8 thoughts on digital transformation of manufacturing enterprises!

01. Goal Setting for Matching Capability Model

Many leaders of enterprises, especially those in business departments, say they want to carry out digital transformation, so they ask HR to recruit a high paying intelligent manufacturing director in the market, and then say they can do it. Digital transformation is not something that can be achieved by one or two people. When a company decides to undertake digital transformation and sets strategic goals for digital transformation, it must not forget to conduct a Capability Study. If the goal is only set without matching and analyzing capabilities, the result may often be that the goal cannot be achieved.

Regarding the construction of digital transformation capabilities, there is a practice in the industry that I personally think is quite feasible, which is to build a digital transformation team in the business department to lead the overall planning of enterprise digital transformation. This team reports directly to the VP responsible for enterprise digital transformation. The business department takes the lead in promoting digital transformation, and the conventional organizational capacity can be divided into three categories:

Small scale, usually 2-3 people, responsible for liaising with management and various business departments, integrating and implementing management's business strategic vision, and promoting the implementation of specific business departments and IT execution;

In terms of scale, there are usually 7-8 people, including experts with specific knowledge in various business fields, such as supply chain, process development, production and operation, equipment standards, cutting-edge advanced technology, and quality management sub fields;

The scale is slightly larger, with more than 10 people. In addition to the capabilities within the scale, it also includes some data research and analysis abilities. It can analyze, summarize, and extract core process data for specific scenarios, and cooperate with suppliers to conduct model research.

02. The Importance of Overall Planning

In fact, there is no unified standard for intelligent manufacturing and digital transformation. Doing more does not mean you are intelligent manufacturing, and doing less does not mean you are not. Intelligent manufacturing and digital transformation are actually aimed at solving the pain points of enterprises. If new generation information technology is used to empower enterprises to solve their business pain points and problems.

Narrowly speaking, your project is an intelligent manufacturing project, and there is no need to add things that you do not need. Here, it is particularly emphasized that there is no need to create new technologies for the sake of new technologies. New technologies must be accompanied by solving a specific problem, such as 5G, whether it is to solve bandwidth, latency, or other pain points faced by existing networks.

The overall planning is actually doing one thing, which is to define when and what problems need to be solved, and lock in two dimensional attributes, time dimension and demand dimension. Why is overall planning so important?

Overall planning can allow management to see the overall blueprint for the next 2-3 years, making it easier to define whether this target is consistent with their positioning of the enterprise or strategic development direction. The recognition of management is very beneficial for the subsequent promotion of the executive level. There is a saying in the industry that "projects that leaders attach importance to are generally easier to promote";

With a clear overall plan, it is better to identify the matching of relevant resource elements that can facilitate the implementation of the overall plan, such as budget, talent, etc;

Overall planning is also the best way to assess the current situation of an enterprise. Although planning should look up to the stars and benchmark against first-class standards, we cannot ignore the most important attribute of planning, which is to be based on the current and actual situation of the enterprise. Through the action of overall planning, identify the difficulties and business pain points currently faced by the enterprise. Sometimes we may say that overall planning is also a form of continuous improvement;

If there is no overall planning, it is easy to be misled by the consultants of Party B. The general strategy of Party B is to buy solutions and sell products. From Party B's perspective, I also understand that they need to sell their own products to customers as much as possible. The better they sell, the better their performance will be. It is rare for Party B to conduct a global analysis of the current situation of users when talking about solutions, such as what Party A already has, which areas are doing well, which areas are not doing well, whether my solutions can really bring value enhancement to Party A, and whether the solutions I sell are must or nice to have for Party A? Observant colleagues may find that many consultants are always talking about what they have when discussing solutions with the client. It is estimated that 90% of the time they are talking about what they have, and few consultants are willing to spend 50% of their time analyzing what they need and then spending another 50% of their time discussing what they have.

03. Strengthen the deep integration of business and IT

When it comes to the integration of industrialization and informatization, everyone is familiar with it. From the perspective of Party A, to truly implement the integration of industrialization and informatization, the first and most important thing to do is to implement the integration of business departments and IT departments in the management mode.

The concept of business integration was proposed many years ago, and those who proposed these concepts hope that traditional IT practitioners can be more proactive and in-depth in understanding the business. Some people also say that the ultimate goal of business integration is for IT professionals to understand the business better than the business itself. Manufacturing enterprises are different from Internet enterprises. An Internet enterprise, a new graduate of 211/985 computer major, can work independently in the team within three months to half a year. Within three years, people with good understanding can basically be promoted to team leader and lead the team alone. Compared with the Internet industry, the process and system of manufacturing industry are more complex. I know some 985 graduate students who have worked for more than two years, and can only do a few things.

