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　　biography

　　Kang Jia, born in 1985, graduated from Xi’an Jiaotong University with a bachelor’s degree and a graduate student from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He is the co-founder of Ele.me. Previously, he served as the chief strategy officer of Ele.me, and made outstanding contributions to the early expansion, mid-term organizational development and logistics system construction of Ele.me. In July 2015, he was appointed chief operating officer of Ele.me.

　　"Ele.me (ele.me) " is a well-known online food ordering platform in China. It was co-founded in 2008 by Zhang Xuhao, a master’s student, and Kang Jia. Kang Jia is currently the chief operating officer of Ele.me, responsible for the company’s early expansion, mid-term development and reform, and logistics system construction. After graduating from an engineering college, he focuses on revolutionizing the online food ordering industry with technologies such as the Internet, artificial intelligence, and big data to bring users a better experience.

　　Hands-on

　　The delivery riders on campus

　　In 2008, Zhang Xuhao, a graduate of Tongji University in Shanghai, and Kang Jia, a graduate of Xi’an Jiaotong University, came to Shanghai Jiaotong University’s School of Power Engineering to pursue a master’s degree together. They lived in the same suite, had similar interests, had a good relationship, and had the idea of doing something together.

　　One night, Zhang Xuhao and Kang Jia were hungry but couldn’t find anything to eat. The two had a whim, why not make a takeaway website by themselves? At that time, the platform economy had emerged, and it was very feasible to build a takeaway website. There was a lot of practical demand for takeout. It was a good idea to start a business. The more Zhang Xuhao and Kang Jia talked, the more excited they became, and it was not until the next morning that they couldn’t wait to start taking action. With the spark of entrepreneurship and a keen sense of business smell, an application to change the way of eating was born.

　　Delivery services have been around for a long time, but they are very fragmented, Mr. Kang said. In the early days of the takeout market, merchants printed their own takeout orders, and people found the phone order on the takeout order, and the merchants provided their own delivery services. In this model, the distance that can be delivered is limited, and the types of food that can be ordered are also limited. "If you can use technology to optimize, it may bring people a new experience," Mr. Kang said.

　　After coming up with the idea of starting a business, the two spent a year familiarizing themselves with every aspect of the takeaway industry, and even personally delivered takeout on campus, thus grasping the core content of the takeaway industry. In 2009, the Ele.me website was officially launched, allowing consumers to order food on the website through the Internet, and merchants could also receive ordering information on the merchant version of the website. This new platform connected merchants and users.

　　"In the first year of our business, we didn’t have our own website or domain name. To outsiders, we were mostly just a student club playing by ourselves, but the joys and sorrows of it were not known to outsiders. Regardless of the wind and rain, we rode through the entire campus on battery bikes. It was very cold in Shanghai in winter, and we would get our shoes wet at every turn. Xuhao and I sometimes delivered food in slippers, and the frostbite on our feet was often bad all winter. At that time, there was not much profit to be made. What supported us was the belief that we wanted to succeed in our business."

　　If you want to start a business, belief is essential, and rational industry analysis and judgment are also indispensable. Kang Jia said that from the perspective of entrepreneurship, you must first find the weakest link in the entire business model to cut in and solve the core problems, or the core problems in stages, so that a model that can be replicated on a large scale can be formed, and the impact on the industry can be rapidly expanded, and the industry can be gradually improved and optimized.

　　"There are many problems to be solved in the food delivery industry, but after judging, the most important problem at that time was real-time online information and transactions, connecting merchants and users through websites and merchant-side software," Kang Jia said. After making this judgment, the founding team of Ele.me focused on building a trading platform for users and merchants, and achieved large-scale expansion in a short period of time.

　　"The internet breaks information asymmetry, makes information more transparent, and allows service providers and users, manufacturers and users to connect directly," Kang Jia said.

　　Keep accelerating

　　"Hummingbird" in a race against time

　　In 2012, Ele.me joined more than 50,000 restaurants, and the annual online transaction scale reached 600 million yuan. Ele.me became one of the benchmarks of the O2O model. In this year, traditional Internet Tech Giants aimed at the mobile Internet, and the application of mobile clients became more and more important. Ele.me also launched the mobile end APP in a timely manner, and the proportion of mobile phone orders increased significantly in 2013.

　　As the number of users continues to increase and merchants continue to connect, consumers can choose more and more types of meals, and the distribution of merchants is becoming wider and wider. A new problem has arisen – the power of takeaway delivery has not been able to keep up with the development speed of the takeaway market, which seriously affects the user’s dining experience. "In the case of a small scale, through the merchant’s own delivery, it can generally meet the normal demand. However, when the scale of takeout expands rapidly, the fragmented self-delivery model can no longer support the development of the entire market. In 2014, we started to develop our own distribution system. In 2015, we launched the first logistics distribution platform in the same field, the’Hummingbird ‘distribution system. We used a unified delivery team to help merchants deliver orders, which not only greatly reduced the delivery cost of merchants, but also realized the standardization and traceability of delivery services. "Kang Jia said.

