Logistics case-the fourth person "intervenes" in the third-party logistics of the third party.

As a company that chooses third-party and fourth-party logistics services, Philips is most concerned about the cost and the service IT obtains-cost performance ratio, the IT capability of third-party logistics and the network coverage capability of third-party logistics. For the fourth-party logistics provider, Philips attaches importance to strength and technology, which can ensure that the solution can improve work efficiency, help complete the solution designed by Philips and realize the docking with suppliers.

Philips Consumer Electronics (hereinafter referred to as Philips) has experienced more than 65,438+00 years from direct shipping to the full introduction of the "third party"-the third party logistics company, but the "third party" and Philips only survived for two years, and Philips can't wait to introduce the "fourth person"-the fourth party logistics company.

Of course, these "third parties" and "fourth people" are not substitutes. They serve as communication platforms between Philips and "second parties" and "third parties". By introducing the "fourth person", Philips has streamlined its own process and team-carrying out the strategy of outsourcing non-core business to the end.

Philips puzzle

In 2000, Philips had more than 40 logistics suppliers in China, some of which were relatively professional third-party logistics suppliers, while others were just fleets. Zhang Jun, director of supply chain and IT at Philips, recalled that there were no more than 20 branded third-party logistics providers in the market at that time. At that time, there was no EDI (Electronic Data Interchange). More than 40 suppliers rely on "crowd tactics"-sending faxes and making phone calls. Zhang Jun's department team is also very large, close to more than 60 people. A *** 18 fax machine is overloaded, handling hundreds of varieties and millions of documents.

Since 200 1, electronic data interchange (EDI) has been carried out between Philips and logistics suppliers. And cancel and streamline logistics suppliers. At that time, there were about 65,438+05 logistics suppliers in Philips and nearly 1 000 distributors, but in 2002, this number became five. Logistics companies with weak IT capabilities withdrew from the ranks of Philips suppliers.

Through EDI, Philips receives customers' orders from the order center, then processes them in the ERP system and transmits the data to the third-party logistics company. Third-party logistics companies use internal storage and transportation systems to schedule and plan social convoys. Then send the receipt back to Philips, and then feed it back to Philips' ERP system to reflect the changes in sales and inventory.

In 2000, a well-known domestic third-party logistics supplier cooperated with Philips for a period of time, and Philips gave this supplier a large area and share. However, due to the unbearable cost, the supplier asked Philips to raise the price in the second year, and the price increase was beyond Philips' tolerance, so the two sides had to break up. And because the two sides jointly created EDI, this breakup brought great excitement to Philips. Zhang Jun found that IT costs (including time and money) had been invested before, and the withdrawal of the supplier caused a blow to Shui Piao. Moreover, the other party also invested a lot of IT investment and didn't make any money at all. Both sides suffered heavy losses.

What puzzles Zhang Jun is whether Philips can avoid such risks in the future.

At first, Zhang Can thought of "being careful" when choosing a third-party logistics supplier in the future, not taking cost as the only consideration, and ensuring that the third-party logistics supplier has reasonable profits and can make money.

However, this idea has many limitations for Philips. There are many factors for third-party logistics providers to make money, including whether management costs can be controlled well, whether they can get more competitive prices in the market and so on. These are beyond Philips' control.

All suppliers were doing EDI with Philips at that time. After Philips receives the customer's order, it must sort the goods to determine which warehouse to load and unload the goods from, which route to take and which supplier is responsible for the shipment. After the EDI data is returned, it is necessary to determine which supplier these documents come from. What Zhang Jun has been thinking about is whether a single order can solve the problem and avoid the tedious sorting work.

In the second half of 20001and the first half of 2002, Zhang Jun began to look for solutions. What he needs is actually a platform. As long as Philips throws the data to it, the platform will process the data with various logistics suppliers and give unified feedback. There is no need to do it one by one.

Introduce the fourth party

The fate between Huaxia Media and Philips began when Huaxia helped Philips to formulate a planning system. During the implementation of the system, Zhang Jun communicated with Lin Liang, the boss of Huaxia Bank, many times, which inspired Lin Liang to establish the platform. Lin Liang quickly established a new business framework, developed various systems and established the NET-X platform. X means infinity and uncertainty. Its basic idea is to serve as a platform for business and information flow between manufacturing enterprises and logistics enterprises.

Why doesn't Philips build its own platform?

Zhang Jun believes that Philips' main competitiveness lies in product technology, design and marketing, while IT and supply chain are not the embodiment of Philips' main competitiveness. Philips' consistent strategy is to outsource non-core business as much as possible. If Philips wants to build its own platform, it will have to recruit a large number of IT personnel, buy its own servers, share the platform, and have an implementation team to deal with logistics suppliers-obviously this is not in line with Philips' strategy.

