"Since its establishment, Shangyue has been very clear about what to do and what not to do. This positioning has not changed until now, and it will not change in the future."
Author | Pi Ye
Produced | Industrialist
Clarity, rationality, firmness, and orderliness are the first impressions Miao Feng, the founder of Shangyue, gave me.
Before I met him, I had imagined the image of the founder of this company who has reached the top position in the field of procurement digitalization in just a few years.
About Miao Feng, the relevant information about him on the Internet is - Vice President of UFIDA Software Group; Alibaba Group O2O Project Leader (New Retail Early Project), General Manager of the Key Account Department of the 1688 Business Unit, Wu'a, a joint venture between Ali and Minmetals Brother CEO.
This is a person who has in-depth research and practice on enterprise digitalization, large enterprise procurement supply chain, and B2B e-commerce. But now, Shang Yue belongs to his new stage.
Digital procurement is not a blue ocean market. Whether it is the Western Regions, Zhenkunxing, which has been established for many years, or the Jingdong enterprise business, 1688, etc., which have been heavily invested in, they have established a complete and high-viscosity customer base over the past few years. However, Shangyue's approach is: no platform, no sales, no commission, and only purchasing software.
Where are the opportunities for Miao Feng and Shangyue?
Before answering this question, a market portrait of Shangyue needs to be mentioned. Founded in 2018, Shangyue has now served more than 200 customers, such as Great Wall Motors and China FAW in the automotive industry, Shell and Tencent Music in the Internet industry, DJI and NAURA in the electronics manufacturing field, and Sany in the large-scale manufacturing industry China, Shanghai Electric, Wanda Films and other companies, almost every customer name is familiar.
Miao Feng told us that at present, more than 80% of Shangyue's customers are listed companies on average, and the average size and median revenue of customers is around 20 billion.
This is an exceptionally high-quality answer sheet.
In Shangdi, known as the "Pearl of Zhongguancun", we had a two-hour exchange with Miao Feng. During the process, we asked him the answer to the above question - strategic positioning, organizational genes, service concept, In terms of product value proposition, Miao Feng showed us the "password" behind Shangyue's acceleration.
In our opinion, these codes reflect not only Shangyue’s understanding of China’s procurement of digital services, but also its successful practice of China’s special SaaS model.
1. About the direction: "Narrow gate and wide road"
With "good employees serve good customers"
"Since its establishment, Shangyue has been very clear about what to do and what not to do. This positioning has not changed until now, and it will not change in the future." Miao Feng told us.
Shangyue is positioned as a medium and large customer. One detail is that before its establishment, the core team of Shangyue visited the purchasing teams of hundreds of companies. During the visits, some large and medium-sized companies exposed cumbersome procurement processes, complex procurement scenarios, and complicated management of the large number of suppliers. And other phenomena have just become the core starting point of Shangyue's current products.
"In the ToB field, there is no intermediate state, whether it is software or supply chain." Miao Feng told us, "Shangyue will not only purchase software, but also get involved in the supply chain and make itself a supply platform."
He said that Shangyue's positioning is to only provide digital technology services, and will not intervene in the commercial relationship between customers and suppliers, let alone take rebates from e-commerce platforms. It really knows who to serve and effectively protects the interests of customers.
Outside of the structure, customers have a special position within Shangyue.
First of all, everything is based on creating value for customers. In terms of customer service, Shangyue will conduct double index verification internally, that is, customer value and business value. Customer value refers to whether customers use Shangyue's products to realize their own intelligent procurement, and commercial value refers to whether Shangyue itself has obtained product and service benefits. Only when both are satisfied, can this project be called a "good project" and "high-quality customer" within Shangyue, and the service team can be rewarded.
At the same time, Miao Feng asked Shangyue's service team to "understand customers better than customers". "Customer service" in the digital age is no longer the traditional collection of customer needs, but based on customer feedback and data insights, it will accurately dig out and solve the real demands behind the surface of the demand. This is what customers are really willing to pay for.
