After experiencing the epidemic last year, it is not difficult to find that data resources have quickly become the core element of maintaining the global market and driving economic development.
The new year has arrived, are you ready?
For a clothing company, the market is always right. You can either lead the market or follow the market. If your products are insufficient to lead the market, you can only follow the market. Because only when the company is alive can we talk about the next step.
In the era of digital economy, especially the industrial Internet and smart manufacturing brought about by the combination of 5G, digitalization and physical industries, it is a systemic opportunity for the upgrading of China’s manufacturing industry.
01 The epidemic accelerates the survival of the fittest in the industry
Affected by the continued spread of the global epidemic , as well as the impact of multiple sporadic cases and even local clusters of epidemics in the country, the stable development of China’s garment industry still faces tremendous pressure. At the same time, 2020 has also accelerated the closure or withdrawal of many brands that were originally not developing well in the domestic market.
French women’s clothing brand Etam has been in the Chinese market for more than 20 years, but it is facing bankruptcy and liquidation. During last year’s “Double 11”, Taobao stores sold assets at special prices, and more than 2,600 pieces of clothing were sold out.
Also facing bankruptcy and liquidation, Jeanswest has closed 1,300 stores in China as of 2019. At the beginning of 2020, JeansWest Australia announced that it had entered voluntary administration and began to enter the bankruptcy liquidation stage. The “King of Jeans” fell.
Longer behind in the market competition are La Chapelle, Daphne, etc. La Chapelle, known as the “Chinese version of ZARA”, has seen its market value evaporate by tens of billions in three years, and its overseas subsidiaries have gone bankrupt and liquidated. Daphne, which is facing the closure of 6 stores every day, announced in 2020 that it will completely withdraw from physical retail and only retain its online e-commerce business.
Not only that, but more importantly, there are very few leading companies in the apparel industry that will achieve positive growth in 2020.
But the epidemic is really just a catalyst, which represents the arrival of a new competitive ecology. We believe that the real competition has transcended the stage where B2C is the core of what enterprises produce and what consumers buy. The next era must come from C2B and C2M, a model where consumers truly determine the direction of enterprises. So, how to deal with the changes in consumption, the answer is digitalization.
02 Pathfinder of technological innovation in the apparel industry
In the past two years, many leading brands and The factory has made heavy investments in digitalization. Digital investment is not limited to one end or a certain aspect, but is also a comprehensive digitalization of all links in the entire chain. The requirements for enterprises are not only investment in capital and technology, but also long-termism. Therefore, the position of CIO has also become extremely important for enterprises. Judging from some cases, leading companies have achieved first-mover advantages.
1
Under the epidemic, the performance of fast fashion brands has declined. Take the Chinese market as an example, but Chinese local brand URBAN REVIVO ( UR) has been able to buck the trend and stabilize its domestic business and expand its overseas market layout. The secret is that UR has invested a lot of digital technology in planning, research and development, production and supply chain in recent years. In 2017, UR selected Centric PLM solutions to provide support for its product development and sales planning infrastructure. The product R&D management chain realized “module electronics, design modularization, progress visualization, and technical process standardization.” In order to hit consumer demand points more accurately and improve the success rate of products, the digital technology on the product research and development side will be upgraded again in 2020, digital purchasing signboards will be purchased, team collaboration and decision-making methods will be reshaped, and the product portfolio strategy will be promoted to maximize value.
As the person in charge of operations of the UR Design Center said, “Digital purchasing signboards can make our product mix more reasonable and rich, and make our selection and product structure more accurate. The buying team can also make decisions more easily, because the digital purchasing board provides numerous data reports and analysis views, providing comprehensive support for the development of purchasing work. The use of digital purchasing board is an important part of our management strategy Change, it mobilizes the creativity of each of our business teams and brings more accurate business decisions.”
There is also the digitalization of Uniqlo that we focused on in previous articles. . Uniqlo is already transforming into a “digital consumer retail company”, that is, introducing digitalization into the working methods of all employees, from design, production, manufacturing, and sales.
Looking at the manufacturing industry, they are all increasing their efforts in digitalization and achieving good results.
2
The global textile and apparel industry is collectively experiencing a cold winter. Many fashion brands have unilaterally canceled orders and refused to pay for goods. The total price has reached more than 16 billion U.S. dollars, and global clothing OEMs are facing destruction. In such a living environment, every clothing company is thinking about what to do next and how to survive.
As a senior veteran of foreign trade service companies, Huifu Group has been deeply involved in the garment industry for 15 years, with an annual import and export volume of nearly 400 million U.S. dollars. It can be regarded as the leading player in domestic textile and apparel industry.One of the representative trade companies. The epidemic has encountered many market challenges, and the foreign trade textile and apparel supply chain is facing five major pain points: labor costs are rising year by year, the degree of informatization is low, the overall added value of the industry is low, the degree of standardization is low, and upstream suppliers are generally small in scale. Faced with the above pain points in the industry, Huifu has decisively adopted a comprehensive layout for digital transformation and built a complete and efficient intelligent ecosystem for the global textile and apparel supply chain that is oriented by cross-border trade and based on an information-based intelligent platform.
Huifu chose to cooperate with Centric Software and completed the project implementation and digitalization of PLM R&D in just 9 weeks. online. When Huifu just resumed work in early 2020, if the senior management wanted to know the status of an order, people from all aspects of the order had to be present for a meeting and each produced their own forms. As a result, the epidemic situation was relatively tense at that time, and the number of people in meetings was limited, and the number of people in the resumption of work was also limited, so it became very difficult to hold this meeting. But after joining the PLM project, this problem no longer exists, and the entire department collaborates on one platform.
The visualization of the whole process and the improvement in order reprinting and product selection efficiency brought about by the accumulation of digital assets are a powerful means for foreign trade companies to improve their competitiveness in front of foreign customers.
Digital transformation will be a watershed in future competition. We must move from empirical decision-making to digital decision-making. Persist in digital transformation and better explore and leverage the value of data assets to guide future management work. It is necessary to continuously understand digitalization from the perspective of the entire value chain, industrial chain, and supply chain, and improve terminal operations, logistics, and cost efficiency through digitalization. After experiencing the epidemic last year, it is not difficult to find that data resources have quickly become the core element that maintains the global market and drives economic development.
03 What are the considerations for digitalization of service companies?
First of all, it is based on the starting point of consumer trends. In the future, C2B and C2M models will be dominant, so companies must be required to make quick decisions and respond quickly to consumer feedback. to adapt to market changes. Behind this, companies need to make long-term investment and continue to iterate and improve.
There are several key points:
1. Taking “digitalization of people” as the core. Work backwards on how to transform the enterprise’s overall value chain system. In the future, personalized and precise customization will even be possible.
2. Long-term value. Long-term investment is the long-term value that allows companies to think about the future. For example, NIKE, Uniqlo, etc. are establishing leading digital experience store scenarios. In the short term, the costs are high and the benefits are not large. But long-term competitiveness lies in every digital “point”.
3. Efficiency revolution. The efficiency brought about by digitalization is ultimately reflected in the “people” aspect. How to quickly and accurately find people on the front end, provide fast delivery experience, and quickly feedback information; how to make quick decisions on the back end, rapid production matching, rapid innovation, etc. </p