My friends often ask who would be more suitable to lead digital transformation. My immature opinion is that the business architecture (what I want) should be planned by the business planning team, and the technical architecture (how I implement it) should be planned by the IT team. Based on three considerations:

The business architecture reflects more about the long-term development strategy positioning and operational processes of the department's business by the business management. Business has a better understanding of business than IT, and more importantly, compared to IT, the business planning team has unique advantages. They have more opportunities to meet, interview, and communicate with management, and they understand the voice of management better;

The technical architecture is more inclined to the underlying technology, IT will know better than the business, know how to deploy and configure resources to achieve optimal performance, such as using 5G or wifi, deploying private cloud or public cloud, etc;

IT should maintain close cooperation with the business and build a management Council mechanism. IT personnel can participate in the discussion and exchange of business architecture planning in the early stage, and provide technical guidance to the business personnel from the technical level to facilitate the possibility of the final implementation of the business architecture.

In the process of deep integration of business and IT, a little mention may be made of the problems faced by some enterprises in pushing this model and who the credit belongs. The deep integration of business and IT requires both teams to maintain an open and inclusive attitude, because this cooperation mode and the traditional business only raise demands, and the mode in which IT is solely responsible may be somewhat different. This mode is business-oriented in the early stage and IT-oriented in the later stage, so who has the greater credit? In fact, this problem itself is not a problem. After all, IT reports to the IT line and the business report to the business line, it is not a line report in itself. IT does not have to dispute with business, and business does not have to dispute with IT. Each has its own performance appraisal management line. Both parties can be praised for the good work of the project.

04. Select Product Supplier Portfolio Strategy

Digital transformation involves a wide range of business. To implement the implementation of a flow-based enterprise, many enterprises have implemented dozens or hundreds of different IT systems. On the surface, I feel that informatization has been very successful, but after careful analysis, many systems can only be supported by the blood and sweat of brothers in human flesh operation and maintenance.

In general business architecture planning, business requirements are identified based on the value chain process of the enterprise. Therefore, as the planning team related to Party A's digital transformation, in addition to accumulating business experience on a daily basis, we should not forget to go out more to understand and benchmark the solutions of benchmarking enterprises and Party B in the benchmarking industry, and have the ability to identify, judge and accumulate to form a knowledge base that meets the potential needs of the enterprise, so that when the project really comes, it will not be blind and overwhelmed.

Take the automobile industry as an example. Some people say that it is definitely not wrong to choose big brands. I choose Siemens, I choose SAP, or I choose Dassault. After careful study, the small partners will find that in fact, although these big companies have a wide range of products, not every product is the best solution for your industry. For Party B, they definitely want to sell a full set of solutions, the selling point is very simple, the same product, easy to integrate, but know the inside of the small partners also understand, in fact, a lot of software is also they bought back after integration, whether the strength of integration is really good, there is also doubt. Therefore, how to choose the supplier combination strategy, Party B generally can't give this job, only rely on Party A itself, through time and practice to constantly explore, summarize and refine, because even if a consulting project is started, suppliers who prefer product solutions have product tendencies, and those pure consulting companies often prefer top-level strategy and process planning. At present, in view of this situation, if Party A really does not have the ability to make plans, a feasible way is to find a third-party supervision organization with good reputation in the industry, and they may be more neutral.

05. Segment Product Make/Buy Development Strategy

There are mainly two types of systems that constitute digital transformation, one is self-developed Make, and the other is purchasing Buy. In the era of industrial Internet, with more and more demands for open source software, agile development, user experience, transparent operation management, data analysis, etc., the demand for Make has also become more and more. In the early planning, which systems are suitable for purchasing commercial kits and which are suitable for independent development, in order to form a more perfect development iteration model?

If you prefer to know how much industrial knowledge, this kind of software is more suitable for Buy, such as PLM, simulation software, SAP, MES, etc. If you choose to develop independently, on the one hand, the cycle is long, on the other hand, the underlying data model of these systems is very complex, there is no architect who is very proficient in the business, and the developed system has very weak ability to continuously expand the business in the later period;

The lightweight of traditional industrial software is suitable for Make, such as many loading of PLM software, UI interface, data reports delivered by various users, production plan and MRP of SAP system. Personally, I think the biggest advantage of these foreign industrial software is the planning of the underlying data model, and the biggest disadvantage is bulkiness. It develops many functions that users do not need, which is very bulky and has poor user experience, with the problem is that the performance is pretty.

For end-user 2C, if Party A has strong IT development capability, it can choose Make, because this business is the best way to demonstrate the enterprise's pursuit of user experience and personalized needs;

For enterprise operation and management, it is generally recommended to Make. On the one hand, the amount of data is not particularly large, and the data is basically confidential.On the other hand, these data often come from upstream and downstream application systems. It will be easier for Party A to coordinate and promote various resources than Party B, and the operation data management itself is not particularly difficult technically.

06. Change the cooperation mode of Party A and Party B.

Party A and Party B have two cooperation modes: fixed price contract and human-day contract T & M. In the past, many enterprises preferred to choose fixed price for their information projects. For Party A, this is simple and low-risk, and the pressure of delivery quality and process control is lost to suppliers. What is the bad point of fixed price contract?

