Can you imagine purchasing prescription drugs using a mobile App and receive doorstep delivery within an hour of placing the order?
Jointown Pharmaceutical Group Co., Ltd. (Jointown), an industry giant based in Wuhan, China, is making this vision a reality by boldly combining new cloud computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies with creative marketing. The largest privately owned pharmaceutical enterprise in China, Jointown is primarily a wholesale of pharmaceutical and medical apparatus business that also incorporates retail distribution. Jointown has been on the list of the top 500 enterprises in China for several years. Jointown has a long established reputation for applying leading-edge technologies, most recently in the areas of eCommerce and intelligent logistics. And now, thanks to their close work with the HUAWEI CLOUD Business Unit and the HUAWEI CLOUD, Jointown is on the way to becoming a fully intelligent enterprise.
How Did Jointown and HUAWEI CLOUD Come Together?
Comprised of more than 130 pharmaceutical companies and commanding a 95 percent market share in China, Jointown currently serves more than 150,000 business customers and 10.5 million private customers. The company has plans to expand to between 300 and 400 companies over the next three years. Operating as an intelligent enterprise, Jointown forecasts increasing its revenue to USD 15.24 billion (CNY 101.6 billion) by 2019.
"Jointown doesn’t feel that the traditional business-driven IT model is efficient enough," said Wan Yougang, Jointown Deputy Director of Operations and IT Management. "Instead, we prefer a strategy-driven IT model in which enterprises prioritize their future. This is why Jointown chose Huawei and HUAWEI CLOUD to help us become a driving force for business innovation, and specifically IT innovation that relies on cloud technologies."
Huawei has a wealth of experience in helping enterprise customers with their digital transformation. In 2017, in response to customer requirements for innovative IT technologies and AI services, HUAWEI CLOUD was established as an independent business unit to deliver user-friendly hybrid public and private cloud solutions for enterprise customers. For Jointown, the decision to choose Huawei as its cloud partner was easy.
HUAWEI CLOUD Helps Jointown’s B2B Platform Withstand Massive Traffic Surges
In 2016, Jointown launched a Business-to-Business (B2B) supplier-collaboration marketing platform, the first in the pharmaceutical industry and now widely adopted by its suppliers. The release of this innovative service also presented a number of technical challenges. First launched with another Chinese cloud provider, the new platform suffered a long and serious service interruption — a fatal liability that resulted expensive user losses.
Jointown decided to migrate its supplier-collaboration marketing platform to HUAWEI CLOUD and immediately saw significant benefits. The stability of the system improved, service delays were shortened, and no further breakdowns were reported. To ensure the health and stability of their services, other B2B eCommerce platforms can harness their elastic computing resources by adopting HUAWEI CLOUD for processing large numbers of concurrent requests even during peak hours.
Figure 1-1 Jointown’s B2B platform is built to withstand massive traffic surges during peak delivery hours.
To meet the eCommerce self-building requirements for thousands of enterprises, HUAWEI CLOUD offers eCommerce value propositions at the Billion, Terabyte, and Million (BTM) levels. With BTM, Huawei Cloud can support billions of concurrent connections, terabyte amounts of single-user data, and transaction processes by the millions. In a flexible cloud environment, HUAWEI CLOUD has built up a technology ecosystem that includes full life cycle management, data security, and mobile Internet connectivity. The platform is so reliable it supports massive amounts of concurrent user access and safeguards the system in even the most difficult situations. Simply put, services will run smoothly even during peak hours.
HUAWEI CLOUD’s stable and reliable technical services have greatly improved the customer experience for users of Jointown’s eCommerce platform.
HUAWEI CLOUD Helps Jointown Develop Intelligent Logistics
Jointown intends to update its logistics services to better fulfill service needs. The major challenges for Jointown are:
Scattered and Changeable Goods Locations Result in Time-consuming Pickup Jointown has 30 regional and 73 municipal logistics warehouses that are randomly packed with large numbers of products for delivery. Because there are no fixed locators for best-selling items, it is time-consuming and labor-intensive to identify and pick them up. Each picking clerk at Jointown’s warehouses picks up an average of 1,000 items per day and walks an average of 30,000 steps (about 18 km) in the process. All picking clerks are overworked and tired, making them more likely to commit errors. To address this, 'pickup paths' are optimized to reduce the clerks’ workload and improve overall work efficiency.
Larger Orders, Higher Logistics Costs When scheduling the delivery for thousands of daily orders, dispatchers used to manually match vehicles and routes based on experience, though frequently the results are not cost-effective.
Manual Invoicing Drives Labor Costs Higher Jointown requires invoices to be associated with warehousing details, which had been performed manually by procurement specialists. Automating this simple yet time-consuming task will have the affect of greatly improving efficiency and reducing costs.
Larger Orders, Higher Logistics Costs Jointown receives thousands of orders every day, which requires dozens of dispatch vehicles. When scheduling the delivery orders and dispatching route of each vehicle, dispatchers select orders and destinations as efficiently as they can based on their experience. However, manual dispatching often results in disordered vehicle tracks and is not cost-effective.
Manual Invoice Input, Driving High Labor Costs Jointown requires invoices to be associated with warehousing details, which is currently performed manually by procurement specialists. Automating this simple yet time-consuming task will greatly reduce costs and improve efficiency.
To address the preceding challenges, HUAWEI CLOUD provides the following solutions: Based on the data analysis result of the historical orders of Jointown, Huawei's Intelligent Logistics Service (iLogistics) helps Jointown optimize storage locators in warehouses, calculate the overall importance of pharmaceuticals, and place all best-selling items to the locators nearest to the re-inspection station before delivery.
Figure 1-2 EI services used by Jointown.
Additionally, iLogistics provides the optimal pickup paths, reducing the walking distance of picking clerks from 30,000 steps down to 20,000 steps, and also increasing pickup efficiency by about 30%. iLogistics also provides the optimal vehicle dispatching paths, reducing the number of vehicles required for dispatching the same batch of orders. On average, the dispatching efficiency of each vehicle is improved by nearly 5 times.
Third, with Huawei's Optimal Character Recognition (OCR), invoice information can be digitally entered and automatically associated with warehousing details, allowing procurement specialists more time to focus on their core work. Re-inspection can be completed within 10 seconds.
Figure 1-3 iLogistics solution architecture
Jointown's Wuhan Logistics Center is recognized as the pivot of all its logistics centers around the nation. As the most advanced single-building pharmaceutical logistics center, it covers a building area of 80,000 square meters and can house 1 million pharmaceutical items (bin packing) with a daily throughput of 100,000 items. In December 2017, Jointown's Wuhan East and West Lake Modern Pharmaceutical Logistics Center ranked in the Top 10 National Intelligent Warehousing Logistics Demonstration Bases. Applying innovative technologies to company businesses and customer services helps Jointown receive a large order worth 1 million RMB. From the order placing to the goods loading, the entire process takes less than two hours. Now, Jointown has become one of the few pharmaceutical distribution companies that are capable of independently completing logistics planning and design, system integration, logistics building and implementation, and operations.
Embracing the Future with HUAWEI CLOUD
Jointown's mission is to provide cost-effective services for the medical and healthcare industry. It is committed to becoming the best service provider in its industry in China.
"We chose Huawei because of its excellent track record," Wan said. "It conforms to industry standards and related rules, and it provided the solid foundation we required for our platform. We hope that our collaboration with Huawei and HUAWEI CLOUD will help us develop better services even faster in the future."
