The article explains how procurement, logistics, and the broader supply chain differ in scope and objectives, illustrating common pitfalls, hidden costs, and the importance of integrated information, order, logistics, and capital flows for achieving efficient, low‑cost delivery.
In 2026, fast‑moving consumer goods distributors face inventory overload, shelf stagnation, and cash‑flow crises, but the article shows how a three‑pillar activation framework—Buyable, Visible, Audible—combined with digital SaaS solutions can transform them into data‑driven local service providers and restore profitable sales.
The 2026 618 promotion saw a 40% sales rise on JD, a doubling of 133 brands on Tmall and a 70‑fold surge on Meituan, while industry inventory exceeded 3000 billion CNY and turnover days hit 900, highlighting a shift from price subsidies to a multi‑dimensional value‑focused strategy across online channels.
A deep dive into the sharp sales decline of traditional FMCG distributors reveals that over‑stocking, price‑war induced margin squeeze, slow execution chains and aggressive competitor moves—driven largely by manufacturers' outdated policies—are the primary culprits, and outlines how digital correction and proactive manufacturer reforms can reverse the trend.
The article explains that effective supply‑chain collaboration hinges on clear responsibilities, a single executable plan, transparent real‑time data, and accountable roles for PMC, procurement, warehouse, and production, supported by a unified data platform.
This guide shows manufacturing and trade managers how to scientifically determine procurement frequency by classifying materials, accounting for hidden ordering and holding costs, applying the Economic Order Quantity model, and adjusting for supply‑chain uncertainty, ultimately using a procurement system to automate and optimize the process.
This article presents DeepStock, a deep reinforcement learning framework with policy regularization that integrates classic inventory heuristics, achieving 7% turnover reduction and multi‑million cost savings across millions of SKU‑warehouse pairs in Alibaba's self‑operated ecosystem.
This article explains how a well‑aligned supply chain—integrating goods flow, cash flow, and information flow—acts as a company’s circulatory system, shows common blockages that cripple profitability, and offers practical steps and digital tools to diagnose and improve supply‑chain health for SMEs.
The article explains the fundamental difference between traditional inventory (进销存) systems that record stock and sales and modern supply‑chain solutions that coordinate material, information, and financial flows, offering a step‑by‑step guide for SMEs to choose the right system based on product complexity, warehouse and supplier networks, and order‑fulfilment demands.
During peak travel periods, 12306 often displays available seats that cannot be booked, a problem caused by intricate inventory deduction across multiple travel segments, heavy caching strategies, and real‑time load pressures that lead to stale data and purchase failures.
This article examines why small‑and‑medium businesses consider cloud‑based inventory solutions, outlines their key benefits such as real‑time data sharing and finance‑business integration, highlights risks like data security and limited customization, and provides practical criteria for deciding whether a cloud inventory system fits your company.
The article introduces the checkmark function—a mathematical model where a linear term rises while an inverse term falls, creating a unique minimum—and demonstrates its powerful applications across inventory management, fence design, production batch sizing, and equipment maintenance, highlighting common optimization features.
This article reviews five classic mathematical models—production scheduling, inventory management, quality control, reliability analysis, and energy optimization—detailing their formulations, common algorithms, and how they enhance efficiency, reduce costs, ensure product quality, and support sustainable industrial operations.
Learn why many companies suffer from excess inventory yet material shortages, and follow a step‑by‑step procurement planning framework—collecting demand, expanding BOM, calculating net needs, scheduling based on lead times, and continuously adjusting—to keep stock balanced, avoid production delays, and optimize supply chain efficiency.
This article explains the fundamental differences between a traditional procurement plan and MRP, illustrates their advantages and pitfalls with a detailed case study, and provides practical steps to combine both approaches for efficient, cost‑effective purchasing.
This article outlines the eight typical outbound types in warehouse management systems—ranging from sales shipments to special releases—and walks through the complete WMS outbound workflow, covering order receipt, inventory allocation, wave planning, picking, verification, packaging, consolidation, shipping, and inventory updates.
This article explains the essential quality inspection process within a Warehouse Management System (WMS), outlining its core objectives, common strategies, detailed workflow steps, and how proper inspection reduces defects, lowers costs, ensures compliance, and supports continuous supply‑chain improvement.
