Commodity standardization and material management are the key to the digital transformation of supply chain. Only by establishing a unified standard can we reduce information silos, realize resource sharing, improve collaborative efficiency, and reduce social costs.

On September 6, the commodity standardization and material governance special activities of the procurement supply chain digital intelligent transformation series seminar initiated by Jingdong Industry were held in Guangzhou, inviting a number of supply chain material management experts in the industry, national central enterprises and industry benchmark enterprises supply chain and material procurement leaders to gather. On-site, experts in the form of face to face, around the supply chain material management key points, difficulties, blocked points, practical cases and solutions to carry out in-depth discussion.

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From SKU to MKU Jingdong industrial technology to promote the standardization of enterprise commodities

In material management, article code is the “identity card” of goods and plays a key role. But in the field of industrial goods, article coding has long been in a state of isolation. Brand owners, platforms, and enterprises often code materials according to their respective management needs, which leads to the classification and coding standards in the multi-level supply and demand chain are not uniform, and it is easy to appear a multi-code, a multi-name, a product, a product, and other phenomena, which increases the communication and transaction costs between the various links of the industrial chain. For example, the same material has different names in the industrial chain due to non-standard description, which not only makes it difficult to compare prices, check accounts, and audit, but also makes it difficult to exchange data and inefficient to match supply and demand; Under the multi-supplier system, the same physical goods often have different categories, different brands, and different prices on the procurement platform, which also significantly increases the difficulty of enterprise choice.

The key to solve this problem lies in the standardization of commodity information. It can be said that commodity standardization is not only the premise of unifying the procurement objectives of both the supply and demand sides, but also the basis of realizing the fine management of improving the efficiency and reducing the cost of procurement. In the “National Standardization Development Outline” issued in 2021, it is mentioned that the focus is on strengthening the standardization of article coding.

As a provider of industrial supply chain technology and service solutions under Jingdong Group, Jingdong Industry has always invested heavily in coding standardization as an important work. As early as 2020, Jingdong Industrial has built a Mercator standard commodity library. This is the use of artificial intelligence deep learning technology to analyze standardized commodity categories and attributes, commodity manufacturers guidance information, commodity information collected from supply chain participants, and industry experts knowledge and experience, to develop a uniform set of commodity parameter definitions.

Liu Xinjian, head of the digital business of Jingdong industrial commodities, said that compared with the SKU code, the standard commodity code generated by Mercator is called MKU, which is distinguished by the model and richer specification parameters, and is not different from the manufacturer and supplier. This can not only ensure the uniqueness of the code, but also especially suitable for the management logic of the procurement demand side.