Industry Insights
“Three cups of wine for the worldly hustle, one pot of tea for an eternal legacy.” China boasts a long-standing tea culture, which has evolved alongside changing consumer demands. The functions of tea beverages have gradually expanded to include trends such as viral MAX drinks, individualism, and wellness for the younger generation. This has fueled the rapid growth of new-style tea beverage brands.
With the growing pursuit of healthy living, lemon tea, characterized by its focus on freshness and health, has rapidly risen as a distinct category in the new tea beverage market. It is gradually expanding from the Guangdong region to the rest of the country.
Client Introduction
This year marks the 6th anniversary of THE ONE Lemon Tea, a brand specializing in lemon tea beverages. It has grown from a single pushcart to a brand with 300 stores, primarily located across Guangdong, Fujian, Guangxi, Hainan, Hunan, Jiangxi, Shandong, and other provinces. In 2018, THE ONE Lemon Tea completed the construction of a lemon orchard spanning over 780 acres, ensuring that all its stores use only premium-grade lemons for tea preparation. This achievement represents a significant leap from “THE ONE products” to “THE ONE quality.”
THE ONE Lemon Tea rejects any tea drinks or tea powders containing additives, adhering to the concept of health and freshness. With handcrafted, hand-shaken lemon tea as its starting point, it diversifies its product offerings while focusing on the research and development of healthy, eco-friendly fruit teas.
Digitalization Needs
NO.1 Information silos make it impossible to achieve omnichannel data operation and management.
Stores place orders to the headquarters through a mini-program mall, the cash register systems in the stores use Meituan Cashier, while the finance, procurement, and inventory management operate on a separate standalone software. These management systems belong to products from different companies and have no connection with each other. Employees need to input data into multiple systems, with data scattered across various platforms, unable to interconnect or be shared. This makes data analysis difficult and unable to support the needs of digital operations.
NO.2 Store ordering is separated from the procurement and inventory management system, resulting in low efficiency and difficulty in reconciliation.
Over 300 stores place orders for ingredients with the headquarters through a mini-program mall and confirm payments separately via bank transfers. Headquarters staff manually input orders from the mini-program mall into the procurement and inventory management system one by one. As the number of stores increases, the workload becomes overwhelming and prone to errors. Information between stores, warehouses, and the finance department is not synchronized, making collaboration difficult.
NO.3 The workload for data compilation is heavy, and the timeliness of the data is poor.
Each store operates with independent accounting, requiring monthly reconciliation of each store’s total sales and calculation of sales rebates. Financial staff spend a significant amount of time collecting and organizing data scattered across various systems and performing reconciliations. They are constantly overwhelmed with endless data processing and report generation, often working overtime. As the number of stores increases, the workload becomes immense, costs rise, and the situation becomes unsustainable.
Solutions
Kingdee Cloud Stellar, a one-stop management platform solves the problem of information silos across multiple systems. It integrates store ordering with supply chain and financial management, enabling online store ordering, shared inventory data across multiple warehouses, and unified business and financial management. Headquarters can efficiently process nationwide orders, while the data analytics platform provides real-time access to national sales data and operational performance. It can quickly generate various operational reports, offering strong data support for business decision-making.
NO.1 The mini-program mall enables efficient order placement and streamlined order processing.
As the number of THE ONE Lemon Tea stores increases, the volume of daily orders has grown significantly. Through the Kingdee Cloud Stellar Ordering Mall, store managers can directly check inventory and prices on the mini-program mall, allowing them to place orders quickly and efficiently.
Orders are synchronized with the sales orders in the inventory management system for unified shipment, enabling standardized order management. This solves issues such as incorrect orders, missed orders, delayed orders, and inventory inaccuracies. The aggregation and unified handling of orders improve both store ordering efficiency and headquarters’ delivery efficiency.
NO.2 Online payments make reconciliation simple and hassle-free.
The ordering mall integrates with Allinpay, allowing stores to choose from multiple payment methods such as WeChat Pay and Alipay when placing orders. Store managers can clearly view the monthly order amounts and payment totals in the backend. They can also reconcile and confirm payments with the finance team using detailed account statements.
Previously, each store would take half a day to complete end-of-month reconciliations. Now, it can be done in just a few minutes, significantly improving reconciliation efficiency.
NO.3 Lightweight Analysis and Modeling for Efficient Statistics
A visualized data analysis platform has been established for THE ONE Lemon Tea, enabling intuitive visualization of sales performance across various regions, as well as individual store sales and profit data, through charts. Business data such as year-over-year (YoY) and month-over-month (MoM) comparisons, along with trend changes, are graphically displayed. This has greatly accelerated the finance department’s ability to produce sales analysis reports.
Through the analysis of product sales variation charts, the headquarters can assist in creating procurement plans and analyze the preferences for different products across various regions. This enables adjustments to marketing strategies accordingly.
The emerging new tea beverage industry, which has only been growing for a few years, has already become one of the most fiercely competitive “red oceans” today. For the early stages of this saturated tea beverage market, Kingdee Cloud Stellar believes that innovation and transformation are the keys to winning at this stage. By fully leveraging digital transformation tools and platforms, enterprises can maximize their core competitiveness and secure a position in this crowded and competitive market.
Customer Testimonials
Mr Zhao said: “After using Kingdee Cloud Stellar, the work efficiency of employees across all positions has greatly improved, especially for sales and finance staff. The company’s management has reached a new level, giving us greater confidence to attract more like-minded entrepreneurs to join this great platform.”