There are also third-party logistics companies coming to Philips, hoping to build this platform to make Philips run. However, Zhang Jun believes that the role of the third-party logistics platform is very limited. Usually, customers want the platform to be fair or independent, and serve all customers and logistics suppliers. For example, if this platform is Huayuntong's, Bao Gong will refuse to take its data from Huayuntong's platform, because the two parties are competitors, and the data can know their traffic and destination. Trade secrets are not guaranteed.

As a fourth-party logistics platform, Huaxia Media charges Philips.

The charging mode of Huaxia Media is: for large enterprises, monthly rent+document fee; For small and medium enterprises, there is a monthly fee.

Compared with this extra cost, Zhang Jun thinks that the fourth party logistics saves several costs:

Work with suppliers to reduce risks and costs; As mentioned above, due to the strict cooperation requirements of Philips, logistics suppliers can't do it any more. If it stops its cooperation with Philips, the previous investment in IT development will be useless, and this investment is still very large.

With the platform, starting from Philips, as long as we maintain a standard and throw data on the platform, we don't need to invest any more.

The same is true for suppliers, which will not change because of Philips system upgrade and other reasons, and can maintain the original system. The platform is used to complete data coupling and matching.

This can improve the efficiency of third-party logistics, and then improve the efficiency of Philips.

For example, if there are 50 major customers, 50 of them should sign EDI with Bao Gong, and they should sign 5 scars. Looking for a trace? ┍ Love Jia? Hey? The number of people in department T also needs to expand with the growth of business. In this case, people may ask, is Bao Gong doing logistics or IT?

Simply put, IT is to save costs and form scale effect through a unified platform, so that manufacturers and third-party logistics companies do not need to increase IT investment because of the increase of suppliers or customers.

In addition, it turns out that Philips IT staff and supply chain managers maintain data according to the division of suppliers. Because of this platform, now data transmission only needs to be maintained by the platform, which greatly saves labor costs.

Zhang Jun said that Philips originally needed to maintain four EDI sets. Although you don't have to pay the supplier, you still need the input of personnel to maintain four sets of EDI and understand each other's processes and systems. Philips' current platform is basically developed by Huaxia. Balance according to the project, and the initial investment is very small.

On June 65438+1 October1day this year, Philips' SAP system was officially put into operation. Fortunately, as the director of information technology, Zhang Jun and his colleagues only need to interface with the platform, but not with various logistics providers, which has not affected the implementation of the project.

Only two of the 18 fax machines in the supply chain management department are brave enough to handle emergency affairs. At present, Philips has not seen any bills of lading with logistics suppliers.

In the past, at the end of each month, two or three employees of Philips spent three days checking accounts with logistics suppliers and settling accounts. Now they can get business documents directly through the platform and solve them within half an hour.

In the interview, Zhang Jun has always stressed that the competition in the TV industry is cruel, and the concept of cost is very important. In this series of changes, the annual logistics cost of Philips has been declining. In the past few years, the decline rate reached 10%, and in the past two years, due to industry reasons, it still decreased by 5% every year.

Manage third parties and fourth parties

However, Huaxia is a young company after all. Can the system withstand the huge business flow of international giant Philips? Philips talked with Huaxia during the system research and hoped that the other party would use international standards. Huaxia adopts ROSETTANET, one of the two international standards, and Philips itself is one of the member organizations of the standard, which has less technical risk. In addition, although Philips operates through this platform, it still retains a set of processes. In case of an accident on the platform, it can still survive a difficult period on its own (although its efficiency has decreased).

Regarding the security of data operation, Zhang Jun thinks that the security level of the system itself is the third-party logistics provider, because the third party itself is not an IT company, it is just one of their services. In terms of security, it is different from an IT company like Huaxia Media. When Philips launched the platform, it made a lot of evaluation, including the design details of the server and firewall. Information confidentiality and the ability to provide technical support are some necessary conditions for the survival of the platform, which is related to the continuous growth and development of the company. On the contrary, the fourth party logistics is more concerned about these indicators than customers.

As a company that chooses third-party and fourth-party logistics services, Philips is most concerned about the cost and the service it obtains-cost performance; Secondly, Philips attaches great importance to the IT capabilities of third-party logistics; In addition, it is the network coverage ability of third-party logistics.

The cooperation between Philips and Baogong has such a slogan: wherever our products are sold, Baogong's network will extend.

Philips also pays special attention to the business center of third-party logistics. Usually, only heavyweight customers can get more attention. Philips hopes to account for more than 10% of its suppliers' revenue. Philips' supply chain often only uses two or three third-party logistics providers. Because there are two or three companies, the business volume of Philips third-party logistics is quite large. In this case, Philips has the right to ask suppliers to focus on Philips and is willing to invest and develop with Philips.

