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Text｜Lightcone Intelligent White Dove Editor｜Wang Yisu

How can a large or medium-sized manufacturing company with tens of thousands of employees keep up with the ever-changing market?

Since its listing, Awinic Electronics has doubled its size and staff. If product research and development is to increase exponentially, the investment in research and development must be huge.

"How to ensure the input-output ratio and improve the success rate of new products was the key issue that Awinic considered at the time," said Lu Yi, CIO of Awinic.

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 even thousands of people. There may be hundreds of projects of this size in a year. This is the general norm in the new manufacturing industry.

In recent years, China's advanced manufacturing industry has shifted from its original extensive management to a stage that focuses more on technology and product innovation, and is transforming from "Made in China" to "Created in China" and "Smart Manufacturing in China".

In the process of digital transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry, from technological and product innovation to the expansion of R&D team personnel, complex and numerous project management are difficult problems that manufacturing companies urgently need to solve as they enter the deep waters of transformation.

Therefore, using advanced digital management systems to make processes serve businesses and people is the key to enabling the manufacturing industry to stand out in an increasingly competitive market and to making it a new type of productivity in China.

How to solve the management problem of product development in the precision manufacturing industry with tens of thousands of employees

In 1992, Stan Shih, the founder of Acer Group in Taiwan, China, proposed a famous theory, namely the "smile curve" theory.

The principle of this theory is: a curve of a smiling mouth points upward at both ends. In the industrial chain, added value is more reflected at the two ends, namely R&D and sales, while manufacturing in the middle link has the lowest added value.

Originally, China's manufacturing industry belonged to the intermediate processing and production link with low added value, but with the development of the times, China's manufacturing industry has also entered a stage of high R&D investment. In recent years, the number of advanced manufacturing enterprises and R&D investment have continued to rise.

Data from the "China Manufacturing IPD White Paper" shows that after more than a decade of rapid development, the number of listed companies in China's advanced manufacturing industry has grown rapidly, with more than 2,000 high-end manufacturing-related listed companies, a 70% increase compared to 2017. At the same time, the R&D investment of these companies is also increasing rapidly, with the growth rate of R&D expenditure reaching 20% ​​in the past five years.

Currently, the manufacturing industry has entered the deep waters of digital transformation, but at this stage it is also facing the contradiction between product development and market demand. What this reflects is the lack of construction of the core product development management system of the enterprise, and even the entire internal organizational coordination.

Wuhan Jingce Electronics, founded in 2006, has successfully developed a number of flat panel display testing systems, integrating the advantages of an integrated system of "optics, mechanics, electronics, software, and computing". It is at the industry-leading level in the field of flat panel display testing and has many industry patents and awards.

However, during the previous high-speed growth stage of the flat panel display testing industry, Wuhan Jingce Electronics still adopted the "software + spreadsheet" collaboration method internally, which led to problems such as information barriers and data islands within the company. Product development was out of touch with the market, and it passively responded to sales orders instead of being market opportunity-oriented, making it difficult to cope with the ever-changing market situation.

Xiangcheng Technology, a smart hardware solution provider founded in 2016, has continued to expand into the international market for many years. In 2022, its cumulative shipments exceeded 15 million units, and its annual sales exceeded US$190 million.

But behind the rapid growth, Xiangcheng Technology has continuously increased its R&D and digital management talents. In just a few years, the number of R&D team members has tripled, from the original 120 to 400. This has led to a doubling of the number of projects and processes that need to be promoted simultaneously, and the difficulty of project communication and management has increased exponentially.

Problems of increasing organizational entropy, such as increasing staff without increasing efficiency and increasingly lower efficiency in delivering R&D projects, have gradually become prominent.

Another high-tech enterprise that suffers from the above problems is Silan Microelectronics, which is engaged in integrated circuit chip design and production of semiconductor microelectronics related products. Chip research and development is a complex and high-tech process that requires close cooperation among multiple teams and departments in different locations.

However, unclear management processes and insufficient 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, and waste of resources.

So, how to solve the above-mentioned product R&D management problems?

After years of exploration, IPD is one of the effective ways to help improve the level of corporate product research and development.

The so-called IPD (Integrated Product Development) is a set of product development models, concepts and methods. It aims to achieve efficient product innovation and rapid market launch by optimizing organizational structure, market management processes, product development processes and technology development platform construction.

In other words, through a systematic methodological framework, these advanced manufacturing industries can open up collaborative communication among internal organizations from top to bottom, thereby improving product R&D efficiency and corporate operating efficiency.

Some advanced manufacturing industries have restructured their internal organizational collaborative work methods based on IPD. For manufacturing companies with large and complex organizational structures, IPD may be the key to solving their pain points if they want product development to keep up with the ever-changing market.

