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Bing FU, General Manager of Dada Now shared insights on on-demand delivery at the Intra-City Logistics Summit 2022, held by the China Federation of Logistics & Purchasing (CFLP).
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Since its launch in July 2021, Dada Now’s open platform for autonomous delivery has supported deliveries of over 50,000 supermarket orders.
With the volume of offline orders shrinking and more physical stores embracing an omni-channel strategy, intra-city retail has become a red-hot topic in the industry. Today, intra-city retail is catalyzing a new ecosystem, which is mainly characterized by the online-ization of supply chains and the digitization of retailers’ whole-chain operations, according to Bing FU, General Manager of Dada Now, the on-demand delivery arm of Dada Group , at the CFLP Intra-City Logistics Summit 2022.
The boom in intra-city retail has been supported by intra-city delivery as the underlying infrastructure for fulfillment. Additionally, on-demand delivery and fulfillment capability has become a key determining factor in improving the consumer journey, increasing store capacity and growing intra-city retail coverage.
Three major trends in intra-city retail fulfillment decoded
At the summit, FU shared his thoughts on the development of intra-city fulfillment:
First, fulfillment is no longer simply limited to delivery. Fulfillment is more about the synergy of warehousing, order picking, packaging, package hand-over, delivery and after-sale service. Compared to the food delivery business, intra-city retail has a longer and much more complicated fulfillment chain, and requires highly robust and flexible delivery capacity during grand promotions. Hence, retailers need to improve the efficiency of each step in their daily operations to upgrade their fulfillment performance.
Second, as product categories and shopping scenarios present differentiated characteristics, merchants and consumers’ needs for fulfillment services are diversified. The delivery industry is rolling out customized fulfillment solutions for brands and merchants of different types and scales.
Third, the booming on-demand retail business in China allows consumers to place orders for almost anything (food and drinks, fresh and raw, consumer electronics, medications, etc.) from anywhere (home, office, hotel and more), driving the business scope of intra-city fulfillment to extend to all consumer groups, all regions, all categories, and all scenarios.
To address the retail industry’s expectations, Dada Now has rolled out a fulfillment service system that integrates its know-how in warehousing, order picking and delivery to help improve merchants’ fulfillment performance. The all-round fulfillment solution empowers retailers’ warehouse management, improves order picking efficiency, and accelerates deliveries.
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Autonomous delivery practice praised
In July 2021, Dada Group launched an open platform dedicated to making autonomous delivery services smoother and smarter.
In collaboration with JD Logistics and unmanned vehicle developer White Rhino, the open platform for autonomous delivery operation is now deployed to merchant partners such as SEVEN FRESH, Sam’s Club, and Yonghui, to provide one-hour deliveries for consumers’ on-demand grocery orders. So far, over 50,000 orders have been processed though the autonomous delivery platform.
The platform proposes a smarter solution that helps lower costs, and improves efficiency for delivery partners, thanks to its three key functionalities, which are a smart dispatching system of unmanned vehicles, a human-vehicle interaction system, and a smart order management system. In addition to providing massive delivery orders, the platform also enables its partners with digitized operation tools, and a securer delivery experience.
For its efforts in driving forward the autonomous delivery, the platform was honored as an ‘Exemplary Case of Innovation’ at the summit.
Dada Now is committed to becoming a new infrastructure for intra-city retail, said FU at the event. “In the future, we will continue to give full play to our digital capabilities, empower the industry in every aspect of operation, and help partners with diverse needs to achieve the goal of ‘bringing people everything on demand’.”
