Text: White Pigeon
Edited by Wang Yisu
How can a large and medium-sized manufacturing enterprise with tens of thousands of people keep up with the rapidly changing market?
Since the listing of Aiwei Electronics, the company's scale and personnel have doubled, and in the case of exponential increase in product research and development, R&D investment is bound to be huge.
"How to ensure the input-output ratio and improve the success rate of new products was the key issue considered by Aiwei Electronics at that time." Lu Yi, CIO of Aiwei Electronics, said.
The R&D cycle of a product can be as short as a few months or as long as several years, and each project may involve hundreds or thousands of people involved, while a project of this size may be carried out in hundreds in a year. ——This is the general norm of the new manufacturing industry.
In recent years, China's advanced manufacturing industry has entered the stage of paying more attention to technology and product innovation from the original extensive operation, and is transforming from "Made in China" to "Created in China" and "Made in China".
In the process of digital and intelligent transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry, from the innovation of technology and products to the expansion of R&D team members, complex and diverse project management is a problem that manufacturing enterprises urgently need to solve in the deep water area of transformation.
Then, through an advanced digital and intelligent management system, making the process serve the business and people is the key to the manufacturing industry to stand out in the increasingly competitive market, and it is also the key to making it a new quality productivity in China.
How to solve the management problem of product research and development in the precision manufacturing industry of 10,000 people
In 1992, Shi Zhenrong, the founder of Hongji Group in Taiwan, China, put forward a famous theory, namely the "smile curve" theory.
The principle of this theory is: a curve of the smiling mouth shape, both ends facing up, in the industrial chain, the added value is more reflected in the two ends, respectively, R&D and sales, and the manufacturing added value in the middle link is the lowest.
Originally, China's manufacturing industry belonged to the processing and production links with low added value in the middle, but with the development of the times, China's manufacturing industry has also entered the stage of high R&D investment, and the number of advanced manufacturing enterprises and R&D investment have continued to rise in recent years.
According to the data of the IPD White Paper on China's Manufacturing Industry, after more than ten years of rapid development, the number of listed companies in China's advanced manufacturing industry has grown rapidly, with more than 2,000 listed companies related to high-end manufacturing, an increase of 70% compared with 2017. At the same time, the R&D investment of these enterprises is also increasing rapidly, and the R&D expenditure has reached a growth rate of 20% in the past five years.
At present, the manufacturing industry has entered the deep water area of digital and intelligent transformation, but at this stage, it is also facing the contradiction of mismatch between product research and development and market demand. Behind this is the lack of product research and development management system construction at the core of the enterprise, and even the coordination of the entire internal organization.
Founded in 2006, Wuhan Jingce Electronics has successfully developed a number of flat panel display test systems, integrating the advantages of "optical, mechanical, electrical, soft and computing" integrated systems, and is at the leading level in the field of flat panel display testing, with a number of industry patents and awards.
However, in the previous stage of rapid growth of the flat panel display testing industry, Wuhan Jingce Electronics still adopts the collaboration method of "software + form", which also leads to the existence of information barriers, data islands and other problems within it, product development and the market are out of touch, passive response to sales orders, rather than market opportunities-oriented, it is difficult to cope with the rapidly changing market situation.
Founded in 2016, Xiangcheng Technology, a provider of intelligent hardware solutions, has been continuously deploying in the international market for many years, with cumulative shipments exceeding 15 million units in 2022 and annual sales exceeding 190 million US dollars.
However, behind the rapid growth, Xiangcheng Technology continues to increase R&D talents and digital management talents, and in just a few years, the number of R&D team personnel has tripled, from the original 120 to 400 people, which has led to the doubling of the number of projects and processes that need to be promoted simultaneously, and the difficulty of project communication and management has increased geometrically.
The problems of increasing organizational entropy, such as increasing personnel but not increasing efficiency, and the increasing efficiency of R&D project delivery, have gradually become prominent.
Chip research and development is a complex and high-tech process that requires close cooperation between multiple teams and departments.
However, the lack of clarity in the management process and the lack of communication efficiency and accuracy are major obstacles faced by many companies in chip R&D, which can lead to a series of problems, such as project schedule delays, quality issues, waste of resources, etc.
