Unit Code : BSS051-6

Assignment : No 1
Student Name: Muhammad Haseeb Anwar
Id Number : 1612461
Deadline : 28-6-19
Supply Chain Management
 Alibaba Group is a Chinese multinational firm that is
specialized in internet, retail, e-commerce and technology.
It was discovered in 1999, the firm is specialized in
providing C2C (consumer to consumer), B2C (Business to
consumer) and B2B (Business to Business) sales services
through web portals, cloud computing, electronic payment
services and shopping search engines. Alibaba operates
and owns a vast diverse type of businesses across the
globe in various sectors (Gang-lan et al., 2009).
 The company is made up of three main sites.
 Taobao.com
 Tmall.com
 Alibaba.com
Source Adopted from: Zhou,
Chen and Li (2018).
 Alibaba stresses on the protection of buyers that has
become recently a significant problem in the e-commerce
era. Hence, the supply chain structure of Alibaba consist on
the process under which the customer or buyer pays for the
service or goods, the payment remains in the Alibaba
account until the order is received by the buyer (Hu and
Zhao, 2010). In addition, Alibaba also enables customers
for pre delivery goods inspection for customer satisfaction.
 Alibaba previously had no warehouse as it was not
serving as a manufacturing firm. However, recently it
opened its own biggest robot Warehouse, the warehouse
has been established by a logistic Chinese firm in which
majority of the shares are owned by Alibaba (Clark, 2018).
 The warehouse has been established to assist in
handling increasing demand.
 70% of the work in the warehouse is done by robots.
 A vast product inventory is being hold in the Robot
Warehouse of Alibaba and other products of sellers
are hold in their own warehouses.
 Alibaba basically combines various order under a
single cost reduction global shipment and track those
orders by the suppliers of China through a single
online interface, these orders are further verified
before the shipment in central warehouse.
 Alibaba doesn’t directly own a delivery service as
it work with a network of logistics for offering
transportation services. These network of logistics
is known as china smart logistics.
 Inventory waiting
 Seasonality in Demand
 Packaging Waste
 Knowing Alibaba is a retail company when the
order is place by the buyer and it is being held in
the robot warehouse of Alibaba due to the
cancelation of order Alibaba as well as supplier
faces issues.
 It occurs mainly due to the fact that the warehouse
place is being occupied by the product that is
being on the hold that might be replaced with the
product that are in demand.
 It has been mainly due to the inefficiency of robots for
navigating the dynamic environment. Due to which
robots were unable to recognize the item resulting in a
delay in operation that eventually created bottleneck
(Keow and Nee, 2018).
 Robots have not been constructed for adopting to
the different changing environment due to which
sometimes they might show error and would
required assistance.
 Alibaba wasn’t able to produce as much sales as it
was predicted after the robot warehouse.
Furthermore, it has also been facing issues in
handling the rising demand due to products being
held in the sellers warehouses that creates a time
frame obstacle for the firm.
 It has been due to the fact that environmentalists
have started to criticize Alibaba for its
biodegradable packaging that would be a massive
part of Alibaba’s on million parcels.
 Biodegradable packaging refers to material ability
for breaking down and returning to nature.
 As Alibaba packaging has been based on
biodegradable plastic that may have no hope for
decomposition it may become a threat for the
environment sustainability.
 Chen, Y.L., 2017. Alibaba Challenges Google, Amazon With New Echo-Like
Device. Bloomberg, Jul, 5, p.3.
 Clark, D., 2018. Alibaba: the house that Jack Ma built. HarperCollins Publishers.
 Gang-lan, H.U., Xiang-hua, L.U. and Huang, L.H., 2009. Research on E-business
Ecosystem and Its Coordination Mechanism——A Case Study of Alibaba Group
[J]. Soft Science, 9(003).
 Hu, Y. and Zhao, S., 2010, May. A case study of online retail innovation system on
Alibaba Taobao. In 2010 International Conference on E-Business and E-
Government (pp. 224-227). IEEE.
 Keow, M.A.K.S. and Nee, A.Y.H., 2018. Robotics in Supply Chain. Emerging
Technologies for Supply Chain Management, p.25.
 Poujol, P., 2019. Alibaba Pictures: An Illustration of Changing Business Cultures
and Film Finance. In Online Film Production in China Using Blockchain and Smart
Contracts(pp. 127-181). Springer, Cham.
 Sand, C.K., 2018. E-Commerce Packaging Demands Efficiency.
 Yazdanifard, R. and Li, M.T.H., 2014. The Review of Alibaba’ s Online Business
Marketing Strategies which Navigate them to Present Success. Global Journal of
Management and Business Research.
 Zhou, Q., Chen, X. and Li, S., 2018. Innovative financial approach for agricultural
sustainability: A case study of Alibaba. Sustainability, 10(3), p.891.