Almost every successful company in the past decade has navigated a fog of uncertainty and reaped huge premium. After a closer look, there is no doubt that digitization brought about the evergreen industry. Why go digital? Digitisation has gone from being an option to a must - how do we win the competition through digitisation? 

In the vertical field of fashion clothing in China's cross-border e-commerce industry, self-operted online seller and third-party platforn seller  are locked in a battle. When the much-concerned fast fashion company will go public is also a topic that everyone talks about with great interest. However, after the "low-profile" Zibuyu Group (2420.hk) is listed on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in Nov. 2022, The market woke up to the emergence of another giant in China's cross-border e-commerce of apparel and footwear B2C industry. 

The first performance announcement showed that the annual revenue in 2022 reached 3.07 billion yuan, up 30.7% year on year growth, and the revenue reached a new record high. However, the imagination space of Zibuyu is not limited to cross-border sales of apparel and footwear products. How to respond to market expectations is a greater pressure and challenge. Zibuyu Group chooses digital transformation as the beginning of a new situation.

Build the base, digital capability into deep water 
The biggest challenge at the beginning of digital construction was data decentralization, such as decentralized systems, code in different languages, and Excel managed reports. 

In the past, the demand for a data report was generated as the specific business department wanted to see a certain data, through logical dismantling, front-end page development, database development... A month passed. The construction of digital capability chassis and the selection of a suitable BI product has become an immediate task. 

In the creation of digital chassis, the use of cloud native technology stack, the introduction of big data ability, through the data of various production systems, the establishment of a systematic warehouse architecture, and business field modeling and standardization, take the data processing and analysis capacity of the group to a new level. 

After completing the underlying data development and data warehouse construction, the company uses Quick BI as the last link of data analysis and presentation. The upgraded digital capabilities were immediately put to work in enabling the business. "There were some data reporting requests that needed to be responded to very quickly, and we would have the results of the data analysis ready in one night and available at the venue the next day. "A report view development task that would take two weeks can be configured in a day." The service of helping the finance department to produce the audit report has been continued to this day. The original working process, in which the finance department contacted IT research and development to fetch data from the production database and then imported it into Excel for review, was replaced by Quick BI spreadsheet and automatic fetching data. The financial department only needed to fine-adjust the format to submit the audit, which greatly improved the work efficiency.

Analyze data and explore new depths of business insight 
Log data reveals the company's enthusiasm for digital operations from the top down. But there is less data to give insight into overseas markets than might be expected. In addition to the Zibuyu Group's own sales data, public industry data, the clues left on the Amazon platform have become the key to success. 

As we all know, the logistics and warehousing cost of cross-border e-commerce is a difficult application problem. Usually cross-border sellers need to ship their products to the Amazon warehouse system (namely FBA warehouse). If insufficient stock leads to low inventory warning, Amazon platform will restrict the flow of products, and the exposure advantage accumulated in the early stage of listing and advertising will be wasted. If the stock is too much, it will lead to overstock, warehousing costs are not sustainable, need to pay high costs. 

Based on Quick BI's enterprise intelligent analysis, prediction and alarm monitoring capabilities, combined with the business characteristics of the purchase-sales-inventory system of Zibuyu Group, the intelligent sales analysis, intelligent inventory management and automatic early warning system are built, which not only increases the sales volume, but also comprehensively guarantees the inventory quantity and inventory turnover days within the safety threshold range, and controls the balance between stock out and inventory backlog. 

With years of experience accumulated under the operation, Zibuyu has become a frequent customer on Amazon bestseller list and new products list. Through an insight into the sales volume of each product in different positions on the list and the retained review data of the sold products for attribution analysis, the reasons for the rise and fall of the historical sales volume will be accurately positioned to promote the dynamic management of the enterprise.

When the actual inventory reaches the warning level, the data analysis report is automatically pushed to the inventory manager. If the need for replenishment, but also combined with logistics, weather, festivals and other factors, to provide delivery time suggestions. When a commodity enters the end of its life cycle, the decline in sales volume will cause the income to fall behind the storage cost, and there will be a sign that the commodity needs to be abandoned. At this time, the system will timely send out an alarm and suggest that the commodity in storage should be cleared at a reduced price. 

In the pursuit of user experience optimization, Zibuyu also use the ability of the algorithm to the customer left comments and return reasons for semantic insight, from the corpus split out of thousands of labels for analysis, if found the same product repeatedly appear such as ”shoulder-tight“,"sleeve - short "description, the front desk business can reverse the version of the design of optimization suggestions. If there are key words such as ”pilling“, ”shrinking“ and ”transparency“, it can also manage and adjust the materials used in the supply chain timely. 

Zibuyu Group also has the definition of success of digital transformation, from IT cost center to the future of the apparel and footwear industry, with the digital capability precipitated in the consumer field, to affect more similar industries and supply chain enterprises, to bring them the digital transformation experience of proven value.