This guide explains how to handle batch mixing of short‑shelf‑life items in warehouses and stores by establishing clear batch identifiers, maintaining batch‑level inventory ledgers, applying dynamic expiration calculations, and enforcing FIFO through precise inbound recording, storage adjustments, outbound prioritization, regular cycle counts, and staff training to minimize waste and improve turnover.
The article explains that simply lowering purchase prices rarely reduces costs long‑term because hidden process inefficiencies add hidden expenses, and it shows how a full‑chain supply‑chain process redesign—covering planning, procurement, contracts, and inventory—can sustainably lower costs.
The article explains why warehouses can be overfilled while customers still face stockouts, analyzing false and structural overstock, flawed demand planning, weak supply chain execution, and offers practical steps such as data‑driven forecasting, ABC inventory classification, transparent collaboration, fast‑response mechanisms, and accountability to resolve the paradox.
This article explains the fundamental differences between dynamic and static inventory counting in warehouse management systems, detailing their definitions, core features, algorithmic logic, error‑prevention designs, discrepancy handling workflows, and how they can be combined to achieve near‑perfect inventory accuracy.
The article reveals how over‑eager replenishment creates supply‑chain avalanches, zombie inventory, and bullwhip effects, then offers a step‑by‑step resurrection guide with dynamic safety stock, data‑validation loops, and self‑healing mechanisms to restore healthy inventory flow.
This article analyzes common inventory discrepancy scenarios, exposes typical blame‑shifting tactics across departments, and presents a comprehensive, operation‑focused solution stack—including traceability, dynamic calibration, and fool‑proof design—to eliminate errors and improve accountability.
To prevent overselling during flash sales, the article explains how non‑atomic database updates cause negative stock and presents solutions such as optimistic DB locking, Redis Lua atomic deductions, Redisson distributed locks, transactional message queues, and pre‑deduction with rate limiting, recommending a combined approach that achieved 120 000 QPS with zero oversell.
This article explains the concepts of FIFO and FILO inventory methods, compares their advantages and suitable scenarios, provides four key questions to help choose the right approach, and shares real‑world case studies illustrating how companies apply these strategies to optimize stock turnover and cash flow.
This article dissects common failures in e‑commerce replenishment—such as hot‑product black holes, slow‑moving stock graves, and supply‑chain avalanches—and presents a seven‑step framework of dynamic forecasting, tiered strategies, distributed inventory, and automated safeguards to stabilize inventory levels.
This article addresses a high-concurrency inventory problem in a second-hand market's second-hand market system, focusing on solving the system's inventory deduction issue during flash sales using cache and asynchronous processing to achieve horizontal scalability.
This article explores practical strategies for handling the high‑concurrency inventory deduction problem in flash‑sale scenarios, covering lock‑based approaches, Redis caching, partitioned stock management, asynchronous updates, and distributed scaling techniques to prevent overselling and improve throughput.
The Taotian Group’s algorithm team, with Zhejiang University’s School of Management, created the E‑commerce Supply Chain Optimization Decision Support System—implemented as Taotian Inventory Optimization Engine (IOS)—which uses deep learning, robust optimization and game theory to solve NP‑hard location, inventory and transfer problems, providing warehouse and inventory plans that improve efficiency and consumer experience, earning a nomination for China Operations Research Society’s Operations Application Award.
This article explores the three‑high requirements of modern internet systems, compares multithreading with asynchronous methods, and presents a practical, partition‑based inventory‑deduction architecture that leverages Redis caching, MySQL sharding, and asynchronous updates to achieve scalable high‑concurrency performance.
The article details JD’s smart supply‑chain innovations, describing an explainable AI forecasting method that boosts prediction accuracy while maintaining interpretability, and an end‑to‑end inventory management model based on multi‑quantile RNNs that improves replenishment decisions, reduces costs, and enhances overall operational efficiency.
The article explains how to handle the most complex part of an e‑commerce order flow—stock deduction under high concurrency—by using JVM and distributed locks, Redis atomic operations, two‑phase commit, hot‑cold routing, fault tolerance, and cache rebuilding strategies.
This article shows how forecasting, linear programming, EOQ inventory, pricing elasticity, and location‑selection models can be applied to a coffee shop to predict foot traffic, optimize menus, reduce waste, set optimal prices, and choose the best site, ultimately boosting profitability.