　　The construction of the logistics system is an important task for Kangjia. After the construction of the Hummingbird distribution system is completed, most orders on the Ele.me platform will enter this system, and the daily order volume will reach tens of millions. One of the problems that Kangjia often thinks about is how to improve the distribution efficiency. Under the huge market scale, even a little improvement in efficiency is actually a huge number. "The starting and ending points of terminal delivery are very scattered, and there is a lot of room for efficiency improvement. If a delivery staff can deliver two or three more orders a day through reasonable distribution, the efficiency of hundreds of thousands of delivery staff across the country will be very considerable." Kangjia aims at the emerging new technologies, hoping to improve the efficiency of terminal delivery through the power of technology.

　　Kang Jia said that in 2017, Ele.me made many innovations in the field of logistics technology, and the Ark intelligent scheduling system is one of the most important ones. The Ark intelligent scheduling system combines deep learning with multi-scene intelligent adaptation and distribution order technology, which can not only accurately predict basic parameters such as meal time, rider plan, and future order load, but also learn the reassignment behavior of expert dispatchers, and optimize scheduling instructions in combination with special scenarios such as order peaks and valleys, hot and cold food, and new and old riders. "At present, the intelligent scheduling system has basically covered the waybill presented on all major platforms, and can maintain high dispatch accuracy whether it is peak or flat peak. The data shows that in the first 30 cities tested, intelligent scheduling reduced the average delivery time to 28.62 minutes, and the on-time rate and praise rate reached 99%. "Kang Jia said.

　　Ele.me has also independently developed the food delivery drone E7, which can reach a speed of 65 kilometers per hour, a maximum load of 6 kilograms, and a full load range of 20 kilometers. In the future, it will undertake the trunk delivery of large-scale and high-density orders. In addition, the Ele.me food delivery robot "Wan Xiaoxian" is responsible for the delivery task in the building. After handing over the takeaway with the rider in the building, it can self-service up and down the elevator to deliver the takeaway to the user’s floor. After the "Wan Xiaoxian" is put into use on a large scale, it is expected to save riders 5 to 10 minutes per order during the peak delivery period. "Our core appeal for the application of new technologies is to improve human efficiency. This is also in the same vein as the idea of industrial automation," Kang Jia said.

　　More than just delivery

　　Build a "national app"

　　"Since its establishment, it has gone through 10 years without realizing it. It has witnessed the vigorous development of the mobile Internet and the ups and downs of the O2O model. It has been regarded as a representative of the new economy and has been pushed to the forefront of the trend due to problems such as poor management." Kang Jia said with emotion, how can you see the rainbow without experiencing wind and rain. Today, Ele.me’s service has covered more than 2,000 cities in China, and it has joined 2 million restaurants, including more than 50,000 brand chain restaurants. The company’s development has become increasingly stable, and its management and operation have become increasingly mature. An app with a blue "e" icon has more than 1.01 million user reviews in the Apple APP Store, with a rating of 4.9 out of 5; in the major Android app stores, Ele.me is also among the most downloaded in life apps, as if it has become a "national app".

　　It is also in these 10 years that China’s online food ordering industry has grown from scratch, forming a large market with an annual transaction volume of more than 200 billion yuan. The catering industry has been able to realize the Internet, and takeaway has become the third regular way of eating for people after dine-in and cooking. Through a series of Internet technology innovations and model innovations, the takeaway industry has achieved important results in artificial intelligence, food safety, environmental protection and other fields, and has directly and indirectly created more than one million jobs, allowing enterprises to share the dividends brought by innovation inside and outside.

　　Facing the future, where will Ele.me go? "In line with the trend of the times, the new business that Ele.me focuses on developing can be summarized as three new, that is, new categories, new scenes, and new catering." Kang Jia said that in the future, Ele.me will deeply cultivate instant delivery services and create a professional local life service platform. "We want to do more than just deliver food."

　　"As long as we keep feeling hungry and keep learning vigorously, we will continue to be extraordinary." Kang Jia said that Ele.me has been learning and making progress. Since its establishment, it has established a complete management structure and business process, and has created a flexible and innovative business on this basis. In the future, in addition to food delivery, supermarkets, flowers, fresh food, fruits, medicine, etc. are all new categories. Ele.me will also take the lead of "new retail" and build NOW unmanned shelves to expand more service scenarios. In addition, Ele.me will also provide "one-stop supply chain + back kitchen + marketing" services for Internet takeaway brands to help the Internet takeaway industry develop in a more standardized and orderly direction.

　　"Whether it is a new technology or a new model, the starting point of all decisions should be to better meet the needs of users," Kang Jia said. (Zhou Mingyang, reporter of Economic Daily China Economic Net)