Case Study:
Background: Hema Fresh is a well-known online fresh product retail supermarket in China, relying on Alibaba Group, China's largest e-commerce conglomerate. With astonishing speed, Hema Fresh has achieved rapid growth. Hema Fresh has created an innovative business model of "online + offline," allowing customers to not only purchase a variety of fresh ingredients online but also providing sales and storage functions. Consolidating such multifunctionality into one store clearly poses significant challenges to the supply chain:
Freshness Preservation Challenge: Fresh product has strong seasonality and perishability, requiring high temperature control and time efficiency during storage and sorting. The current manual picking method has limitations in ensuring product freshness and cannot effectively prevent product loss due to prolonged operation time.
Difficulty in Handling Multiple Varieties in Small Batches: Fresh product has a wide variety of SKUs, and individual orders involve a variety of products. Manual picking struggles to efficiently and accurately handle large quantities of small-batch orders with multiple varieties, often resulting in picking errors or low efficiency.
Lack of Fine Inventory Management: Due to the characteristics of fresh products, real-time and accurate inventory tracking and management are crucial. However, current inventory counting and recording rely on manual processes, often failing to achieve real-time updates and precise control.
Pressure on Delivery Timeliness: Consumers have increasingly high expectations for the timeliness of fresh product delivery. The complex manual picking process affects overall outbound speed, which may lead to an inability to meet customer demands for instant delivery in the "last mile."
Solution:
After thorough site surveys and needs analysis, we recommended the adoption of tilt tray sorters as the solution for Hema Fresh.
Project Scale: 424 trays, 327 destinations, 10 supply stations.
Implementation Time: From September 1, 2021, for planning and design to project completion on October 30, 2021, it took 58 days.
Effect Display: After the introduction of turnover sorting machines, Hema Fresh achieved the following significant results:
Improved Picking Efficiency: Compared to traditional manual picking methods, turnover sorting machines increased efficiency by over 60%.
Assurance of Food Freshness: Turnover sorting machines reduced operational delays and human errors, ensuring the freshness and quality of fresh food products.
Control of Labor Costs: By introducing turnover sorting machines, Hema Fresh reduced labor input by 30%, lowering labor costs.
Optimization of Delivery Experience: With the improvement in picking efficiency and food freshness, Hema Fresh's delivery experience significantly improved, leading to increased customer satisfaction.
The speed and accuracy of manual picking are limited by the skills and experience of pickers. When faced with a large number of orders and products, manual picking may fail to meet the demand for rapid delivery.
Manual picking may result in errors due to fatigue, lack of concentration, etc., such as placing different types of products together incorrectly or picking products to the wrong area.
Fresh product products require high freshness, and improper manual picking may damage or reduce freshness during operation.
Peak periods see a dramatic increase in order volume, demanding higher picking capabilities. Failure to process large orders quickly and accurately may lead to delivery delays or decreased customer satisfaction.
.svg)
Automatic sorting equipment can handle large volumes of orders quickly and accurately, significantly improving picking efficiency and shortening delivery times.
Through advanced recognition technology, automatic sorting equipment can accurately identify product information, avoiding human errors and greatly reducing picking error rates.
Automatic sorting equipment adopts gentle operation methods, avoiding collisions and damage to products during picking, thereby reducing product loss.
Automatic sorting equipment can flexibly adjust sorting speed and scale, easily coping with challenges of peak periods and large order volumes, ensuring stable and efficient sorting services.
