How Meituan’s Supply Chain System Cuts Costs 90% with Automation

British supply‑chain expert Martin Christopher once said, “In the 21st century, competition is not between companies but between supply chains.”

What is a supply chain?

In the ever‑changing O2O battlefield, Meituan’s success relies on its hidden technology team – the supply chain.

Meituan’s supply chain, abbreviated SCP (Supply Chain Process), works with merchants to turn agreed‑upon cooperation plans into electronic contracts. These contracts are refined into detailed descriptions, prices, purchase limits, and undergo legal and financial review before becoming visible to consumers on Meituan’s apps or website.

The classic group‑buying process starts with a Business Development (BD) person in a city launching a deal, signing a contract with the merchant, entering the plan into Meituan’s portal, and submitting it for headquarters review. Approved plans are then packaged by a CMS and adapted to various C‑end channels, completing the project production.

Beyond traditional group‑buying, Meituan’s O2O services (hotels, travel, food delivery, breakfast, etc.) face varying degrees of product standardization, requiring a flexible and efficient supply‑chain system to capture each market opportunity.

Complex, fine‑grained data structuring

Different verticals demand different attribute sets: a T‑shirt needs material and size, while a restaurant deal needs location, number of diners, cuisine type, etc. A single hot‑pot deal can involve nearly 100 attributes, illustrating why such granularity is necessary.

Two reasons drive this granularity: (1) the supply chain must serve both B‑end (BD staff) and C‑end (consumers), extracting reusable modules like “purchase notice” to speed up BD entry and enable structured search; (2) multiple C‑end channels have divergent and frequently changing attribute requirements, making structured data essential.

Flexible selling methods

Supporting numerous product variations (e.g., hotel rooms with/without breakfast, different bed types) creates combinatorial explosion. Recording each variant manually would cause order‑entry time to grow geometrically. The system therefore must allow a single entry to support many selling configurations.

Dynamic category and attribute adjustments

When new categories (e.g., self‑service dining with Wi‑Fi, parking) or sub‑categories (e.g., Chengdu vs. Chongqing hot‑pot) are added, both front‑end forms and back‑end storage must change. The supply‑chain system therefore requires zero‑code configuration for such adjustments.

Configurable approval workflow

Different business channels need distinct approval controls. For example, a new “buy‑now” model only requires head‑office validation of profit and compliance, while traditional group‑buying still needs city‑level pre‑approval followed by central review. The workflow engine makes these processes dynamically configurable.

Building an O2O service model

Transitioning from ad‑hoc development to a modular architecture, Meituan introduced a “product center” that abstracts services (e.g., big‑bed room, breakfast, Wi‑Fi) into SKU attributes. These attributes map to sales rules, consumption rules, and price rules, enabling flexible product composition.

Event‑driven decoupling

Workflows decouple business logic from the UI, allowing dynamic configuration of approval nodes, participants, and outcomes. Process data (e.g., order latency) is extracted from the workflow, enabling analytics without burdening the core supply‑chain system.

Automation everywhere (Project 908)

By segmenting the order‑creation process and applying targeted automation (e.g., auto‑approval, auto‑writing), Meituan reduced per‑order cost by over 90% and increased efficiency eightfold, a project internally dubbed “908”.

Continuous improvement

Today, automation extends to workflow‑driven repeat‑review handling and a configurable attribute center, allowing business users to adjust categories and attributes within minutes instead of days of development.

Speed gains

For a typical discount‑purchase flow, development effort dropped from 30 person‑days to 5 person‑days, covering merchant onboarding, contract customization, plan entry, storage, approval, and multi‑channel integration.

Cost reduction and efficiency boost

After eliminating manual review and writing, the editorial team (nearly 100 people) was dissolved, and with a 1000% increase in order volume, per‑order cost fell by more than 90%.

Summary

From a technical perspective, the supply‑chain order flow works as follows: a BD initiates a request, the back‑end renders a dynamic form (DF) based on the channel and category, the Attribute Center (AC) validates the input, and the data is transformed for the Product Center. The Product Center stores the plan, triggers Gravity to schedule approval tasks, and upon approval, the CMS assembles the final output for various C‑end channels. Changes are recorded in a Change Center, also processed via Gravity. The system follows an MVC pattern: Model (Product & Change Centers), View (Dynamic Forms & Templates), and Controller (Attribute Center & Workflow), achieving high‑availability and automation.