So, how to solve the above product development management problems?
After years of exploration, IPD is one of the effective ways to help improve the level of product research and development of enterprises.
The so-called IPD (Integrated Product Development) is a set of product development models, concepts and methods, which aims to achieve efficient product innovation and rapid market launch by optimizing the organizational structure, market management process, product development process and technology development platform construction.
In other words, through a systematic method architecture, these advanced manufacturing industries can open up the collaborative communication between internal organizations from top to bottom, so as to improve the efficiency of product research and development and enterprise operation.
At present, some advanced manufacturing industries have reconstructed the way of internal organization and collaborative office based on IPD. For manufacturing companies with large and complex organizational structures, if they want product development to keep up with the ever-changing market changes, IPD may be the key to solving their pain points.
The pursuit of correct and efficient work, precision manufacturing IPD on DingTalk
Doing the right thing and doing things correctly is the goal that every enterprise earnestly pursues.
According to the "IPD White Paper on China's Manufacturing Industry", more than 50 precision manufacturing enterprises have successfully implemented IPD with the help of the DingTalk project Teambition.
For these manufacturing companies, doing the right thing, that is, product research and development needs to be truly analyzed from the market and demand side. Once the strategy is set, IPD can help companies do things right.
Lu Yi believes that doing things correctly refers to improving the efficiency and quality of R&D through processes and systems, including the support of digital capabilities, in the process of R&D, that is, to do things quickly and well.
Therefore, IPD has become the "big housekeeper" to help the manufacturing industry do things correctly, and has gradually become the core of enterprise R&D and innovation. So, how does IPD become the core support for product R&D and innovation of manufacturing enterprises?
"IPD integrates many industry best practices to reduce time-to-market, reduce development costs, and improve product success through organizational reengineering, process reengineering, and product reengineering." Wang Haixu, general manager of DingTalk Teambition, said.
The underlying philosophy of IPD is to regard product development as an investment decision-making behavior, emphasizing the two-wheel drive of market and technology. It can effectively cooperate with cross-departmental teams, such as the technology R&D team and the market demand research team, so that the information of the two parties can be exchanged, so as to ensure that product development and innovation can be carried out from the perspective of market demand in the early stage of the project.
Therefore, in order to achieve product development and innovation based on market demand within the enterprise, "it is necessary to solidify the management thinking, as well as practices, processes and requirements on the tools, and R&D personnel can naturally follow these best practices when using the tools." Wang Haixu said.
Taking Silan Micro as an example, before using the DingTalk project (Teambition), the R&D management process of Silan Micro was more offline, using IM tools or offline meetings for communication and collaboration, and the entire R&D process was not visually managed.
Its project managers often need to spend a lot of time to confirm the progress and information synchronization, but there are still problems such as delayed project risk reporting, inefficient information synchronization, and lack of process control.
After using Teambition, through the task kanban and table view capabilities, the work items involved in the four major process management of the charter stage, concept stage, planning stage, and development stage are made explicit on the kanban in the form of tasks, and each task or activity has a clear responsible person, start/due date, and deliverable completion criteria to ensure that the project is carried out as planned.
The tree structure of the task kanban visualizes the IPD management process
Clarify information such as task owners and standards through structured fields
This IPD management process covers the whole process from concept to product planning to final mass production and launch, and project managers rely on this IPD process system to manage and develop products more effectively, ensure the effective use of resources, speed up product launch, and ultimately improve the company's market responsiveness and competitiveness.
During the entire cycle of project development, Silan Micro lacked an integrated measurement tool to continuously monitor the project process, and the leadership could not see the delivery of each TR node, the completion of each key task, and the overall project progress.
Teambition's IPD panorama vividly shows the progress of the IPD stage, the submission and completion of deliverables involved in each TR review node, so that managers can grasp the core progress of R&D projects in a timely manner.
At the same time, the flexible and powerful enterprise statistical report capability can provide real-time statistics on the completion of tasks at each IPD stage, the overdue situation, and the task completion rate of the responsible departments in each field, which can provide strong data support for managers.
IPD's process and standardization capabilities are the core support for enterprises in the R&D and production process, which can solidify the product innovation process of enterprises, so that they can carry out product R&D, upgrading and iteration based on market demand, so as to continue to create products with explosive potential.
