Not long ago, Kingdee Group conducted a survey on listed companies and found that about 700 companies will achieve continuous revenue and net profit growth in 2020, 2021 and the first half of 2022. The results of the survey show that the reasons behind the success of these companies are varied and complex, but they all have one thing in common, which is "resilience".
Toughness, in fact, is a concept in physics that expresses the ability of a material to absorb energy during deformation. The better the toughness, the less likely brittle fracture will occur.
So, what are the "energy absorbers" for these companies to strengthen their resilience? In fact, it is digitization and intelligence.
It can not only enhance the absorption of external stress and face various external changes; it can also absorb internal stress and deal with sudden changes in the internal production factors of the enterprise.
It goes without saying that digitalization is the core driving force for the high-resilience growth of enterprises, but not all digitalizations can produce similar effects.
People are an important element of resilience
If Baidu's "Du Xiaoxiao" is the first digital person in the consumer Internet field, then Kingdee's "King Xiaodie" is the first "digital employee" star in the industrial Internet field.
(Picture: Released by Kingdee Personalized, Intelligent, and Automated Digital Employees)
For large enterprises, manpower has always been an important element of resilience.
Let's start with a macro perspective. China's industry needs to develop, but the demographic dividend will soon be exhausted. From 1980 to 2010, China's working-age population has almost doubled from 560 million to 918 million. This is the support for China's economy in the past 40 years Takeoff's strong workforce guarantee.
However, after the working-age population reached its peak, it began to decline gradually. If you look at it in units of 10 years, the current working-age population has decreased by tens of millions compared with ten years ago, and this trend will probably only accelerate. It is difficult reverse.
When more and more entrepreneurs make remarks such as "Young people should not deliver food, but go to factories", the involution between different industries in China to compete for the labor force has already begun.
Therefore, the super-high human efficiency, super-high output value, and super-high production capacity represented by "digital employees" have become the key points for China to deal with the challenges of the age of population aging.
From a micro perspective, the import and export trade of various countries has fluctuated frequently in recent years. A big reason is that the manpower caused by the epidemic prevention and control cannot be fully and fully invested in work.
In the face of all this, in addition to passive strategies such as "squeezing water out of stones" such as improving industrial human efficiency, per capita output value, and extending retirement age, we should put our hopes on more "digital labor" that can actively fill the manpower gap. .
In fact, using the word "fill" is somewhat inaccurate. In many ways, digital employees are a kind of capability upgrade.
For example, at the 2022 Kingdee Global Visionaries Conference, with the background of the operation and management of a large-scale comprehensive manufacturing enterprise, the financial digital employee "King Xiaodie" analyzed the business through big data mining and analysis during the Q&A session. Conduct in-depth insights, efficiently help the financial director and sales director to complete analysis problems such as profit and loss, payment collection, and capital occupation, and at the same time provide risk assessment for abnormal situations to assist managers in decision-making.
(Picture: On-site demonstration by Kingdee Digital employees)
This is the first digital employee in the field of EBC enterprise management jointly launched by Kingdee and iFLYTEK. She can become every employee's business partner in the digital world and help enterprises make efficient business decisions.
Zhao Yanxi, Senior Vice President of Kingdee, believes that the emergence of digital employees is not a "replacement" but an "accompanying" relationship with enterprise employees. In the future, every enterprise employee will have one or more "accompanying" digital employees.
Why can Kingdee quickly launch such high-level digital employees? I think there are three reasons.
First of all, Kingdee has long served enterprise management capabilities such as "people, wealth and taxation", and has accumulated a large number of business capabilities on its cloud-native base;
Secondly, in the EBC concept advocated by Kingdee, PBC (assembleable) is a prominent feature, and digital employees with different roles are actually Kingdee financial SaaS cloud applications that are "encapsulated" in the "brains" of each "digital employee". , and then appear as an anthropomorphic image, its essence is still the result of Kingdee's digital capabilities and EBC application.
Finally, Kingdee has an open structure, and cooperation with iFLYTEK, a company with voice interaction expertise, has accelerated the maturity of digital employees, making them usable and interactive. These are details, but they are very important details.
