entire Jinhua area has expanded 12 production lines. The daily output of a production line is about 300,000 square meters, which is enough to make 3 million small express boxes. This is equivalent to the production line newly added last year, which can create 30 to 40 million small express packages in one day.
Huang Binbin feels that Jinhua area has overcapacity now. When going out to talk about orders, the number of orders for a single customer is getting less and less, and it is split into several secondary factories to do business. There was once a customer who had 50 per month. Wan’s order is harvesting, and now there are only 200,000. The other demand is shared among the other two packaging plants. “It has greatly exceeded the demand. The next step is the process of shuffling.”
In 2011, Jinhua City also organized industry associations. When competition in the industry intensified for a certain period of time, and the market price was lower than the cost price, the industry association organized an exchange meeting. A dozen business representatives sat together, and the scene was once embarrassing. In the beginning, several large companies diametrically opposed each other, asking each other, how can you allow such a low price in the market? You messed up the market.
The meeting was over, and there was no discussion about the results. After a fight, everyone went back. People in the association said, “Don’t engage in vicious competition. In fact, everyone still competes there in private.” The market is like this. Interests are involved and no one is willing to compromise.
In the lively and chaotic industry atmosphere, the factory that Master Tian stayed in a few years ago is not able to develop now. “The previous boss seemed to be relatively conservative, and he was still standing in place, resulting in a failure to achieve the current efficiency in all aspects. The level of competition in the industry has gone down a bit.” The concept of automation investment, equipment renewal, and business sales network, “be a regular customer,No one of them thought of developing a new customer, there is no such idea of innovation. “
In 2019, Zhou Ran also felt that the company has reached a bottleneck period. “We had three assembly lines before, but we wanted to develop five or six. Where do the orders come from? How do I manage?” Opening up more production lines means As the financial pressure will increase, most factories will ship first and then collect payments. “The scale of the company continues to expand, and it may even be hundreds of millions of receivables, so what?” Once a certain amount of money cannot be collected, the capital chain will break. It is a devastating blow to the enterprise. Huang Binbin is also considering information systems. The packaging industry as a whole is more developed in Guangdong and Fujian. He heard that Guangdong has begun to have software for placing orders.
At the end of last year, Huang Binbin went to Dongyang to visit a customer. In the customer office, he first heard of the digital solution for the packaging industry jointly developed by Tencent Enterprise Point and Yunyin. He also got a brochure that introduced it. Featured business: order online. A mobile phone number was left in the brochure. Huang Binbin dialed this number on the same day. A week later, four workers came to the factory.
In the meeting room, the staff introduced their products in detail. On the same day, the two parties signed the contract on the spot, “A decision was made soon”, even he felt that the meeting was too late, “We harvest Packaging is the last cooperative unit in the entire Jinhua region, and the entire East China region will no longer join the downstream.” He hopes to do this in 2019.
Meeting on the same day and signing the contract on the same day is a rare courage. In some factories, the negotiation cycle is as long as several months, and each step of the process takes time. Yunyin System will only choose one partner within 40 kilometers, which is also a protection mechanism for enterprises. Therefore, this is a two-way inspection process. During the communication, Yunyin realized that this traditional packaging company has a young mentality, they are willing to invest in the transformation, and “do things very decisively and courageously.”
“Digital transformation requires the determination of the top leader. If he just tries his attitude, he will probably not have it if he encounters a little difficulty.” The staff found that after switching to APP to place orders, many people were unwilling Acceptance can only become a lost customer. Some companies gave up because of this, “Obviously they bought the service, but in the end they didn’t continue to do it. If the boss is not determined, it will be difficult to make it.”
The Fengshou Packing Factory was built in the suburbs of Jinhua City. The surrounding areas are mostly factory areas. Crystal factories, carton factories, and garment factories. From time to time, a delivery truck passes by the door. From the outside, this company is no different from the surrounding factories. Change happens from the inside.
Huang Binbin is born in the 1980s. He is very young in dress and familiar with the Internet. Just do it, Fengshou Packaging has more than 400 customers, and the salesmen went to the factory to discuss the two options: follow the past ordering method, or download the APP, and the APP places an order with an exclusive price on the cable, “100% of customers Everyone chooses to install this system right away, “like doing e-commerce, engaging in promotion.” In the traditional model, your cost is 1 yuan, and it is impossible to sell 9 cents. But now we may be able to sell it for 80 cents. Come here.” Huang Binbin, the head of Fengshou packaging sales, concluded that this is “make the customer down, and then slowly earn his money.”
“Traditional companies are slowly becoming Internet companies.” The data seen in the background is like a Taobao store. In addition to sales, they must also learn to operate. Huang Binbin said, “For example, a customer’s monthly output value is 1 million. If you place an order of 300,000 here, there will still be 70% penetration. The penetration rate must be increased so that he can place more orders here.”
A map is also provided in the background to see the surrounding customer data. They are collectively referred to as “third-tier factories”. How big is the production scale of this factory? What kind of material do you like to buy? Customers continue to place orders through the system, forming more and more accurate customer portraits. What orders do customers place frequently this month? How many orders have been placed? According to the accurate portrait of the customer, the information can be pushed directionally. “Some customers need three layers of corrugated paper, so the promotion information of the five layers of corrugated paper will not be sent to him.”
For a traditional company, this is a huge change. Other ways of playing, learning Internet recharge to give discounts, set up a separate VIP for customers who place more orders, and send coupons through events on specific dates…all Pinduoduo, What Taobao can do is possible in this Jinhua factory.
Changes are already taking place. The first thing the Internet brings is accuracy and efficiency. In the past, there was a lag in price adjustments. The company had six employees who were responsible for sending faxes to customers one by one. With hundreds of customers, it takes a day to say nothing. The most difficult problem to solve is that the customer’s money has already been paid, and then the price has changed. At this time, disputes are often prone to occur. Huang Binbin said that a good function of the APP is “stuck”. “The order will only be placed when the payment is charged in. Previously, it was only through fax and WeChat, and there was no way to get it stuck.”
If you take the fish in the sea as an analogy, “Some are stupid and stupid fish, we are very flexible and very active,” Zhou Ran said, APP allows them to have a more flexible price system, “People If you want to increase the price, you may get a lot of orders at once. These orders are all oneprice. But if we want to adjust the price, the platform will place an order, and we will stop taking the order after almost enough for the day tomorrow. If we wait until tomorrow to take the order the day after tomorrow, it may be another price. This is very flexible. “
Thousands of customers, one price per customer, large quantity, small quantity, long billing period, prepaid, good cooperation credit, new development, different customers have different prices, “will become one This is a very active model to control this market. “He is prepared for losses in the early stages of reform, hundreds of thousands or millions of losses, and he believes that “the return to us in the later stage is far from such a small thing.”
In the past year, these factories in Jinhua have undergone earth-shaking changes. What else can technology do? Huang Binbin hasn’t thought about it yet. But he believes that informatization is an important market trend, and those who go fast can be the first to eat crabs