Using Internet Thinking to Promote the Transformation of the Steel Industry

    In recent years, as the H-shaped steel industry of the Steel German Standard has fallen into a slump, industry enterprises have broken through everywhere, and steel e-commerce is rampant. The steel industry is seeking new development directions with the help of internet technology. However, each e-commerce company is fighting on its own, which to a large extent restricts the development space of steel e-commerce. How to use internet thinking more deeply to transform the dilemma of industry sales has become an urgent matter.

In the eyes of industry insiders, in today's world where the internet is booming, it is inevitable for the steel industry to connect with the internet. We need to use internet thinking to enter the pain points of the industry and fully leverage the inherent characteristics of the internet to serve the transformation of the steel industry.

The sales field has always been a concentrated pain point for the steel industry. Due to the existence of large-scale steel trade links, the entire steel trade process involves standards, quality assurance, warehousing, logistics, and other aspects. Industry insiders have pointed out that due to the characteristics of the industry and historical reasons, there is a lot of room for China's steel industry to connect with downstream industries.

At present, there is a lack of effective information communication and business docking between steel e-commerce in China, and many enterprises only achieve the Internet by copying traditional sales platforms online. Although there are also third-party professional e-commerce platforms in the market, from the perspective of the overall development of steel e-commerce, they are still "surrounded by mountains and each one is the king".

American standard H-shaped steel

To establish an effective electronic sales network for steel and iron enterprises and e-commerce, it is urgent to establish infrastructure in the field of steel e-commerce - a series of service information covering production, circulation, warehousing, and other fields, such as production information, inventory information, quality assurance information, and logistics information, that can be freely and smoothly circulated.

Industry insiders point out that this information system is the infrastructure for the entire e-commerce circulation, deeply buried at the bottom of the entire e-commerce system, but provides important information support for all e-commerce systems, accompanied by important functions such as inventory locking and fund clearing. This means effective communication and sharing of information systems that are now independent of steel enterprises and steel e-commerce.

Obviously, the difficulty of building a "counterparty" market system in the steel industry is much higher than that of highly electronic financial markets, as it also involves standards for steel varieties, warehousing confirmation, logistics assistance, and fund settlement. Zhang Long stated that this job is quite challenging. Firstly, in the spot circulation market, the product standard labels of each steel enterprise are different. Although there are national standards, there is a lack of unified labels between refined products; Secondly, the ERP system interfaces of steel enterprises are not unified. If they want to connect to the same system, they need to carry out software and hardware transformation work; The third issue is the lack of awareness among enterprises, who are concerned that after system integration, there will be no trade secrets to speak of.