This article examines the challenges of scaling inventory pre‑allocation in fast‑growing logistics platforms, outlines architectural principles for a lightweight, Redis‑driven solution that replaces MySQL bottlenecks, details data structures, consistency mechanisms, and performance results, and provides a roadmap for future capacity growth.
This article explores how causal inference techniques, including dynamic Bayesian networks and time‑series models, can be used to improve demand forecasting and replenishment strategies in inventory management, offering both theoretical concepts and practical case studies for operational decision‑making.
The article details Vivo Mall’s inventory system evolution from a tightly‑coupled service to a layered architecture handling multiple stock types, high‑concurrency flash‑sale deductions, duplicate‑deduction safeguards, hotspot mitigation, and CDC‑based synchronization, outlining current capabilities and future unified management goals.
This article explains the role of an order system in traditional e‑commerce, outlines its main functional modules, describes the end‑to‑end order flow—including creation, payment, production, confirmation and completion—covers inventory reduction strategies, order splitting, reverse processes, state‑machine design, and discusses future evolution toward a unified order center.
This article curates the ten most-read technical posts from NetEase Yanxuan in 2022, covering DDD adoption, reverse transaction systems, availability metrics, documentation practices, inventory locking, performance optimization, stability governance, H5 containerization, 2B architecture, and the evolution of the Yanxuan app’s engineering architecture.
This article explains the role, architecture, core modules, workflow, inventory management strategies, and future evolution of order systems in traditional e‑commerce enterprises, illustrating design considerations, process steps, and state‑machine modeling for efficient order handling.
This article details the end‑to‑end design of a high‑traffic flash‑sale (秒杀) system, covering functional and non‑functional requirements, performance estimations, dynamic/static separation, traffic‑layer control, high‑availability strategies, inventory‑deduction methods, and the key technologies needed for a resilient, scalable backend.
The article outlines how the Strict Selection e‑commerce platform evolved its locked‑inventory function from a basic tool into a strategic, multi‑layer capability that allocates dedicated stock for marketing, channel, and warehouse scenarios, using sales‑layer and physical‑layer locks and automated strategies to improve flexibility, efficiency, and inventory turnover.
This article formulates the daily flower inventory problem as a stochastic decision model with Poisson‑distributed demand, derives the optimal order quantity analytically, and validates it through Python simulations that compute expected profit for varying order levels.
This article models a piano retailer’s weekly demand as a Poisson process, applies a restocking policy that orders three units only when inventory hits zero, and uses a Markov chain to estimate a roughly 10% stockout probability and an average weekly sale of 0.857 units, while also exploring sensitivity to demand changes.
This article explains how to design a high‑concurrency flash‑sale (秒杀) system by optimizing concurrent reads and writes, applying API and architecture principles, separating dynamic and static data, handling hot items, shaping traffic, improving performance, managing inventory reduction, and implementing robust fallback mechanisms for high availability.
This article presents a comprehensive design for a high‑concurrency e‑commerce inventory system that prevents overselling by combining Redis‑based stock checks with database persistence and a task‑engine workflow, offering code examples, pipeline usage, and strategies for idempotency and fault tolerance.
This article examines the role of order systems in traditional e‑commerce enterprises, outlines their core functional modules and design principles, illustrates system relationships with upstream and downstream services, and discusses future development trends, including modular architectures and multi‑system integration challenges.
This article details how a legacy e‑commerce supply‑chain system was re‑architected using Domain‑Driven Design, Hexagonal architecture, CQRS, and an EventStore solution to resolve unclear boundaries, inventory inaccuracies, and scalability issues while improving testability and operational efficiency.
This article explains JD.com’s comprehensive order transfer, inventory management, fulfillment workflow, and risk‑control mechanisms, illustrating how orders are allocated to warehouses, scheduled for production, and monitored to ensure efficient e‑commerce operations.
The article outlines Youzan’s SaaS supply‑chain solution for retailers, detailing its end‑to‑end business model, layered architecture, and complexity‑reduction tactics such as domain‑driven design, event‑driven orchestration and strategy‑based abstraction, while explaining how supply‑chain inventory is transformed into sales inventory and noting future plans for a visual workflow engine.
