Ali Rhino Smart Manufacturing Factory——Take a look at Ali's smart factory

Take a look at Alibaba’s smart factory - Rhino Smart Manufacturing Factory

On September 16, Alibaba officially released a new manufacturing platform - Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing Factory. According to Ali’s official announcement, the goal of the Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing Factory is to “produce 2,000 identical products in 5 minutes, to produce 2,000 different products in 5 minutes.” Such a capability goal means that Ali will create a system that connects consumers to manufacturers. With the industry's C2M platform to truly redefine and change the manufacturing industry, Rhino will be able to recreate Alibaba.

A new manufacturing platform that re-aggregates consumer data resources

In April 2015, on the road from the suburbs to the Hannover Industrial Fair exhibition hall in Hannover, Germany, Zheng Song, director of the China Shipping Automation Research Institute, once talked about what Alibaba can do: connect the needs of consumers to all aspects of the manufacturing industry. This enables personalized manufacturing. For example, for a pair of shoes, when the user comes up with the look, color, and texture he expects, Alibaba will send out this request, and then assemble every link of the shoe from the laces to the sole to the upper to create a personalized product, and finally submit it to user's hands.

Ali has the ability and can do the above. If Alibaba’s platform can do this, then Alibaba may be able to truly eliminate fakes and realize C2
M Manufacturing will bring about changes in the manufacturing industry, which will be a huge model change.

It took Alibaba three years to build this platform. Because this platform is of great significance, Alibaba did not reveal more information about this platform during these three years, and even internal people rarely knew about it. On the morning of the release of the No. 16 Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing Factory, the invited media did not know that Ali was going to release "Rhinoceros".

The parent company of Rhinoceros is Alibaba Xunxi (Hangzhou) Digital Technology Co., Ltd., with Jiang Fan, president of Tmall Taobao, as the chairman, rather than being affiliated with Alibaba Cloud. Obviously, the "Rhinoceros Intelligent Manufacturing Factory" is more inclined to be a new manufacturing platform that uses consumption data resources from Taobao, Tmall and other platforms to aggregate.

Jiang Fan said in his speech at the press conference: "The Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing Platform hopes to apply digital insights into the manufacturing process to achieve true production and marketing integration, and help small and medium-sized businesses solve a series of pain points in the production supply chain. We hope that it can truly be realized Data-driven, it closely connects consumer insights, industry insights and production links to achieve smarter production scheduling and flexible production."

According to Alibaba, the goal of the Rhino platform is to provide the ability to "go from producing 2,000 identical products in 5 minutes to producing 2,000 different products in 5 minutes." This is new manufacturing. Just as Zheng Song predicted five years ago, the Rhino platform may bring about new manufacturing changes. But Alibaba did not roll out the new manufacturing platform at once, but chose to start with clothing manufacturing.

Turn clothing brands into fast and furious "rhinos"

Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing Factory chose clothing manufacturing mainly because the pain points of this industry are large enough and the contradiction between supply and demand is large enough. Clothing, shoes and hats are also the number one sales industry on Tmall and Taobao, so it is most beneficial to combine with the Rhino platform. demonstration effect.

At present, the clothing industry has a market size of about 3 trillion yuan, and clothing is a high-inventory industry. Due to the influence of fashion trends, the matching of supply and demand is an eternal problem in the clothing industry. An example is that the Sijiqing Clothing Market in Hangzhou, the first clothing street in China, had a large amount of inventory during the 2020 epidemic. A merchant cleared the inventory and sold clothes by the pound in the live broadcast room, shouting "9.9 yuan per pound". In a sense, merchants producing clothing are like gambling. They don't know whether the things they produce can meet the needs of users, whether they can be sold, and whether they will become inventory.

"Lend me a pair of eyes, so that I can see the world clearly." Na Ying's song sings the pain of all small and medium-sized manufacturing companies and businesses. Big brands and manufacturers have market appeal and influence, can influence the market, have more abundant cash flow, and are better able to resist risks and digest slow-moving inventory. The pain points of small and medium-sized businesses are more obvious. They hope to seize the trend and win with design and response speed. However, because the order quantity is too small, it often does not receive support and priority scheduling from manufacturers.

Currently, the average quantity of production in the clothing industry is based on demand, with a minimum order of 1,000 pieces and delivery within 15 days. After connecting with the data from Tmall and Taobao platforms, Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing Factory can realize production based on sales, predict fashion trends, and quickly Develop popular models and reduce inventory to a minimum, or even to zero, to achieve "customization on demand, minimum order of 100 pieces, delivery within 7 days at the fastest". It only takes 7 days from the time an order is placed to when the consumer wears it, which allows clothing brands to quickly capture fashion trends and transform from a slow rhinoceros to a fast and furious rhinoceros.

Choose a balance between personalization and scale

Wu Xuegang, CEO of Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing Factory, said that small and medium-sized enterprises should be freed from heavy production, allowing entrepreneurs to focus on their own advantages and business innovation, so that they have the key capabilities to compete with large enterprises. It is understood that more than 200 Taobao small and medium-sized merchants, industry belt merchants, and live broadcast anchors have used "Rhinoceros Intelligent Manufacturing".

From the current point of view, Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing Factory is not only a platform, but also contains many innovative micro-services including data and accumulated in the clothing industry, including digital design system, central warehouse smart warehouse, checkerboard hanging, digital printing, and environmentally friendly washing. water etc.

Among them, the "Rhinoceros Digital Design System" links both demand and supply sides, enabling rapid 3D simulation testing, providing a quotation basis for merchants, a procurement basis for the supply chain, providing process guidance for production, and accelerating product introduction and replacement. "Rhinoceros Intelligent Central Warehouse" is like the "central kitchen" of the catering industry, enabling intelligent procurement and flexible supply. On the Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing Platform, each piece of fabric has an ID, which enables full-link tracking, automatic inbound and outbound management, automatic distribution, and intelligent picking. The resource utilization rate is four times higher than the industry average. "Chessboard hanging" uses "Internet of Things + artificial intelligence technology" to automatically allocate hanging hangers to relatively idle workstations, changing the problem of one-way flow of hanging hangers in clothing factories in the past and prone to congestion. "Digital printing" positions the printing process parameters in a projection manner, replacing the traditional factory manual frame positioning method, saving printing efficiency. "Environmentally friendly washing water" uses E-Flow atomization technology to replace traditional water bath treatment. The water consumption of each piece of clothing can be reduced to 1/3 of the original, greatly reducing emissions and improving competitiveness.

Rhino Intelligent Manufacturing Factory is different from complete personal customization of clothing and mass customization. "100 pieces of clothing delivered within 7 days" neither abandons scale nor personalization. It chooses between personalization and scale. A point to find a balance between scale, efficiency and personalized production.

Smart City Network - continues to pay attention to the development of smart cities and artificial intelligence.