Alibaba claims dramatic efficiency savings from Xunxi manufacturing technology

November 11, 2020 | Case Study

To further its cloud services growth, Alibaba decided to apply its cloud technology and its own IoT platform to the apparel industry. To do so, it created the Xunxi Digital Factory in Hangzhou, China, with the goal of providing an end-to-end digital infrastructure – from product design to sourcing, production, and packaging. To do this, Alibaba has the advantage of leveraging the data available from its e-commerce platforms (Taobao, Tmall, and Alibaba.com), which host hundreds of millions of users, merchants, and businesses. The goal is to use aggregated consumer data from these sites to feed manufacturing planning systems in real time, enabling a "build to demand" rather than a "build to stock" approach to production planning.