The automobile industry plays a pillar role in the national economy, social development, and consumer economy, with a long industrial chain, wide coverage, and strong driving force. Improving the sophistication, complexity and development level of the automobile industry will be of great significance to the high-quality development of my country's manufacturing industry and the realization of a manufacturing power.
Under the changing times, the automobile industry faces huge challenges
In recent years, the domestic and international environment has been complex and changeable, the downward pressure on the economy has increased, and the consumption momentum of the automobile industry has been obviously insufficient, showing a certain decline compared with the same period. Data show that in the first quarter of this year, my country's automobile production and sales completed 6.484 million units and 6.509 million units respectively, a year-on-year increase of 2.0% and 0.2% respectively, but the growth rate dropped significantly compared with the same period last year.
As my country continues to advance its energy conservation, emission reduction and "double carbon" goals, traditional energy vehicle companies are facing tremendous pressure in the process of achieving high-quality and sustainable development. At the same time, the high fuel costs have affected the market demand of traditional car companies to a certain extent. Under the general trend of energy change, many traditional car companies have also accelerated their transformation into new energy car companies.
In the context of a new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation, electrification, intelligence, and connectivity have become the development trends of the automotive industry. Technological innovation is accelerating and market competition is intensifying. There are still bottlenecks in the production and supply chain of new energy vehicles: the production process is complex and the yield rate needs to be improved; there is a shortage of chips and high power battery prices, further pushing up product costs.
From the perspective of the end market, consumers' car purchasing needs have gradually moved from simplicity to diversification, such as new car ownership, space, fuel consumption, price, discount intensity, maintenance costs, after-sales service, style, etc. The existence of consumers with diverse needs and levels has further promoted the diversified development of automobile consumption and brought considerable challenges to the majority of automobile companies.
Seeking opportunities amid challenges, the automotive industry embarks on the road to digital transformation
Challenges and opportunities coexist. With the advent of the digital economy era, the development of new technologies represented by big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence is promoting the digital transformation of all walks of life. For the automobile industry, how to embrace the new development trends brought about by digitalization and intelligence, how to help automobile companies calmly cope with the challenges of the changing times, and win market opportunities has become an important issue. At present, the digitalization of the automotive industry is mainly concentrated in five dimensions, namely digital R&D, digital production, digital supply chain, digital marketing and digital services.
1.Digital R&D
The digital transformation of automobile R&D is mainly aimed at improving R&D efficiency and reducing R&D costs. Specifically reflected in: realizing "software-defined cars" by integrating software and hardware development; through digitizing the R&D process, R&D knowledge, R&D tools, etc., achieving collaborative R&D within and outside the enterprise and reducing the iteration cycle of new cars.
2. Digital production
Through cluster innovation breakthroughs and in-depth integration of various digital technologies such as the Internet of Things, big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence, the entire vehicle production process will be transformed in the entire process, entire chain, and all elements, giving full play to the value of data and optimizing Production scheduling, logistics management, energy consumption management, safety management, quality testing and other aspects.
3. Digital supply chain
In response to the dilemmas of inflexible execution, low business efficiency, and data fragmentation in the traditional automotive supply chain, digital technology can effectively integrate with business flows, open up information islands, and achieve full-process reliability in production, supply, sales, after-sales, and recycling. Traceability; enhance the coordination and emergency response capabilities of each node enterprise and each department.
4.Digital marketing
Under the consumer-centered business model, digital malls, smart stores, and omni-channel marketing are developing rapidly. Automobile retail is using various digital technologies to break through data barriers, enrich digital touch points in users’ car purchase paths, and build online and offline collaboration. A marketing system to efficiently acquire users at a lower cost.
5.Digital services
Through the digital platform, we will improve the service system for the entire process of car purchase and use for users. In the future, the importance of service experience will surpass the driving experience of the car itself. Automobile companies have built a digital after-sales service system, firstly to achieve in-car digital upgrades driven by the Internet of Vehicles; secondly, to achieve after-sales service upgrades driven by smart stores.
Accelerate the embrace of digitalization, digital transformation cases of automobile companies
As the main force of my country's automobile industry, state-owned automobile companies attach great importance to digital transformation and development. Major state-owned automobile companies have started to look for suitable entry points based on their own realities and embarked on the road to digital transformation.
1. China FAW: Use digital platform as the engine of enterprise digital transformation
Focusing on the theme of "data-driven wonderful travel", China FAW has moved the digitalization, value-based, innovative and other contents of its core business to the company's internal digital platform. As the engine of China FAW's digital transformation, the digital platform combines the latest technology trends and is divided into four levels from the backend to the frontend: the first is a hybrid cloud platform that integrates public and private clouds, networks, storage and other IT infrastructure; the second is a An agile technology development platform and tool chain based on cloud technology supports rapid iteration of application development; the third is a digital application service platform with the middle office as the core; the fourth is user-oriented R&D, manufacturing, and full business chain services Application systems and data application scenarios.
