The current biggest convenience store franchise in China (Data source: CCFA, Top 100 Chain Stores in China in 2022), boasts over 600 brands and 6,000 offerings, and serves over 200 million customers every month.

Spanning 230 cities in over 20 provinces, Meiyijia has a success recipe for rapid development. Its two key ingredients are standard franchise package and store operations support. The package starts and builds up the business while integrating survey as well as location and product selection. The support helps run the business by covering sales flow, stocktaking, account management, and revenue sharing. These two tools are great but isolated. The resulting slow responsiveness and lack of real-time data export are due to:

• Data silos in production, supply, and sales that undermined data accuracy and timeliness. Operational data was only generated the next day, increasing labor needed for supply, stocktaking, and replenishment.

• Too many management platforms that lacked real-time alarms and dragged down efficiency. Each store ran different hardware and software, and HQ often failed to detect and avoid potential problems.

• Demand for better consumer experience that required more efficient store operations, holiday promotions, self-service checkout, and other innovations.

In November 2022, Huawei Cloud established a full partnership with Meijia to build smart stores with the following Huawei Cloud tech:

• A data lakehouse to break down silos:

  Huawei Cloud sorts data such as organizational structure, stores, commodities, and employees into a (Purchase, Sales & Inventory) PSI-based indicator system. Stores use Huawei Cloud big data services to access customer flow, display, and tooling data uniformly stored in Object Storage Service (OBS). GaussDB (DWS), MapReduce Service (MRS), and DataArts Studio coordinate data analytics, eliminating information silos and achieving data-driven development.

• A unified audio and video interaction platform by Closeli:

  Built on Huawei Video Ingestion Service (VIS), this platform connects cameras of different brands using national standards. VIS enables video viewing, playback, and transcoding to support stores unattended from 11:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m to extend business hours. During the Spring Festival, 10 pilot stores increased their daily turnover from CNY4,000 to 20,000.

• A unified AIoT management platform:

  All store devices now connect to the cloud for intelligent control, unified O&M, greener consumption, and operations savings in over 30,000 stores. Device faults are detected, reported, and fixed in real time to improve customer satisfaction. Batch remote configuration by sales region, geographic region, and store enables tens of thousands of devices to easily upgrade, fix vulnerabilities, and run more efficiently.

• A unified information release platform:

  Huawei Petal Ads places and manages ads on different types of screens. In addition, Huawei ad operations experts assist retailers in designing business models, building operations teams, and cultivating operations capabilities.

With Huawei's aid, Meiyijia boosts the efficiency of its success recipe - a store can now open in just 27 days, down from two months. Over 300 new stores that open every month enjoy accurate, efficient data support and accounting, including real-time transaction viewing, surplus goods and replenishment updates, and revenue sharing.