Miao Feng told us that within Shangyue, sales, delivery, and operations are all required to have the ability to help customers sort out the business value and planning of digital procurement. For example, the customer's procurement business progress and value data in the past year, the advanced experience of similar companies of the same scale, the past and future plans of Shangyue products, and the customer's digital iteration suggestions for procurement in the next 1-3 years, etc.
This organizational capability requirement also constitutes another figure of Shangyue: that is, the renewal rate of Shangyue's old customers is as high as 100%.
Second, emphasize "going online". Compared with the "turnkey project" delivery mode of traditional software in the past, Shangyue's approach is to ensure that customers can use it well and use it well, and truly generate value. "The launch of the system is only the beginning of Shangyue's services, and the operation after launch is the most important thing." Miao Feng said.
Taking Great Wall Motors as an example, before the first phase of the project was launched, Shangyue’s operation team worked with customers to formulate an operation strategy for the whole group’s launch based on the complexity of category procurement and organizational cooperation. Through rhythmic step-by-step promotion, it helped Great Wall Motor's procurement digitalization has been deeply applied at the organizational and category levels.
Today, Great Wall Motors has started the fifth year of cooperation with Shangyue. The procurement center of the group and all branch companies in the country use the procurement system built by Shangyue, based on Shangyue's Internet-based product design and intelligent procurement. Process, get rid of a series of problems such as long procurement process, time-consuming and labor-intensive procurement system training, and low efficiency of business collaboration, and realize a more concise, efficient and intelligent procurement experience.
Objectively speaking, it is Shangyue's unique and advanced digital product and service concept that has attracted a series of customers and realized the real digital value on the procurement side.
2. About technology: the underlying support of "PS integration"
Products and services are two indispensable capabilities for enterprises to purchase digital services. In Miao Feng's view, no matter how good the service ability is, if there is no strong product, it is impossible to help customers land.
Pulling the timeline back to 2 years ago, in September 2021, Shangyue released its own PaaS product——Qianjige PaaS platform. At the same time, a product development route about "PS integration" was simultaneously disclosed .
Regarding the "PS integration", Miao Feng told us, "In the beginning, Shangyue launched the SaaS and PaaS lines separately for three years, and realized the merger of Shangyue's PaaS platform and procurement SaaS applications. Now, Shangyue Qianji Pavilion PaaS products have entered the stage of fully empowering businesses.
"Not long ago, the product team did not write a single line of code, and delivered through Qianjige PaaS configuration, that is, to help customers easily run a purchase plan through 4 major systems and apply it to more than 10 documents." Miao Feng said, "This is At present, it is the only PaaS platform in the field of procurement in the world."
It has to be said that this is a unique forward-looking product construction idea.
That is to say, for enterprises that provide digital services, if they want to provide digital service capabilities for medium and large enterprises, PaaS capabilities are extremely competitive. Based on the PaaS platform, enterprises can achieve faster delivery and lower delivery costs. For service providers, they can also continuously enrich and strengthen the underlying atomic capabilities based on the PaaS platform, and finally continuously increase the thickness and width of the enterprise's products.
Under normal circumstances, SaaS companies tend to accumulate their own PaaS capabilities to the bottom layer after years of polishing, such as Beisen, Sales and other companies, but this model corresponds to the "painful period" that lasted for many years, and it is easy to fall into the " High investment" realization depression.
However, Shangyue regards PaaS as the basis of purchasing SaaS, realizing the integration of PaaS and purchasing SaaS experience, process integration, and data integration, which can be called "PS integration". It is also based on the capabilities of the Qianjige PaaS platform that Shangyue has the ability to serve large and medium-sized customers and the confidence to continuously iteratively develop products and even innovate. Among them, capabilities such as low-code/zero-code, process management, and data warehouse are the core components.