It is conceivable that in the future, every enterprise and Kingdee's two-way business will be able to efficiently and quickly build "digital employees" with outstanding capabilities, and these "employees" who are hardworking and ready to use can greatly enhance the resilience of the enterprise.
tenacity, extreme tenacity
In the survey of thousands of companies mentioned above, "high resilience" has always been a core proposition .
Qin Shuo, a financial observer, once said that in the era of major changes, although the traditional dividends have dissipated, the resilience of Chinese companies still exists.
His core point is that China's huge market opportunities, rich application scenarios, and supporting systems that promote each other can enable a group of entrepreneurs who are rooted in the real economy, love innovation, and are full of resilience to play a better role.
If you read this sentence more carefully, you will find that "supporting systems that drive and promote each other" is an important keyword group.
If you think this sentence is obscure, then, we use two shorter words - "connection" and "open closed loop".
Since mankind entered the Internet age, "connection" is the eternal theme of this era. In the earliest stage, the informatization construction of enterprises mainly lies in the construction of ERP+, which connects various activities and information with ERP.
Then, with the rise of the mobile Internet and the consumer Internet, the Internet entered the 2.0 era. Enterprises changed the traditional transaction forms and began to build customer experience platforms, ecosystem platforms, IoT platforms, and data and analysis platforms to support B2B and B2C. In the transactions between them, their elements are still "connected", and the purpose of the connection is to speed up the flow of production factors.
Today we are ushering in an era of advancement from digitization to intelligence, and what we need is a more powerful capability - assembly. And through assembly, digital operation innovation and business model innovation, two-wheel drive enterprise growth with high resilience.
We can look at a few cases. One is Huawei Ocean, which we are very familiar with.
When the new crown pneumonia epidemic just broke out, Huahai Communications (formerly "Huawei Ocean") had used the foreign system for more than 10 years and could no longer use it, and needed to use the local system.
Under the special background of the epidemic, Kingdee received this task and organized a team to go to Tianjin. It took only 68 days to replace 184 foreign systems that the customer spent more than 10 years building, covering the four major systems of LTC, PTP, ITR and IPD. The core business process ensures that every employee of Huahai can work more efficiently under the link of the information system, and guarantees the continuity of its business under the background of the epidemic.
This is the super toughness under the pressure of emergencies, and why it can be done, we will elaborate in the third section.
Sometimes, toughness is not necessarily so vigorous, but moisten things silently.
For example, companies are now carrying out self-planning, some are launching OKR, and some are building distributed organizations, but have you ever thought about what is the core of their cost reduction and efficiency increase?
Take a company that the author researched as an example. Their supply chain is very complicated. There are 5 systems that need to be logged in with a computer instead of a mobile phone. Moreover, there seem to be as many data sources as five systems, but each system gives The information surface is very narrow.
However, the aggregation of data under the blessing of blockchain allows employees to use more data in a safe and traceable manner. As a result, manpower has not increased, but efficiency has improved.
Why is this so? A senior industry analyst described it this way: "We all say we want a fully closed loop, but in fact there are breakpoints everywhere on the closed loop, and these breakpoints are often determined by authorization permissions. If we can make every employee more If there is a wealth of information, the scope of his decision-making will be much wider, and more people who can make decisions will increase the efficiency of the automatic operation of the entire chain.”
It can be seen that people's consensus is that the prerequisite for the realization of corporate resilience is that the company has more sufficient digital and assembling capabilities, but where does all this come from?
Evolved EBC
Since Kingdee took the lead in advocating EBC (Enterprise Business Capability, Enterprise Business Capability) with Gartner in China in 2019, EBC has gradually become a new industry standard for the next generation of ERP.
In 2022, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology has conducted several special studies on "packaged technology" to explore the standards of packaged technology, and jointly released the "2022 EBC White Paper" with Kingdee at this conference. After publishing the EBC white paper in four years, looking around the domestic large-scale software industry, Kingdee's move can be said to be the best practitioner of the EBC concept, and also the most serious practitioner.
Compared with the previous three years, the author believes that the biggest highlight of this year's EBC concept is the formal definition of an "assembled enterprise", and believes that assembly is a necessary condition for a resilient enterprise.