IPD is not a panacea, but the continuous pursuit of leading management ideas and tools is
As far as the manufacturing industry is concerned, in addition to improving R&D efficiency and shortening the R&D cycle through IPD, it is also necessary to systematically upgrade the internal organizational structure of the enterprise based on IPD, including resource allocation and management, departmental collaboration and communication, as well as continuous improvement and innovation.
Yunnan Baiyao Group's Digital Intelligence Center plans to deepen its digital construction in 2024 and 2025 to ensure that the Group's digital construction enters the 2.0 stage, and realize the integration of business and finance, as well as the development of data-driven internal operations and industrial extension of the whole Group.
In 2024, Yunnan Baiyao plans to carry out 300+ projects, and the project management is facing huge challenges. There is a lack of integrated management of self-developed projects and outsourced projects, the project management tools are not uniform, the end-to-end process of requirements has not yet achieved transparent control of the whole process, and the project manager resources are limited, and there are problems such as difficulty in project multi-progress control, communication and collaboration, and statistical analysis.
The Teambition solution provides a full-process system upgrade, including the construction of IT demand pool, project progress control, Baiyao nail collaboration, project data management and other functions, creating a "business + people + things" trinity, one-stop IPD solution.
Undoubtedly, Teambition has systematically managed IT projects for Yunnan Baiyao to help it cope with the challenges and opportunities faced by IT under digital transformation.
In fact, for these advanced manufacturing enterprises, the essence behind the implementation of the whole process of IPD is their pursuit of product competitiveness, and they need more competitive management methods and tools to support this implementation.
However, although IPD can provide enterprises with more efficient and low-cost collaborative work, it is not a panacea. The success of an enterprise is inseparable from multi-dimensional factors such as market, channel, brand, product and even opportunity.
At present, in addition to IPD, major companies also have a variety of other excellent development models, such as Huawei's IPD, ZTE's HPPD, Apple's ANPP, the automotive industry's APQP, the Internet's devops development, and so on.
Wang Haixu believes that enterprise management needs to jump out of IPD to see IPD. Behind IPD, more important is a management idea, a complete closed-loop management thinking of a system from top-level planning and formulation, to customer demand analysis, to implementation.
In the process of pursuing R&D management reform, it is not important what name the R&D management system is used, the key is to adopt its own and systematic solutions. The reason why these companies choose Teambition is because of its maturity and openness at the tool level, which can flexibly implement a variety of management ideas.
Up to now, Teambition has served more than 10,000 enterprise customers and more than 50 IPD customers, established a strong service team and consulting partners, and formed a complete and verified service guarantee system, which can meet the diverse needs of enterprise customers and ensure the successful implementation of tools.
In addition, it is even more important for companies to carry out long-term top-down development regardless of any change in management methods. During the IPD promotion period, there were also many enterprises that did not implement it successfully.
Wang Haixu pointed out: "IPD is like a long-acting drug, and it is very dangerous to expect IPD to be 'cured' in terms of the management problems existing in enterprises. If you want IPD to really see the effect and have strategic determination, you need to treat it as a "No. 1 project".
The white paper also mentions that it is undoubtedly a dangerous and unrealistic fantasy for enterprises to expect IPD to solve all management problems immediately, which not only affects the solid development of the pilot work, but also is not conducive to the comprehensive promotion of the IPD system.
In the process of IPD upgrade, only a system that can truly break the information silos of the enterprise and realize the transparent communication of the whole process from top to bottom can truly provide an effective platform for the coordinated development of the enterprise organizational structure.
At present, China's manufacturing industry is developing rapidly and gradually turning to a new stage oriented by product research and development and technological innovation. However, in the process of its rapid development, it also needs the internal organizational structure and management system of the enterprise to keep up with the pace of development of the times.
From R&D to management, cross-departmental communication, and other collaborations such as enterprise data accumulation, IPD is gradually driving edge management systems from the top-level core system, and jointly promoting the operational efficiency and management level of manufacturing enterprises to a new height.
Enterprise development and industry development complement each other, and this will surely promote the entire Chinese manufacturing industry to reach new heights.