In the product map of Shangyue today, we can see a series of products that are normal in the procurement track, such as procurement planning, strategic sourcing, supplier management, procurement mall, procurement contract management, procurement collaboration, procurement brain, and the opening of Juxian Pavilion platform, Qianjige PaaS platform, etc., but among them, you can also see many products with "Shangyue characteristics", which together constitute the acceleration of Shangyue from internal to external.
"We are currently the only service provider in the procurement track that can really help companies optimize the procurement link through data algorithms." Speaking of the procurement brain, Miao Feng told us.
This involves not only the upper-level product design, but also the underlying technical capabilities such as data warehouses. Shangyue will directly embed the data warehouse into the development center of the enterprise, quickly feedback based on business data, and directly generate real-time BI reports through the real-time data warehouse, helping enterprises to control the situation of the procurement link at any time.
It is understood that Shangyue is currently the only service provider equipped with real-time data warehouses in the direction of domestic procurement SaaS.
Furthermore, if Shangyue Purchasing Mall is leading the procurement management of Chinese enterprises from informatization to digitalization, then the Juxian Pavilion open platform is another core product of Shangyue, which is exactly what Miao Feng said "from connecting commodities To connect everything" core carrier, that is, on the open platform of Juxian Pavilion, more than 30 mainstream e-commerce companies in the market can be directly connected and used. Enterprises can directly enjoy the out-of-the-box privileges of third-party services and applications such as credit information.
It is worth mentioning that Shangyue Juxian Pavilion has realized millisecond-level calculation of billions of products for enterprises, and real-time synchronization with the price, inventory, status, pictures and other information of products on external e-commerce platforms. This is something only Shangyue can do in China. arrive.
3. About Evolution: Be a Trusted Purchasing Digital Partner
In the past May, Miao Feng appeared in front of the screen again. This time he and Shangyue brought the release of the new product R5 of the intelligent procurement platform. In addition to the upgrade of the inherent products, three new products were launched: Planning Workbench, Opportunity Insights Component, and Process Mining.
These three products are respectively aimed at internal and external security compliance on the procurement side of the enterprise, deeper procurement cost reduction and efficiency enhancement, and semi-consulting procurement process optimization.
Behind the products, what can be seen is the focus and persistence of Shangyue.
In fact, this is exactly where Shangyue is trusted by customers. That is to say, Shangyue's approach is to help enterprises optimize concepts and processes, solve inherent procurement problems, and truly help enterprises solve problems fundamentally through leading products and services.
Miao Feng said that regardless of whether customers choose OP or SaaS deployment, Shangyue can help enterprises achieve seamless adaptation and implementation.
"Shangyue will go to the end of the road of procurement digitalization. Judging from the current 15% penetration rate of procurement digitalization in Chinese enterprises, we believe that with the development of technology and the promotion of policies, enterprise procurement software will become more popular in large and medium-sized enterprises in the future. Procurement software will become the core application after ERP.”
postscript:
For Miaofeng and Shangyue, it is always difficult to find a particularly accurate attributive or label.
Shangyue is a sufficiently "new" and "breakthrough" enterprise. This kind of innovation is in the structure, in the product, and also in the growth rate.
In terms of organizational structure, it adopts Huawei's architectural model, which can achieve precise attack and efficient execution, and carry out the intermediate execution process and perfect execution of strategy through excellent systems.
In terms of products, it avoids the PaaS problems faced by SaaS companies in the past, and builds a native PaaS model based on the "PS integration" model.
At the same time, it also has the strongest procurement supply chain founding team and Internet product team in China, which ensures that it will not only accept the "purchasing atmosphere" , but also lead the procurement reform of domestic enterprises from a professional perspective. At the same time It also has the consistent product experience advantages of the Internet.
Together, these constitute the current "catfish" role of Shangyue. That is to say, although it has been established for less than 5 years, Shangyue seems to be mature enough, stable enough, and capable enough to fight.
In it, what can be seen is not only a new interpretation of procurement digitalization, but also a typical practice of the new path of Chinese procurement digital service providers.