Aiwu
            

Laiyifen Co.,Ltd, founded in 1999 and based in Shanghai, China, operates a chain of snack food stores offering a range of food products and other goods. The company has approximately 2,300 retail locations and a thriving online store. It is managed by Shanghai Aiwu Business Management Co., Ltd.

Snack company needs process refresh(ment)

Lyfen snack food stores, managed by Shanghai Aiwu Business Management Co., are among the most prolific in China. For years the stores have operated in a crowded market putting pressure on them to innovate their product line faster. But extra cracks started to form when the product palette was expanded to include more imported products. For Aiwu, this raised all kinds of retail management issues not to mention new compliance obligations. And, naturally, employees needed to be trained on these new products and regulations—which was taking far too long.

It was clear things needed to improve: People were the single point of failure. Lack of transparency was letting management down. Customer enquiries took too long to manage. And all the time the competition was snapping at their heels.

A single solution

To address these challenges, Aiwu focused on the most crucial element for business excellence: processes. After taking a look at various process management tools, Aiwu settled on Software AG’s ARIS because it was easy to use, quick to set up, and offered extensive support. Approachable design, efficient releases, low code development, and KPI dashboards—all promised fast implementation and faster adoption.

Once ARIS was up and running, Aiwu made quick work of documenting and mapping existing processes--for example:

• the company swiftly identified bottlenecks and processes that differed by retail location and region were merged
• rolled out a unified process for gathering and implementing customer feedback
• set up a centralized online employee training platform fed by new workflows
• mapped and streamlined innovation cycles to shorten the time from idea to launch

“By working to establish a single source of truth, Aiwu was able to keep strategy and operations aligned, and to orient all employees around a ‘single way of working.’ This has helped us establish a culture of process excellence that’s quite unique,” says Xu Fei, Senior Manager for Enterprise Management.

Faster, better, more efficient

The results have been exceptional. The newly revamped online product training portal has reduced the time needed for product training sessions by 50%—with worker efficiency increased by 70% compared to the previous model. The company’s innovation cycle has been turbocharged with efficient processes accelerating development time: Now new products take just 1.5 months to launch when it was previously 2-3 months—nearly a 30% increase.

“Our new product training sessions are now conducted in tandem with our product launches, and changes to business processes can be immediately implemented and launched—that’s agility!” says Xu Fei, Senior Manager for Enterprise Management.

Even better, Aiwu has been able to use the data from customer feedback to localize its offerings—catering to regional needs. Both in-store and online customer feedback can be processed much more quickly and there’s been a 38% improvement in customer satisfaction ratings. Simply put: Aiwu’s stores are now more responsive and efficient than ever.

People-powered process excellence

Aiwu’s transformation is a beautiful example of how process excellence can transform an organization in measurable ways. The ability to quickly train employees, process customer feedback, develop new products and then deliver to customers keeps Lyfen stores agile and constantly ahead of competitors. As the next step in its BPM journey, Aiwu will continue to expand ARIS usage to include all retail stores—nationally. Next, it intends to use AI-powered process mining to further analyze process data and optimize operations. “Lyfen stores are leaders in the Chinese snack market,” Xu Fei explains, “and we’re investing in a process-driven future to keep it that way.”