CLGO program, ACEM, visited Dingdong Maicai, an alumni enterprise, to get deep insight into “unicorn” of fresh food e-commerce

On March 26, the faculty and students of ACEM's CLGO program visited Dingdong Maicai, a famous "unicorn” of fresh food e-commerce. In addition to the faculty and students from CLGO Grade 2020, this event also attracted the attention and participation of many outstanding "entrepreneurial" alumni of ACEM. Dingdong Maicai paid special attention to this visit, which was hosted by Mr. Zheng Guizhou (vice president of Dingdong Maicai, president of Ding Dong University and alumnus of Antai MBA). Mr. Liang Changlin (CEO of Dingdong Maicai) and Mr. Shen Qiang (president of Dingdong Maicai Research Institute) successively gave special speech to the students on "Business Logic of Dingdong Maicai" and "Methodology of Building Supply Chain".

There were various forms of visiting activities, including four theme modules: front-end warehouse visiting and sorting experience, Dingdong Maicai business logic and cognition sharing, Dingdong cultural wall visiting, modern agricultural ecosystem and supply chain communication. During the course of front-end warehouse visiting, the head of the front-end warehouse introduced the distribution of shelves, commodity code marks, commodity placement and delivery services to the students around the commodity transfer process based on SKU. In the in-depth communication, CLGO students had a strong interest in the operation mode of Dingdong front-end warehouse, and asked a lot of questions, such as the question on calculation of loss rate of fresh goods, FIFO delivery mode, solution for commodity shortage, treatment of overdue goods, and picking & delivery time. They learned a lot in that process. Then, Dingdong organized sorting experience activity to allow students to experience the whole process of order collection, commodity picking, PDA identification, order bill printing and fixed-point storage, and feel Dingdong's efforts in lean operation from every detail.

In module 2, Liang Changlin, CEO of Dingdong Maicai, shared with the students the business logic and cognition of Dingdong Maicai. Dingdong's flywheel effect is based on quality, time and category. By gradually realizing the external demand for “more, faster, better and cheaper”, it gains customers' trust, improves customers' repurchase rate, and promotes enterprises to further improve efficiency and develop into a larger scale. At the same time, the agricultural supply side reform and fresh supply chain are used as catalytic factors to empower the business flywheel. Index thinking is the underlying logic of Dingdong’s business model, which is different from the logarithmic curve. Dingdong keeps on laying a solid foundation in sales of products, service scenarios, traffic sources, repurchase methods, profit points, distribution and other aspects, so as to realize the incremental outbreak brought about by the index curve. Seed strategy is another perspective of Dingdong's thinking on the growth of the enterprise, which takes growing towards the outside as the growth strategy, adheres to the original intention and provides good experience for customers, so as to obtain the recognition of the society. Dingdong's mission is to "make good food materials as tap water, accessible and benefiting all", which reflects the vision and sense of social responsibility of an enterprise to contribute to improving the overall social welfare. Finally, the students and Liang communicated about a series of questions on "rider management, business model and profit contradiction", and the confusion of the students during the visit was solved.

In module 3 which is the module of supply chain and operation closely related to CLGO program, Shen Qiang, the president of Dingdong Maicai Research Institute, shared the “Methodology of Building Supply Chain”. In view of the pain points of China's agriculture, the industrialization trend of agricultural supply side, Dingdong's modern agricultural product supply chain system, the food safety system, the agricultural supply chain ecosystem and other aspects, he introduced in detail the modules that Dingdong is exploring and innovating currently, which are not only to find the future of Dingdong, but also to improve the food safety of Chinese residents, change the vicious circle of China's agriculture, become a responsible and caring company, build a virtuous business cycle of China's agriculture, and contribute to China's sustainable development.

In module 4, the students visited Dingdong's cultural wall to learn more about the development of Dingdong, and saw its explosive growth by 3000% from 2017 to 2021, but more importantly, they experienced the hardship of a start-up company to survive all the way, so that the students had a deeper understanding of the whole start-up process, which was a vivid film of the integration of business theory and practice.

Finally, the teachers of ACEM discussed the project cooperation with the senior management of Dingdong, and took a group photo. It is believed that the students of CLGO Grade 2020 will have a deeper understanding of Internet enterprises and gain different learning experience and practice vision through this visit.