Commonly used indicators such as punctuality rate of receiving goods, error rate of receiving goods and damage rate of goods are commonly used indicators for Philips to evaluate third-party logistics. Philips has 15 standards for evaluating suppliers. Each weight is different, and the most important concern is usually the on-time arrival rate-because customers give money to Philips and very much hope that the goods will arrive on time. In addition, only when the goods are delivered to customers quickly can the inventory be maintained at a fairly low level for normal turnover. Philips' current arrival rate is over 98.5%. In addition to these key indicators (KPIs), Philips also has a supplier management system, which grades its suppliers according to the indicators and lists the rankings every month. According to these rankings, talk to suppliers about what they have done well and what they are not satisfied with, a year or a quarter.

For the fourth-party logistics provider, Philips attaches importance to strength and technology, which can ensure that the solution can improve work efficiency, help complete the solution designed by Philips and realize the docking with suppliers. Philips used to need two to three months to establish contact with new third-party logistics providers through EDI. Now, with the support of Huaxia platform, it can complete all docking within one week without paying any fees. In the future, when new suppliers enter, Philips will not have to invest in EDI.

For Philips, the thing to do this week is to increase the number of users. Companies like Huaxia have played a catalytic role in disguise. Accelerate the docking speed, which is zero for Philips. On this platform, Philips pays according to the transaction. IT turned out that Philips' IT staff was very depressed and had to change suppliers again. The previous one has been ruined. Now once the third-party logistics provider quits, there is no need to pay this money.

In daily work, Philips mainly focuses on the frequency at which the system cannot work. The number of times that the system can't work and can't transmit data must be less than 0.02%, unless it is caused by force majeure such as national optical cable and optical fiber construction.

In terms of data security, Philips also asked Huaxia to configure a backup server to provide double security.

In addition, if there is a problem with the platform data, the response time of the fourth party logistics is also very important, such as two hours to solve the first-level problem (such as data transmission); Two-level problems are solved 24 hours a day. In addition, there is a strict rule that as long as Philips is doing business, Huaxia will serve Philips 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for example, someone must be on duty during the Spring Festival and at night.

third part logistics

Third-party logistics refers to a business model in which logistics services are provided by logistics enterprises other than the supply and demand sides, and professional logistics enterprises engaged in third-party logistics business are third-party logistics enterprises.

The third-party service provider was first mentioned in a customer service survey conducted by the American Logistics Management Committee from 65438 to 0988, and this new thinking was incorporated into the customer service function. It is also used to describe "strategic alliance with service providers", especially "logistics service providers". Contract logistics also refers to the outsourcing of logistics functions. From a broader perspective, it not only includes warehousing, transportation and EDI information exchange, but also includes order fulfillment, automatic replenishment, selection of means of transport, packaging and labeling, product assembly, import and export agents and so on. For the above services and many other services, enterprises are increasingly turning to contract suppliers.

Compared with the self-built transportation of the first party logistics, the second party logistics requires motorcade transportation, and the concept of logistics outsourcing brought by the third party logistics will be a major development trend of the logistics industry in the future. Cooperation between production enterprises and third-party logistics enterprises can reduce costs, obtain good service, spread risks and enhance competitiveness.

Taking the American market as an example, the outsourcing rate of warehousing, inbound transportation and freight document review and payment of manufacturing enterprises is 63.3%, 60.7% and 59.8%, respectively.

Due to the promotion of outsourcing and e-commerce, third-party logistics will experience rapid development. Morgan Stanley believes that the growth of global third-party logistics is between 15% and 20%.

The existing domestic third-party logistics include: China Post, UPS, Baogong, Xinke Anda, Ande, Huayuntong, Sinotrans, Xike and Haier Logistics.

Fourth party logistics

"Fourth Party Logistics" refers to a supply chain integrator, which integrates and manages different resources, capabilities and technologies owned by companies and complementary service providers, and provides a whole set of supply chain solutions. It is also called "general contractor" or "leading logistics service provider".

According to Morgan Stanley's analysis, the fourth-party logistics is more profitable than the third-party logistics because they have professional consulting services. Although the scale of this service is still very small, it will become a rapidly growing part of the highly competitive logistics market in China.

It was Xunbu Yi Jie Company that introduced the concept of the fourth party logistics to China for the first time.

The competition in this community can be roughly divided into the following categories: traditional IT software manufacturers, such as Orcale, CA, Microsoft, Neusoft and Kingdee; Traditional IT hardware manufacturers, such as HP, IBM and Lenovo; Third-party logistics service providers, such as UPS and postal services; Emerging fourth-party logistics service providers, such as Aauto Quicker Yi Jie, Asia Logistics and China Merchants Chen Dihe Huaxia Media.