The consumption period is long, because the total price is fixed, so when preparing SOW, Party A and Party B should consider every word. Party B is worried that if the scope is not clearly discussed in the early stage, the change of the scope in the later stage cannot be borne;

For informatization projects with poor flexibility and partial management, even if there are many plans in the early stage, there will still be many changes and adjustments in requirements in the specific implementation process. For the fixed price contract, each change in requirements in the later stage needs to be repeatedly wrangled with Party B;

Unsustainable, fixed price contracts generally have a fixed project termination period. After the project is delivered on-line, Party B basically withdraws from the project through acceptance and hands it over to Party A for operation and management. Party A in many enterprises may not have the ability on the one hand and may not attach great importance to operation on the other hand, resulting in many on-line projects and systems that are yellow after half a year and few people use them.

During the period of digital transformation, a new cooperation mode between Party A and Party B may be more suitable for this fast iteration, flexibility and variability: Party A is responsible for overall planning and project management, and Party A defines the capability model requirements of different combinations of various external resources according to the internal human resource gap, focusing on the resource capability gap, for example, scheme consultant, implementation consultant, development consultant, test consultant, etc, according to different ability requirements, Party B can choose different people to support this project. Those with high ability requirements can go to the original manufacturer, while those with weak ability requirements can go to the agent of the original manufacturer. In this way, Party B is no longer selling the delivery of the project, but selling ability and knowledge. Party A is no longer the shopkeeper. Party A should really assume the responsibility and obligation of the final delivery quality of the project. This approach can save a lot of costs for enterprises. A project group I managed before operated according to this mode, which will save the company millions of investment.

If Party A wants to really move towards this cooperation mode, there is a necessary condition to meet:

Party A has a person with planning ability and comprehensive project management ability in this field;

Party A can sign strategic human-day cooperation framework agreements with relevant potential cooperation suppliers;

Party B is also willing to cooperate with Party A in this human-day cooperation model.

07. Pay attention to on-line operation management strategy

For systems with strong business management, such as PLM, ERP and MES, the traditional desktop operation and maintenance helpdesk cannot be operated and maintained. What we call operation is not just to ensure that the server does not go down. It is a narrow sense of operation and maintenance, not the concept of operation and system operation. First of all, we must understand and be familiar with the process of implementation in the system, and have the responsibility of training and guidance when users do not know or understand, at the same time, the data of the system operation can be configured, the operation state can be analyzed and the optimization and improvement suggestions can be put forward.

The launch of a system or project is only the first step in the long march. In fact, the real challenge and difficulty is that the operation is not online. Why do many enterprises now have a lot of information projects, but the feedback is not good? There are many reasons for this:

Many softwares are not tailor-made for the business of the enterprise. During the implementation of the project, the real users often participate in the project for a short time. Generally, the demand research stage and the user acceptance test UAT(User Acceptance Test) stage are estimated to take less than half a month together. Moreover, many key business users are not full-time and have a lot of their own work during this participation. Therefore, at this stage, it is impossible for the end-user to make a proper determination of the system's functionality and experience;

The data of the project function test is also forged. UAT test cannot run all business processes according to the 1:1 physical process. At this time, the test often cannot identify many potential problems;

Business needs are constantly changing, and many businesses themselves are constantly optimized and improved through projects. Therefore, it is impossible to be so compatible based on the needs of half a year ago or a year ago;

The bulkiness and complexity of the software system, if there is not enough operational support and continuous training and promotion, many users will give up using it.

So how do you develop an appropriate operational strategy?

System IT system operation and maintenance strategy to ensure the stability, reliability and performance of the system;

Develop business data operations, regularly analyze and evaluate the quality and process of business data in the system according to the usage of actual users, identify potential problems and risks affecting the application of the system, and communicate with the planning team to develop improvement strategies;

Develop a system user promotion mechanism, including training, daily problem docking response mechanism.

08. Don't forget the research reserve of cutting-edge technology.

If points 1 to 7 are down-to-earth, then point 8 is the icing on the cake. There is generally a long time difference between the birth of new technologies and their commercial application. For traditional manufacturing, this time difference may be longer. Some people say that for the application of new technologies, the traditional manufacturing industry is at least 5 to 10 years behind the Internet industry. As a digital transformation team of a manufacturing enterprise, how can it ensure internal stability without lagging behind the industry's pioneers?

Visit the benchmarking exchange, learn from other people's cases, understand the reserve and application of cutting-edge technology, this is also the simplest, most direct and most feasible way, through watching and listening to understand;

Try to carry out some cooperative research with some representative enterprises, such as how to apply AI algorithm to process quality prevention;

Enterprises where economic conditions permit can set up some advanced technology research laboratories internally, and can establish joint innovation projects with universities and other peers in the ecosystem to truly implement the integration of production, education and research, so that children in higher education institutions can understand the needs of enterprises as soon as possible.

summary

Digital transformation is a complex systematic project. For Party A, it is necessary to have truly competent people to take the lead, integrate internal and external resources, and form a real digital transformation ecosystem or alliance, so that cooperation is more integrated and the model is more diversified.

Digital transformation is not an overnight thing, and we must be prepared for a protracted war. As the leader of the digital transformation of enterprises, we should be able to deeply realize that digital transformation is not the end of a batch of projects. We should always adhere to the continuous and lean operation improvement thinking and concept, cultivate talents in the process of digital transformation, and promote the digital transformation and upgrading of enterprises in the process of training talents.

Information source: Intelligent Manufacturing