From a charming local hub to modern international metropolis, Shanghai has been leading the development and digital transformation of China's retail sector. Bailian Group, an iconic retail brand in China, is going digital together with Shanghai, to serve their consumers better.
An Iconic Milestone All Workloads on Cloud
Bailian Group has been exploring digital transformation as a way to ensure a future oriented digital business system. But it hasn't been easy.
As with almost all retail businesses, Bailian Group has complicated internal and external systems. In contrast with traditional information systems and their siloed architectures, the e-commerce system of Bailian Group has a mesh topology. The company has more than 600 microservices, 1,300 scheduled tasks, and 100 databases on its service middle-end. Not only that, Bailian Group has a large number of associated subsidies, such as Lianhua Supermarket Holdings, No. 1 Pharmacy, Sanlian Group, and Bailian Group Finance. They also have nearly 300 third-party suppliers and operate 4,000 stores. All these make it hard to plan and reorganize their systems for cloud migration.
To migrate workloads to the cloud smoothly, Bailian Group worked with Huawei Cloud to design a cloud migration solution. After a full year of planning and preparation, they conducted 10 step-by-step migration tests and organized five migration drills.
On August 16, 2023, after their shopping centers, department stores, and supermarkets closed up for the day, 200 members of Bailian's omni-channel team witnessed a historic cloud migration. In the early morning of May 17, Bailian Group officially migrated all service middle-ends to the cloud, including the customer touchpoints, service applications, shared service middle-end, shared group middle-end, and the basic service and infrastructure layers. The entire migration did not compromise data integrity and consistency and not interrupt the normal operations of the next day.
A Digital and Intelligent Foundation for Future-oriented Retail
Century Lianhua, a subsidiary of Bailian Group, has served consumers for more than 30 years. It has more than 400 direct-sale stores in Shanghai and more than 3,000 stores throughout China. Century Lianhua has an effective digital operations system that digitalizes sales, finance, logistics, inventory, and stores. The system is now interconnected with the HQ data center, allowing the HQ to track store statuses in real time.
These stores sell all sorts of daily necessities, such as rice and flour, oil, tobacco, alcohol, and other beverages. How well consumers, products, information, and finance are managed depends heavily on an intelligent fulfillment system.
With a good system in place, employees can precisely locate and prepare products for order from within a massive catalog. In addition, employees can scan barcodes to accurately replenish products to an empty shelf in a timely manner.
Bailian Xijiao Shopping Mall, which has just recently been upgraded with a new layout designed for digital sales, a new business paradigm, and new business scenarios. This next stage in Bailian's digital evolution is to establish a "super community". This new intelligent digital system is based on one that was previously established by Bailian for the Hangzhou Outlet Plaza. This system streamlined every stage of the shopping experience, from the passenger flow and shopping environment to the electrical infrastructure. They have expanded the lifecycle of merchant services and enabled data monitoring and routine management through mobile phones.
Bailian Nanfang Shopping Mall is also accelerating digital transformation. Throughout 2023, it has been exploring digitalization and reconstruction. It made all marketing channels digital, boosted conversions from private traffic, built smart buildings, deployed digital operations projects, and explored new methods and means of promoting repeat purchases.
Looking to the future, Bailian Group is well on the way to an operational model that is agile, intelligent, and efficient.