Keruyun [OC: 835268]: Digitalizing and Intellectualizing Catering and Retail Industry

Peng Lei, Co-Founder & CEO

Back in the days of the conceptualization of O2O, it was often considered as online to offline—that is to bring online users offline by the application of group buying. However, if only the offline physical service flow is attributed to O2O, the picture is incomplete, as online internet information flow also falls under the same category. So, the form of online to offline is just a semicircle without a closed loop, while the other half of lost semicircle is offline to online. With the growing digitalization, it becomes imperative to find the lost semicircle. And to achieve the complete circle in the case of the catering sector, offline information such as menu, price, dining environment, and more should be collected manually and uploaded online for workers to view. This process inevitably leads to high cost, low efficiency, delay, and other problems. With this backdrop, Peng Lei, an expert in big data, group buying, and Saassystem, founded Keruyun, one of the largest cloud-based SaaS companies in China, engaging in catering, retailing, and other service businesses. Keruyun collects offline information intelligently and uploads them online by integrating POS, CRM, and supply chain.

To realize intellectualization and informatization in all catering and retail stores, Keruyun has been committed to SaaS for eight years and developed smart hardware products, namely OnPOS SE, OnPOS mini, OnPOS handset, Onkiosk tablet, and Onkiosk tower. These products with POS and built-in software connect intellectually and operate at places such as foyer, kitchen, and so on to offer comprehensive and smart information service to catering and retail firms. Peng Lei speaks about these products as “Keruyun’s fully featured products encourage large chain store merchants and small and medium-sized enterprises to intellectualize and digitalize their store.” With mobile payment becoming the new normal, the smart upgrade of Keruyun’s products has supported the merchants to make adjustments of intellectualization to meet customers’ needs. The products enable millions of users to complete a smart reform in the local life service world of catering and retail with a competitive advantage in areas of function, cost performance, product stability, and service.

Keruyun’s products, along with the fundamental functions such as reservation, queuing, ordering, account settlement, and more, provide advanced functions like supply chain management, report, marketing, and so on to satisfy not just the basic needs and wants but even the more complicated conditions of use. These functionalities of Keruyun products are paired with features such as good-looking appearance and modular operation interface for amateurs to learn fast. Keruyun’s products are equipped with the feature to switch languages freely, such as Chinese, English, Malay, and more, to successfully realize the compatibility and management of different countries, regions, currencies, and tax collection methods in accordance to the catering standards of different countries.

Keruyun’s fully featured products encourage large chain store merchants and small and medium-sized enterprises to intellectualize and digitalize their store

Keruyun also has this interesting feature of supporting international payment and connects with local payment means. They support rapid upgrades with the built-in On OS system. In addition, the open platform promotes connecting different third-party software such as a takeaway platform. For these easy operations and comprehensive features, Keruyun is renowned as the Apple among B2B companies. On February 24, 2020, Alibaba Local Services Company announced a wholly-owned acquisition of Keruyun.

Besides the comprehensible features and efficient functioning of the products, Keruyun takes immense pride in three strong abilities of its product service. Starting with the ability to pursue extreme perfection on software and hardware products, the company has over 1,000 technical and development personnel to maintain hardware upgraded each year and software every two weeks to keep the products innovative. Alongside, Keruyun also provides the same SaaS system and targeted module function in accordance with a different stage of business. Secondly, Keruyun has the ability to sell the products to more than 1,000 cities and counties with synchronous after-sales service. Having built up to 100 direct-sale branches, serving over 500,000 merchants, Keruyun has a colossal operation and maintenance and after-sale service to guarantee a star-level worry-free product service. The third ability of Keruyun’s product service is producing a complete service from SaaS to ecology and to additional service. Besides the most fundamental hardware and software products, Keruyun also has value-added services such as open platform and financial loans to meet the more comprehensive customized needs of merchants. In addition, Keruyun has also cooperated with domestic mainstream platforms such as Tmall, Alipay, Meituan, and more to help merchants connect upstream and downstream resources such as people, finance, property, and customers and form a synergistic development.

The mark of Keruyun in the catering and retail industry with its products and services could be best understood with an instance of the company’s successful implementation in the market. China Vanke Co. Ltd., often referred to as Vanke Group, is one of the top 500 enterprises across the globe. In 2018, Keruyun made a strategic cooperation with Vanke Group, which paved the way to the introduction of cashier all-in-one products in the Vanke square’s business district of the group and in the catering and retail stores of the Wanxianghui business district. At this point of time, intelligent store management solutions were adopted to help the development of the business district. A few of the most productive outcomes of this installation include the remarkable improvement of human efficiency, area-effectiveness, and product efficiency. The intelligent ordering and self-service pick-up functions of Keruyun’s products save the stores in the business circle five manpower on average; online stores and take away businesses integrate online and offline traffic with the raise of gross merchandise volume by 100 percent for the Vanke Group. Further, the marketing functions help the catering and retail stores of Vanke Group with the creation of pop-up products and multichannel promotion, ultimately increasing the sales of every single product by 100 percent.

Towards the future, Keruyun wants to carry out a large-scale expansion. The company is aiming towards establishing the direct-sale branches in more domestic cities to ensure that consumers can buy products and enjoy synchronous services regardless of the city they are placed in. Keruyun is very particular about internationalization and considers the overseas markets to be of great importance. In the next year or two, the company wants to invest more capital and labor costs to increase the layout of overseas markets.