Let's take a look at the commodity circulation of fruits and vegetables, taking potatoes as an example. You may not think that Hainan in this month, if you want to eat potatoes, you need to transport them from Inner Mongolia, which is more than 2,000 kilometers away.
From a national perspective, there is a place where potatoes are grown in large quantities. From July to March of the next year, it is Hebei and Inner Mongolia, and many of them are cellar potatoes, the kind you eat a lot of soil, a little black, and many times there are sprout potatoes, which are basically cellar potatoes here. The area of Tengzhou and Jiaozhou in Shandong Province is from April to July, as well as in a small area of Fujian and Guangzhou, and only potatoes are produced in January and February. Therefore, the potatoes eaten in the whole country are sent to the whole country by these production areas alternately throughout the year.
The chain of potatoes is sourced from the harvest, and after harvesting, they are directly selected in the field to remove the soil, and then sealed and put on the car. There is a link here that cannot be bypassed, which is the chargé d'affaires, which can be understood as the meaning of the head snake, that is, all the needs that come need to be connected to the local planting, harvesting and delivery through the chargé d'affaires.
Finding an agent is not necessary, but you will find it difficult to do anything locally. This is the problem of the circulation of traditional agricultural products, whether you are the second and third batches of merchants in various regions, or the bulk purchase of enterprises, are directly looking for the local agency in the production area to cooperate, and then send it to all parts of the country, and finally to the hands of consumers, the chain of the wholesale market will be longer.
The more complex the circulation of traditional agricultural products, the higher the cost, and the higher the final selling price.
We can take a look at how complicated it is based on this and the markup rate of each link.
The production area agency has a service fee, consumables packaging, labor, and then loaded into the car, and the trunk line is transported to the wholesale market of various cities, and the process of transportation has a high loss. When you arrive in various cities, you have to enter the wholesale market to get an entrance fee, and many times you still have to find a consignment to sell, and you have to unload the goods in the wholesale market, load them on the buyer's car, and then send them to the destination.
Finally arrive at the end market, that is, the vegetable market or supermarket next to your home, and the loss, booth fees, and delivery costs generated in this have to be spread out into the selling price. The price of potatoes for one dollar and one pound, after so many links, the price is increased layer by layer, and in your hands, it may be more than two yuan and a pound, which is still conservatively calculated.
In this case, the circulation of traditional agricultural products because of too many intermediate links and the problem of inconsistent standards, resulting in extremely serious cost waste, every time it is turned over, it will increase the cost of delivery, packaging, unpacking, getting on and off the car, and will also increase the loss.
Can we increase control and optimization of the entire ** chain through the adjustment of logistics nodes? Those who do logistics know that under the warehouse network, we can lay out multiple logistics nodes to meet the order volume and distribution needs of different levels. CDC, which is the origin warehouse, the first warehouse, the collection of raw materials and processing. RDC, regional warehouse, is mainly for transit demand, radiating the surrounding areas. DC, can be called city warehouse, FDC, this is the front warehouse, site.
With such a set of logistics nodes, combined with the circulation of potatoes just now, how can we optimize the best chain? There is a premise, that is, the downstream of the ** chain has a huge order volume in the market.
Traditional circulation, at the source, is that all kinds of institutions, enterprises, wholesalers through the agency to get the goods, and then send to the wholesale market in various cities, by the wholesale market to cover the demand area. There may be some large enterprises at the source with processing plants, kitchens, etc.
After the introduction of logistics nodes, see how the ** chain is optimized. At the source, it is possible to set up a large-scale processing center in the production area to be responsible for the collection, storage and processing of the production area. To various regions, set up special line vehicles, fixed round-trip routes, standardized loading and unloading to reduce the loss of trunk lines.
In the concentrated area, regional transshipment centers, such as the Greater Bay Area, the Yangtze River Delta, and the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Region, are set up to do regional order distribution, with fast turnover, large throughput, and huge freight volume, covering various surrounding cities through branch lines.
At the city end, an urban distribution center is set up to cover the business volume of the city, and there is a certain complex operation capacity to meet the downstream order packaging and processing needs, mainly to do small B services, community stores, supermarkets, etc., as well as the support of logistics nodes at the next level.
The last level is the community distribution warehouse, the front warehouse, the final order closure, the completion of customer reach and delivery, and after-sales service, basically no storage. In this way, through the layout of the 4-level logistics node, the first chain of vegetables and fruits has become simple and efficient, removing multiple links in the middle, and it is easier for a chain to do unified standardization, and importantly, the first level of terminal consumption will also be greatly reduced. Here is just a simple example, the real industry's best circulation, if you want to complete the reshaping and upgrading, it is very difficult, you need to consider many factors, I will not talk about it in depth.