ZKH Group Limited (ZKH), a leader in maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) procurement, is on a mission to revolutionize the industrial supplies industry. By embracing digital transformation, ZKH has modernized legacy services and scaled its operations to meet the demands of a global marketplace.

Founded in China in 1998, ZKH has revolutionized the procurement process with its cost-effective and time-efficient digital platform, enabling customers to quickly and easily find products and services.

Since partnering with Alibaba Cloud in 2018, ZKH has leveraged its intelligent products, solutions, and services to drive exponential growth. This collaboration has fueled a tenfold increase in sales, streamlined procurement processes, accelerated global expansion, and ultimately paved the way for ZKH's successful listing on the New York Stock Exchange.

With Alibaba Cloud's support, ZKH has pioneered MRO innovation across China, Singapore, and the United States, setting new benchmarks for transparency and efficiency in the industrial supplies industry.

As ZKH expanded, new challenges emerged, requiring swift solutions to maintain its competitive edge. To meet its high-resilience demands, the company needed a robust infrastructure capable of supporting a multi-region setup and eliminating single points of failure. Additionally, its global expansion highlighted the need for a cloud provider that could guarantee fast, reliable communication between data centres worldwide.

To keep pace with evolving resource demands, ZKH turned to Alibaba Cloud for innovative, scalable solutions. This partnership enabled seamless resource allocation across its e-commerce, supply chain, and logistics operations. At the same time, robust security measures were essential to protecting sensitive data from cyber threats, ensuring uninterrupted business continuity.

The traditional MRO procurement process, dependent on exact SKU codes retrieved through search engines and customer service channels, was inefficient and required transformation. ZKH set out to modernize the industry through digital transformation and cloud innovation, driving its mission to revolutionize MRO.

Recognizing that global expansion required a powerful technological backbone, ZKH sought a cloud computing partner capable of supporting its ambitious growth.

Alibaba Cloud's flexible infrastructure and big data processing platforms aligned seamlessly with ZKH's demanding requirements, ensuring high availability, robust data security, and optimal website performance, all maximizing cost-effectiveness and operational efficiency.

In 2024, ZKH began building its own industrial supplies industry model by utilizing Alibaba Cloud's open-source Qwen model. Running on multiple ECS GPU Instances, ZKH fine-tuned and trained this Large Language Model (LLM) with its own e-commerce data to create a specialized expert model for its daily MRO scenarios.

This initiative implemented a series of AI agents into ZKH’s infrastructure to streamline the MRO procurement and sales process. The advanced generative AI Material Manager quickly structured and standardized materials, while the industry-trained AI MRO Expert provided intelligent, interactive services for customers, suppliers, and internal employees.

Additionally, the AI Price Comparison Agent delivered quick, easily digestible product price comparisons sourced from a vast pool of suppliers. Finally, the AI Product Recommendation Brain enabled customers to swiftly and accurately select products best suited to their needs and challenges.

Additionally, ZKH used the Alibaba Cloud Model Studio platform to directly access the commercial version of the Tongyi Qwen (Qwen-Max) LLM, focusing on enhancing human-machine collaboration across the order process to streamline end-to-end procurement efficiency.

By leveraging this AI-powered solution, customers can identify the exact product SKU they need simply by describing their requirements, turning the platform into an advanced product recommendation assistant. By using AI to deconstruct and optimize 16 scenarios and 120 sub-scenarios, ZKH has vastly enhanced operational efficiency and reduced costs.

Furthermore, ZKH has collaborated comprehensively with Alibaba Cloud in the field of cloud computing since 2018, which has significantly supported ZKH's rapid business growth.

ZKH implemented Elastic Compute Service (ECS), Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK), and Service Mesh (ASM), enabling the expansion of cloud computing applications and AI without sacrificing efficiency.

Next ZKH leveraged Alibaba Cloud's industry-leading Object Storage Service (OSS) to efficiently store, safeguard, and access the extensive data generated by its MRO procurement platform while ensuring dependable and secure content distribution.

PolarDB separated computing and storage resources, providing ZKH with secure, high-performance, rapid auto-scaling capabilities. This also increased its e-commerce storage capacity, ensuring a smooth customer experience. ZKH then adopted MaxCompute, which allowed for the efficient querying of large data sets and further streamlining the customer service journey.

To safeguard customer information, ZKH leveraged Alibaba Cloud's Certificate Management Service (SSL), which encrypts data transmission, verifies trusted IP addresses, and integrates with well-known certificate authorities.

To support its overseas expansion across APAC and the United States, ZKH implemented Cloud Enterprise Network, enabling efficient management of its international cloud resource network.

ZKH has undergone a radical transformation, migrating its e-commerce platforms, payment processing, warehousing, logistics, and operations to Alibaba Cloud. This shift has enabled the company to overcome key challenges in platform performance, resource scalability, and data security, further strengthening its competitive edge.

By leveraging Alibaba Cloud's Qwen model to train its own LLM, ZKH has vastly reduced RFQ time, propelling it to the forefront of MRO industry innovation. Building on this successful partnership, ZKH has expanded its operations beyond APAC, fulfilling its mission to spearhead the digital transformation of the MRO industry.

This collaboration strengthened ZKH's confidence in the transformative power of cloud computing, particularly in elevating customer service. Having witnessed AI's ability to boost productivity and reshape competition in the industrial supply chain, ZKH remains committed to driving AI innovation to tackle unforeseen challenges and foster industry-wide collaboration. With this solid foundation, ZKH is primed to accelerate its growth and cement its status as a global industrial supply leader.