(Yicai Global) Aug.15 -- It's no secret that China is shifting from a manufacturing-led economy to a consumption-driven economy. The Chinese market is consuming more of everything from every channel, and with the shift in the Chinese consumers' buying habits, the emergence of new retail is transforming the entire supply chain and requiring a integrated information and goods flow to merge both online and offline businesses.

Brands are looking for more efficient ways to manage their inventories, logistics information and sales channels, which requires an integrated smart supply chain and logistics platform.

Founded in 2007, Hangzhou-based BEST Inc., a technology-driven supply chain and logistics solutions provider, seeks to provide that very solution in building a platform for one-stop integrated logistics solutions in order to serve more than 560 multinational large enterprises and enormous mid or small businesses.

For example, BEST has been providing Chinese sportswear giant Li Ning with an integrated supply chain system to integrate its fulfillment orders and inventories, from online to offline, and from warehouses to retail stores.

"Li Ning has been exploring with BEST to build a smarter supply chain system to meet the diversifying demand from consumers along with the increasing sales and ever-changing fashion trends", said Feng Ye, general manager of Li Ning's e-commerce department.

According to Daniel Hong, Director of Sales and Marketing at BEST Supply Chain, BEST has a strong capability to design end-to-end supply chains, which connects different sectors – whether it is online or offline related order processing, handled in a synergized mechanism– by integrating customers' enterprise resource planning ("ERP") and BEST's order management system.

BEST's solution has also helped food producer, COFCO's Fulinmen, to integrate and manage all their different sales channels including distributors, supermarkets, e-commerce and social commerce at one place.

"BEST has solved our problem of information integration," said Liu Jinhua, general manager of Fulinmen's supply chain department, "The most direct benefit is that our total channel inventory has been significantly reduced by about a third, which saved us hundreds of millions yuan."

Apart from sales channels, many brands are also looking to enhance their control over logistics so as to receive the most transparent and updated logistics data.

According to Li Haoyong, who manages P&G's distributor channel digital logistics project, the majority of P&G's offline business is completed by first-tier distributors. To increase distributor's core competitiveness, brands need to optimize the logistics processing.

Since last August, some of P&G's distributors have started to use BEST's order fulfillment system to achieve better data visibility. Through the system, P&G can obtain real time data of distributor's inventory as well as transportation flow, so as to design more effective marketing strategies.

"Many business competitions today seems to be about product sales," said Lao Guolin, Director at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics's E-commerce Study Center, "However, the fact is that what facilitates the competition is based on their supply chains."