Shanghai promotes industrial services to enable industrial upgrading. Heihu Technology helps more than 30,000 manufacturing companies embrace digitalization
2024-08-07
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Caption: Most aspects of factory production operations can be managed on mobile phones Source/Provided by the interviewee
A factory that makes cosmetic packaging materials used to receive more than 80% of its orders from European and American brands. It has a small number of categories and stable business, but its gross profit margin is not high. With the rise of local emerging brands, the factory faces a choice: should it accept niche non-standard orders? This type of product has a high gross profit margin, but it has higher requirements for production and manufacturing, and one batch of orders can be completed in a few days, and it needs to be quickly switched to the next batch. The length of the waiting time directly affects the factory's gross profit margin and capacity utilization efficiency.In 2016, Zhou Yuxiang, an entrepreneur who returned from Wall Street, worked as a picker in the injection molding workshop of this factory. The months of hard work on the front line cured his entrepreneurial anxiety and also confirmed his entrepreneurial direction: to build a system that can achieve manufacturing collaboration, accurately distribute tasks to factories, and improve production efficiency. Black Lake Technology, founded by Zhou Yuxiang, set sail in Shanghai. In less than 8 years, it has served more than 30,000 manufacturing companies, promoted corporate transformation, and made the daily work of more than 2 million producers simple and efficient under the guidance of data. Shanghai recently released the "Action Plan to Promote Industrial Services to Empower Industrial Upgrading" to better play the supporting and enabling role of the industrial services industry and strive to enhance the competitiveness of the manufacturing industry. The practice of Heihu Technology is a vivid example of Shanghai's layout and development of the industrial services industry.Listen to customer needs and conduct frontline research to find answers The experience of working in a cosmetics packaging factory made Zhou Yuxiang realize that manufacturing companies urgently need a "partner" in the process of digital transformation. This "partner" is neither an investor nor an operator, but a "partner" who makes data the driver of the manufacturing process. "We listened to the real needs of our customers and combined technologies such as cloud computing and the Internet of Things to enable Black Lake to set sail." Zhou Yuxiang believes that only by always staying with customers can we find the right answer to the direction that a company should take. There is a company with an output value of over 500 million yuan and more than 400 employees. The boss' biggest pain point is how to improve the accuracy of order delivery. They wanted to solve the problem through digital transformation, but the purchasing manager connected the business processes with various departments and sorted out "120 functional requirements". The employees of Black Lake Technology went to the front line of the factory and talked with workers of various trades. They found that their average inspection time for incoming material response was 56 minutes, while it only took 6 minutes to walk from the quality inspection area to the inspection area. Where did the missing 50 minutes go? Taking this as a breakthrough, Black Lake did three things: automatically transmit data to the quality inspection office through the system; present the data of quality inspection agency items on the large screen of the inspection office, so that quality inspectors can see in real time how many items to be inspected need to be completed; and transmit all the inspection data of incoming materials on the day to the management in a timely manner through mobile phones. After two weeks of operation, the average response time for incoming materials of this customer dropped to 25 minutes. The answer Heihu got from the factory site was: there was no need to do complicated process reengineering, and a big leap forward could be achieved simply by doing data transformation around the timeliness of incoming material inspection. After several in-depth field surveys, "Heihu Smart Manufacturing" came into being, providing the manufacturing industry with collaborative management functions such as production planning, production execution, quality management, logistics management, material management, and visual data analysis, helping medium and large manufacturing industries to improve the collaborative efficiency within factories, between multiple factories within a group, and upstream and downstream of the supply chain. The Nongfu Spring we drink in our daily lives, the small toys given away in McDonald's, Sanjiu cold granules, Mixue Ice City drinks...are all produced on the Heihu cloud manufacturing collaborative platform."Small Work Order" is launched Intimate service for the "second generation of factories"