▲Hongqi Factory realizes assembly quality data storage of all parts
2. Dongfeng Motor: Create a “star-core transition” digital R&D three-vertical and three-horizontal system
Based on technologies such as digital twins, Dongfeng Motor organically combines experience, technology and data to significantly improve research and development efficiency. In September 2021, Dongfeng Group released the "Star Core Leap" digital R&D three-vertical and three-horizontal system, with technology platform, network security, and digital system as the three horizontal supports, and digital products, digital business, and digital ecology as the three vertical initiatives to create With the intelligent full-stack self-developed smart center, Dongfeng Group’s overall research and development cycle has also been shortened from 36 months to 24 months.
In the production process, Dongfeng Group has currently built multiple intelligent factories in Wuhan, fully applying virtual simulation and other advanced production management system technologies to realize automatic system production scheduling, online quality inspection, smart logistics, warehousing and other functions. Building process design platform data enables 3D data to penetrate the entire process of process planning, shortening the production preparation cycle of new cars by 20%, reducing process design costs by 15%, and improving new product quality by 10%.
3. SAIC: Continue to promote the construction of benchmark factories and strengthen digital services
SAIC Motor continues to promote the construction of benchmark factories, and its passenger car branch was selected into the fifth batch of "Intelligent Manufacturing Benchmark Enterprises" in the country; the technology center uses digital twin technology to build a digital R&D platform and was rated as "100 Typical Examples of Digital Transformation of State-owned Enterprises" by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council. Case" was selected into the fifth batch of national industrial design centers.
▲SAIC Group Xiangdao Travel Online Car Hailing
In terms of digital services, Xiangdao Travel's online car-hailing business has fully covered the six major urban agglomerations of the Yangtze River Delta's "One Core and Five Circles", with a platform compliance rate of more than 90%; Shencheng Travel's "one-click car-hailing smart screen" has covered More than 40 communities, hospitals and other public places in Shanghai. In terms of digital ecology, the company held the world's first automotive SOA developer conference, and joined hands with dozens of ecological partners such as Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, and OPPO to carry out intelligent network connection, network and data security, 5G empowerment, and automotive chips. Cooperation in other fields.
4. GAC Group: Breaking through traditional marketing service links and realizing digital marketing
GAC Group's digital transformation continues to expand from the fields of marketing and management to intelligent manufacturing and R&D. In the past year, GAC Group took the launch of new models such as Shadow Leopard as an opportunity to explore digital marketing innovation, break through traditional marketing service links, and form a new "user-centered" marketing service by establishing direct connections between OEMs and customers. model, and used this to help GAC Trumpchi achieve a growth of more than 10% in total sales for the whole year, reaching 324,200 vehicles; at the same time, GAC Group launched the construction of the GAC data center project, based on the principles of intensification, flexibility and autonomy. The cornerstone of the group’s digital transformation.
▲GAC Group builds digital marketing golden triangle model
5. Changan Automobile: Create three enterprise-level applications to achieve customer-centric digital transformation
As the scale of Changan Automobile continues to expand, various management difficulties have also emerged: massive public opinion discovery is slow, information is incomplete, and analysis is inaccurate; the user scale is large and there are many channels, making it impossible to achieve precise marketing and customer operations; there is data within the company There are isolated islands of information, lack of management standards, and coarse data analysis granularity; there is a lack of a unified port for vehicle mobile interconnection.
▲Digitalization helps Changan Automobile improve customer service levels
In order to solve these problems, Changan Automobile has cooperated with well-known domestic IT manufacturers to create three enterprise-level applications tailored for enterprises to achieve customer-centered digital transformation: creating a public opinion monitoring, analysis, and closed-loop processing system based on business operation experience; comprehensive integration Internal system data such as sales, membership, e-commerce, channels, etc., form a unified DMP platform through external user data, and form data tags through business rule modeling to fully support multiple user scenarios; based on the needs of enterprise data-driven management, it satisfies the decision-making layer Look at the industry, management looks at improvement, and executive level looks at problems, and build a unified big data analysis platform.
As the entire industry's exploration of digital transformation enters the "deep water zone", my country's automobile industry will also usher in the spring of high-quality development. The competitiveness of domestic automobile products will also gradually increase during this change, winning more market space in the domestic and international markets.
(Source: Central Enterprise Rongtong)