The author has been tracking Kingdee's PBC (Assembly) concept for many years. This is not a new topic for the author. Therefore, when the 2022 Kingdee Global Creator Conference was held, I also specifically asked Kingdee Senior Vice President, Strategic Development Department General Manager Sun Yanfei——EBC is emphasized again this year. What changes and new knowledge have there been?
"Start from a micro level, that is, we have richer experience in PBC and a more complete understanding of the essence," Sun Yanfei said: "We continue to accumulate experience in practice. For example, for PBC, we gradually discovered that The requirements of small and medium-sized enterprises are very different from those of large enterprises. Small and medium-sized enterprises have relatively coarse granularity requirements for PBC, hoping to integrate as many functions as possible in one module; Each individual function is strong and clear enough... These experiences will be fed back into our research and development, EBC is a concept, and only continuous practice can enrich and enrich this concept."
Sun Yanfei is very open about the concept of EBC. He said: "We don't think that 100% of enterprises should choose EBC. Digital transformation is inevitable because it can make enterprises more flexible and resilient, but EBC is not the only way to digitize .As long as a technical system can help enterprises cope with more uncertainties in the future and enhance their core competitiveness in the face of more intense competition in the future, it may be a good route. But we will work hard to integrate EBC Make the optimal solution for most enterprises."
"How does Kingdee make EBC the optimal solution for most enterprises? I think the only way is to assemble under the concept of PBC. With the solidification of our various PaaS foundations, as we accompany customers in the process of growth By accumulating a variety of PBC core capabilities, we will eventually develop a nearly unlimited assembly capability that can adapt to large enterprises, small and medium-sized enterprises, and enterprises of different formats, and the adaptation is getting faster and faster.” Sun Yanfei said.
From the author's external perspective, in addition to the enhancement of PBC capabilities, another focus of Kingdee is to improve the service level of delivery. In this regard, Kingdee's approach is to integrate the low-code development platform and SaaS Services are combined and called a productivity continuum called PaaS plus SaaS.
Previously, the low-code platform was more to reduce the secondary development cost of external users, but when Kingdee uses this method to deliver to customers, the advantage is that the customer's core application and Kingdee IPaaS platform are integrated, and the two are from The underlying architecture is "born from the same root", which avoids inconsistencies in data or even inconsistencies in system architecture when customers upgrade their core systems in the future.
"From the core backbone of an enterprise's complete information system, our delivery is a more holistic delivery solution," Sun Yanfei said.
When the author came into contact with PBC four years ago, only a small range of users were experiencing this capability, but four years later, the situation has changed greatly, and many companies have obtained real customer value through this practice.
For example, Tao Jingwen, Director of Huawei and President of Quality Process IT, said in his sharing that Huawei and Kingdee began to cooperate in the field of human resource digitization in 2020, and have carried out digital exploration and practice in various fields such as organization and talent management and employee basic services. . In practice, he gradually realized: "The digital enterprise of the future must be a 'platform + service' model. Any enterprise that wants to do a good job in digital transformation must have a powerful digital platform that can be assembled."
Yu Minhong, founder of New Oriental Education Group, also believes, “There is no doubt that New Oriental’s development all the way, especially this time the popularity of the Eastern selection, is actually that New Oriental caters to the wave of digital development in the outside world, and uses ‘numbers’ to find and grasp the outside world. The opportunities brought to us by the development of the world have contributed to the resilient growth of New Oriental."
When I came into contact with EBC about four years ago, especially when I heard that Gartner proposed the concept of EBC (it is also the originator of the concept of ERP), the author’s cognition at that time was that Kingdee inherited an advanced technology from the outside world. In order to prove the correctness of our own practice, isn’t that what some of our companies have done in the past many years.
But in fact, after many years of contact, the author feels more and more that although Gartner is the creator of the concept, Kingdee has gradually enriched and supported the connotation, extension and evolution of EBC with its own practice; moreover, I also believe that There will be more Chinese companies, whether they use this concept or not, are using their own efforts to make China produce greater software companies, fundamentally avoiding the possibility of us being "stuck" in large-scale management software.
The author's observation
