The change of enterprise inventory is an important basis for judging the stage of the economic cycle and an important factor affecting short-term economic fluctuations. Data from the National Bureau of Statistics show that in June 2023, the inventory of finished goods of industrial enterprises fell by 1 percentage point year-on-year to 2.2%, which is already at a historically low level. The macroeconomic Research Department of the Development Research Center of The State Council believes that the current round of inventory destocking of industrial enterprises is nearing an end. With the implementation of stable economic policies, demand continues to improve, enterprise revenue is expected to continue to increase, and gradually enter the replenishment stage of production expansion.

But different from the past, this round of replenishment cycle industrial enterprises are also facing a series of new challenges. From January to June, the profits of industrial enterprises above designated size still fell by 16.8% year-on-year, and the year-on-year decline in June was 8.3%, of which the upstream raw material manufacturing industry profit generally negative growth. This means that enterprises should carry out this round of restocking under the background of continuous increase in profit pressure. How to reduce cost and increase efficiency while replenishing inventory has become an urgent issue for industrial enterprises.

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As a sub-group of Jingdong Group engaged in industrial supply chain technology and service business, Jingdong Industry serves industrial enterprises to reduce costs and increase efficiency with the digitalization of the full link of supply chain. Jingdong Industry has built a complete set of technical service product system – IPNP (Industrial Performance Neuroscience Project Set) around the digitalization of the full link of the supply chain to help industrial enterprises achieve a balance between inventory and cost through commodity optimization, performance optimization and source optimization in inventory management.

Combine SKUs with commodity standardization and reduce the number of suppliers to achieve “less storage”

In the past, the procurement of industrial enterprises was mainly based on the offline model, and the local bidding was conducted by various factories. However, the material codes of suppliers in different regions are different, and the product descriptions are not uniform, which makes the phenomenon of “one product and multiple vendors” extremely common, and it is easy to have duplicate stocking. For example, product A and product B may only have slight differences in material, the actual use effect is almost the same, in the vast majority of scenarios can be replaced with each other, but because of different suppliers or different codes, enterprises in the inventory will be prepared separately, virtually formed a duplicate inventory.

To this end, the plan given by Jingdong Industry is to standardize the goods. Through the Mercator standard commodity library created by Jingdong Industry, enterprises can clarify the specifications of each industrial product, so as to merge the SKUs of the same type and effect in the past, reducing the overall number of SKUs and the number of suppliers. This can not only achieve less storage, but also further play the scale effect and reduce procurement costs.