Since he started his business in 2016, Zhou Yuxiang has had a very deep feeling every time he visits a factory: small and micro enterprises can easily achieve significant efficiency improvements through digitalization, and even quickly expand product categories based on the original products. Only by stimulating their vitality can the manufacturing industry truly have lasting vitality. "Although 'Heihu Intelligent Manufacturing' has served customers like Nongfu Spring and Mixue Ice City well, they are based on the public cloud and can be operated on mobile terminals. The microservice architecture also makes configuration and launch very flexible. But for small and medium-sized factories, this product is still too complicated. Small and medium-sized factories may have never used any software, but they are very eager for progress and better development." How to help these small and medium-sized factories take the first step in digital transformation? "Heihu Small Work Order" was launched. It is a lightweight digital factory applet that helps factories solve problems such as delayed delivery, material inventory backlog, cumbersome time and piecework wage calculations, low efficiency of workers and equipment, high defect rate, and opacity. Interestingly, the "small work order" was first used by a group of "second-generation factory workers". Zheng Jite, a "second-generation factory worker", first worked as a production supervisor in the fastener factory founded by his father from scratch. The sales end needs to obtain production data in real time, with 7 specifications and more than 600 models. He hand-copied reports and manually checked them every day, going up and down the stairs dozens of times, and the data was often wrong. He used "small work orders" to track the production progress of each order in real time, respond to customers' urging orders in a timely manner, calculate the cost and gross profit of each order, optimize customer selection, improve the collaboration efficiency between the factory and the cooperative factory, and realize structured real-time data collaboration. After several drastic reforms, the digital system has penetrated into every corner of the factory. In the past year, Zheng Jite helped his father's factory achieve a 10% increase in turnover. "Black Lake is a close partner of these 'second-generation factories'. Our system capabilities are becoming more and more powerful as their needs grow. They are eager to drive product innovation through digitalization."Taking advantage of location Based in Shanghai and connected to the world
In Zhou Yuxiang's view, the rapid development of Heihu is inseparable from Shanghai's unique locational advantages and industrial ecology. "Our headquarters is now located on Wuyi Road, and it takes only one hour to reach major cities in the Yangtze River Delta, which brings us closer to manufacturing customers in various places. I think Shanghai has a very unique advantage in using technology to empower traditional industries." Eight years ago, the cosmetic packaging company where Zhou Yuxiang worked had seen a reversal in its order ratio, from large-volume standardized orders to small-volume customized orders. "Many new demands have emerged on new global e-commerce and new social platforms, many of which involve small-volume customized products. We help companies respond quickly, shorten the introduction of new products, and increase the production cycle of orders." Zhou Yuxiang believes that Heihu still has a lot to do to be based in Shanghai, connect with the world, and help companies develop digital intelligence. Heihu is like a "partner" in the factory's digital transformation. It uses various SaaS applications to break down data silos, realize real-time aggregation, collaboration, analysis and decision-making of production site information, promote interconnection and efficient collaboration between upstream and downstream of the industrial chain, and improve the operating efficiency, quality and flexible manufacturing capabilities of small and medium-sized enterprises. Shanghai is providing a broader stage for these "partners". According to the Municipal Commission of Economics and Information Technology, Shanghai is vigorously promoting the deep integration of the real economy and the digital economy, and focusing on cultivating a number of industrial service industries in the field of digitalization. At present, Shanghai has produced a number of professional service providers focusing on cloud computing and lightweight tools in the field of integration and industrial software, focusing on "small, fast, light and accurate" products and solutions, and promoting small and medium-sized enterprises to accelerate the deployment and application of the industrial Internet. The newly released "Shanghai Action Plan to Promote Industrial Services to Empower Industrial Upgrading (2024-2027)" points out that it will promote the in-depth development of service-oriented manufacturing, and the supporting policies have provided real financial support: actively cultivate industrial Internet professional service providers such as industrial software, system integration, and industrial big data, and give a maximum reward of 500,000 yuan to units included in the recommended catalog of industrial Internet professional service providers according to their grades after evaluation; promote industrial Internet professional service providers to strengthen application, conduct digital diagnosis of manufacturing enterprises above the designated size, and support each service with a support amount of 25,000 yuan; for the research and development of new technologies and products for industrial Internet networks, identification, platforms, data, etc., financial support will be provided at a rate not exceeding 30% of the approved total project investment, up to a maximum of 20 million yuan. At present, Heihu Technology is actively expanding its ecological cooperation, empowering upstream suppliers through technology co-creation, connecting the production data of chain-leading enterprises and multi-level suppliers, and striving to be the first in Shanghai to achieve digital collaboration in the manufacturing industry chain radiating to the Yangtze River Delta region.
Xinmin Evening News reporter Ye Wei
