1.The single quantity has surged and fluctuated greatly

According to the Report on Monitoring Data of China's E - commerce Market in 2016 released by China's E - commerce Research Center, China's E - commerce turnover in 2016 was 22.97 trillion yuan, up 25.5 % year on year. With the rapid development of China's e - commerce, the rapid increase in express parcel volume has become an inevitable result - according to the statistics of the State Post Office, China's express parcel volume reached 31.28 billion pieces in 2016, up 51.4 % year on year. Such a huge volume of packages and accelerating commodity distribution undoubtedly put forward higher requirements for the operation and management of e-commerce logistics centers. Not only that, but also the soaring number of e-commerce promotion days poses a huge challenge to logistics center operations. For example, Tmall double 11's turnover reached 1207 billion yuan in 2016, with more than 657 million logistics orders, and the daily operation volume of the logistics center was 8 times as large as usual, an increase of 2526 times compared with 260000 orders in the first double 11 in 2009.

According to the post office's forecast, the total volume of express delivery in the whole industry will reach a new level during this year's " double 11" period ( November 11 - 16 ), with more than 1 billion pieces expected. It is conceivable that e-commerce logistics is facing great difficulties in handling.

2. Bottleneck encountered in the prior art.

Wang Yinxue, senior director of JD.com Logistics Asia No.1 Project, said that the bottleneck of existing technical means was highlighted under the combined influence of numerous factors such as massive orders, massive SKU, and rapid aging requirements. Therefore, the automation level of e-commerce logistics center is increasing year by year, but the rigidity of automation system is difficult to overcome. However, what e-commerce enterprises need is a sufficiently flexible logistics system. How to reconcile the contradiction between high automation and flexibility is also a common challenge facing the industry.

In addition to the above problems, different types of e-commerce logistics centers also face their own bottlenecks. Wang Yinxue took 360buy.com as an example to analyze that the e-commerce logistics center can be divided into a large logistics center and a small and medium-sized logistics center in terms of the size of the parts. The large-sized goods usually adopt the logistics service mode of " warehousing + delivery and loading", which makes it more difficult to realize automatic operation due to the large-sized and overweight goods. The small and medium-sized logistics center has higher requirements for timeliness of order execution, which tests the processing capacity of the automated logistics system. According to the categories, e-commerce logistics centers can be divided into comprehensive logistics centers ( covering multiple categories of goods ) and single item logistics centers ( such as clothing ). The process and equipment of the former are much more complicated, and the automated logistics system needs to be able to adapt to various categories and specifications of goods. The single item logistics center is more convenient to use specialized equipment to realize high automation and higher efficiency.

3.       Logistics information system capacity needs to be further improved

As the premise and foundation of automation, informatization also faces corresponding bottlenecks with the development of e-commerce logistics and the increase of demand. Yuan Guojun, information director of Guangdong Xinyi Technology Logistics Co., Ltd., said that in order to meet the demand of e-commerce logistics with the characteristics of small batch, multiple categories, strong timeliness, high frequency and personalization, the service content and quality requirements of subsequent logistics will be more differentiated. Therefore, in WMS, business processes for different industries will also be different. However, if a system covers all business forms, it will make the system huge and bloated. For this reason, Xinyi's suggestion is to subdivide the versions according to the complexity of business and the size of orders, such as basic edition, enterprise edition, professional edition and customized edition.

In addition, with the accelerated expansion of warehousing and distribution integration, supply chain coordination, cross-border logistics, and the emergence of new retail, the integration of resources, stores as warehouses, and inventory on-line and off-line with radial radius has become a new trend, which poses greater challenges to the overall supply chain system. Therefore, it is necessary to fully open up the system to realize upstream and downstream collaboration and information sharing ( sales, procurement, warehousing, transportation and distribution ) in the whole process. For example, Xinyi Technology has set up a BOSS ( Business Operating Support System ), a unified information platform and a data interface platform to support rapid business changes, strengthen the collaborative ability of heterogeneous systems and improve the effective sharing and reuse of business data.