This article explains Yanxuan's inventory center design, detailing a layered approach that separates warehouse, physical, and sales inventories, introduces lockable stock pools for complex sales scenarios, and shows how these practices improve stock turnover and reduce out‑of‑stock rates in e‑commerce.
This article examines Yanxuan's inventory management challenges and presents a layered design—warehouse, physical, and sales layers—combined with a flexible lock‑stock pool to support multi‑channel, multi‑warehouse operations while addressing promotional and special‑use inventory requirements.
This report analyzes the rapidly growing O2O home‑delivery market, comparing fast‑pick warehouse and hanging‑chain fulfillment models, and provides detailed operational, inventory, staffing, and IT system design recommendations to reduce costs and boost efficiency.
This article examines how Yanxuan’s offline retail stores combine online and offline channels through unified pricing, marketing tools, user ID linking, product caching, precise replenishment, and O2O collaborations, outlining the technical architecture and future outlook for integrated retail.
This article examines Yanxuan's offline retail development, detailing its business models, technical architecture, price‑and‑marketing synchronization, product caching, precise replenishment, inventory integration, and O2O experiments, while outlining future growth prospects for omnichannel retail.
This article explains the role of an order system in traditional e‑commerce enterprises, outlines its main functional modules and architectural design, and discusses future development directions, covering system relationships, core processes, inventory and payment strategies, state‑machine management, and scalability considerations.
Learn how to overcome the concurrency bottleneck of traditional distributed locks in high‑traffic e‑commerce scenarios by applying segment‑based locking and other optimization techniques, enabling thousands of orders per second while preventing inventory overselling.
This article explains the role of an order system in e‑commerce, outlines its relationships with other business modules, details its core architecture and workflow—including order creation, payment, inventory handling, and reverse processes—and discusses future development directions for unified order management.
This article explains the relationship between Warehouse Management Systems (WMS) and Inventory Management Systems, clarifies their definitions and distinctions, outlines how company size influences system architecture, and describes the layered inventory model (sales, scheduling, physical layers) along with its operational advantages.
Drawing from NetEase Yanxuan’s experience, the article outlines three universal B2B design principles: define clear system boundaries and ownership, enforce order through universal interaction rules as scale grows, and prioritize abstract rule‑based capabilities over mere process digitization to create scalable, adaptable solutions.
This article explains the role, architecture, key modules, workflow, state machine, and future evolution of an order system in traditional e‑commerce enterprises, providing a comprehensive guide for designing and improving order management solutions.
Damai’s TicketingPaaS combines high‑performance snapshot caching, SVG‑based seat digitalization, and LoRa‑enabled edge intelligence to handle Double‑11‑scale traffic, ensure seat consistency, and provide resilient on‑site entry, while offering extensible APIs and exploring blockchain and 5G for future ticket authenticity and immersive experiences.
This article provides a comprehensive overview of master production planning (MPS), material requirements planning (MRP), and the key Oracle ERP modules for suppliers, materials, procurement, inventory, and financial management, explaining their concepts, processes, data structures, and practical implications for enterprise resource planning.
The 12306 railway ticket platform faces extreme operational pressure because it must synchronize real‑time sales across online and offline channels, handle countless route and time combinations without buffering, manage complex inventory updates, enforce purchase limits, and process massive concurrent queries, making its load far greater than typical e‑commerce systems.
JD's chief scientist Shen Zuo‑jun explains how shortening the decision chain with end‑to‑end algorithms and intelligent multi‑level replenishment dramatically improves inventory turnover, stock availability, and forecasting accuracy, showcasing a novel supply‑chain research direction that integrates AI, big data, and human expertise.
This article provides a comprehensive, step‑by‑step tutorial on designing and implementing a Java‑based inventory management system, covering requirement analysis, architecture, module design, development environment setup, and deployment using Spring, Spring MVC, Hibernate, ExtJS, Maven, and Tomcat.
This article discusses JD.com's Y Business Unit's AI-driven supply chain optimization, focusing on sales prediction algorithms, inventory control, and the challenges of predicting new product sales.
This article explains how to architect a high‑traffic flash‑sale system by separating data and business layers, using Redis queues for inventory consistency, and implementing multi‑party transaction reconciliation to handle massive concurrent requests while maintaining reliable stock information.
