One of our largest retail customers in China is currently the largest fruit franchise enterprise which integrates fruit production, trading and retail. In October 2016, the business had over 1,600 chain stores and established more than 100 fruit planting bases globally.

To date, they have more than 10 cold storage centres in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Beijing, Chongqing and Hangzhou. They have even successfully opened physical stores in Hong Kong and Singapore.

What were our customer’s requirements?

To support its growing business, our customer required a highly-efficient logistics distribution system, which was capable of supporting multiple business models, B2B, B2C, O2O and omnichannel.

They also required a solution that was able to refine inventory management. This was due to the fact that they dealt with challenges such as the same fruit with different expiry dates, multiple packages, finished products/raw materials, standard/non-standard, suppliers, tare weights and packaging material. Products also needed to be managed on a first-in-first-out basis.

The second but equally important requirement was to have delivery flexibility due to the timeliness of fresh fruit. Fruits that were stored in the warehouse for too long lose its freshness, thus losing its value. Our client required a warehouse operation process that was able to make new SKU delivery, replacement of SKU during delivery, order split upon delivery and multiple deliveries according to the actual solution. In summary, they needed the ability to modify orders at any time during the picking process.

Adding on to this, due to the variety of fruit packaging in the production area and market, the warehouse needed to carry out packaging conversion operations on-the-fly. This could range from switching from large packaging to small packaging, bulk packaging processing, standard portion operations, and fruit packing distribution.

Last but not least, our customer was also committed to creating an online and offline omnichannel through 1MXian that covered more than 1,600 stores in various provinces and regions across the region. This was so that they could achieve full coverage of online and offline business and provide consumers with an offline experience and other services.

How did we meet our customer’s order?

Our first task was to streamline the fresh fruit inventory management. With Honeywell Meson Logistics Solutions, we were able to implement an inventory with multiple Units of Measurement (UOM). Due to the particularity of fresh fruit, our customer had various UOM, such as Weight, Each, Bar, Box and Piece. However, they relied solely on Weight as their UOM for incoming and outgoing transactions. This caused inaccuracies and errors due to the inconsistency of the Weight of products. With Honeywell Meson Logistics Solutions, our customer has now switched to using Piece as a UOM to manage inventory quantity and finance inventory closing, and a UOM conversion logic when receiving or delivering products by Weight.

To support our customers' constant and rapid distribution activities of more than 10 warehouses across the country, we deployed a centralised database which is a testament of Honeywell Meson Logistics Solutions’ advanced technical architecture and stability.

To solve our customer’s second requirement, we implemented logical processing to solve the random industry-specific needs and to deliver system efficiency. To enhance the packaging process, the deployment of Honeywell Meson Logistics Solutions enabled our customer to carry out packaging conversion operations such as large to small packaging, bulk packaging, standard portion operations and fruit packing distribution.

Finally, Honeywell Meson Logistics Solutions was able to seamlessly integrate with our customer’s existing logistics system and helped to enhance the B2b services for enterprises, and consumer-oriented B2C services such as 1MXian and WeChat business sales, and O2O and proprietary services.

What was the end result?

‍The implementation of Honeywell Logistics Solutions was successfully completed in April 2017 and now supports the high volume of goods needed to be pushed through our customer’s warehouse distribution supply chain for their retail stores. This successful implementation has also become a benchmark project for Honeywell Logistics Solutions for the fresh fruit cold chain industry.