Pursuing correct and efficient work, precision manufacturing IPD on DingTalk

Doing the right thing and doing things right is the goal that every company pursues.

The "White Paper on IPD in China's Manufacturing Industry" shows that more than 50 precision manufacturing companies have successfully implemented IPD with the help of the DingTalk project Teambition.

For these manufacturing companies, doing the right thing, that is, product development, needs to be truly analyzed from the market and demand side. Once the strategy is determined, IPD can help companies do things right.

Lu Yi believes that doing things right means improving the efficiency and quality of R&D through processes, systems, and support from digital capabilities, which means getting things done quickly and well.

Therefore, IPD has become the "housekeeper" that helps the manufacturing industry do things correctly, and has gradually become the core of corporate R&D innovation. So, how did IPD become the core support for product R&D innovation of manufacturing companies?

"IPD integrates many industry best practices and aims to shorten product time to market, reduce development costs, and increase product success rate through organizational restructuring, process restructuring, and product restructuring," said Wang Haixu, general manager of DingTalk Teambition.

The underlying concept of IPD is to regard product development as an investment decision-making behavior, emphasizing the dual drive of market and technology. It can effectively coordinate cross-departmental teams, such as technical R&D teams and market demand research teams, so that information between the two parties can be exchanged, thereby ensuring that product R&D innovation can be carried out from the perspective of market demand in the early stages of the project.

Therefore, if you want to achieve true product development innovation based on market demand within the company, "you need to solidify management thinking, practices, processes and requirements into tools so that R&D personnel can naturally follow these best practices when using the tools," said Wang Haixu.

Take Silan Microelectronics as an example. Before using the DingTalk project (Teambition), Silan Microelectronics' R&D management process was mostly conducted offline, using IM tools or offline meetings for communication and collaboration, and there was no visual management of the entire R&D process.

Its project managers often need to spend a lot of time confirming progress and information synchronization, but there are still problems such as delayed project risk reporting, low information synchronization efficiency, and lack of process control.

After using Teambition, through the task board and table view capabilities, the work items involved in the four major process management of Charter stage, concept stage, planning stage, and development stage are made visible on the board in the form of tasks. Each task or activity has a clear person in charge, start/deadline, and deliverable completion standard to ensure that the project proceeds as planned.

Task board tree structure visualizes IPD management process

Use structured fields to clarify task responsibilities, improve standards, and other information

This IPD management process covers the entire process from concept to product planning and finally to mass production and listing. Project managers rely on this IPD process system to more effectively manage and develop products, ensure the effective use of resources, speed up product launch, and ultimately enhance the company's market responsiveness and competitiveness.

During the entire cycle of project development, Silan Microelectronics previously lacked an integrated measurement tool to continuously monitor the project process. The leadership could not see the submission status of each TR node deliverable, the completion status of each key task, and the overall project progress.

Teambition's IPD panorama vividly displays the progress of the IPD stage, the submission and completion of deliverables involved in each TR review node, making it easier for managers to grasp the core progress of R&D projects in a timely manner.

At the same time, the flexible and powerful enterprise statistical reporting capabilities can provide real-time statistics on the completion status of tasks in each IPD stage, overdue status, task completion rate of responsible departments in various fields and other data, which can provide managers with strong data support.

IPD's process and standardization capabilities are the core support for enterprises in the R&D and production process. They can solidify the enterprise's product innovation process, enabling it to carry out R&D, upgrading and iteration of products based on market demand, thereby continuously creating products with explosive sales potential.

IPD is not a panacea, but the continuous pursuit of leading management ideas and tools is

For the manufacturing industry, as it enters the deep water stage of digital transformation, in addition to improving R&D efficiency and shortening R&D cycles 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, and continuous improvement and innovation.

Yunnan Baiyao Group's Digital Intelligence Center plans to deepen digital construction in 2024 and 2025 to ensure that the group's digital construction enters the 2.0 stage, realize business and financial integration, and develop data-driven internal operations and industrial extensions across the entire group.

Yunnan Baiyao plans to launch more than 300 projects in 2024, and project management faces huge challenges. Its self-developed projects and outsourced projects lack integrated management, project management tools are not unified, and the end-to-end demand process has not yet achieved full-process transparent control. In addition, project manager resources are limited, and there are problems such as difficulty in multi-progress control, communication and collaboration, and statistical analysis.

The Teambition solution provides it with a full-process system upgrade, including building an IT demand pool, project progress control, Baiyaoding collaboration, project data management and many other functions, creating a one-stop IPD solution that integrates "industry + people + things".

Undoubtedly, Teambition has provided Yunnan Baiyao with systematic management of IT projects, helping it to cope with the challenges and opportunities facing IT under digital transformation.

In fact, for these advanced manufacturing companies, the essence behind the full-process implementation of IPD is their pursuit of product competitiveness, which requires more competitive management methods and tools to support this implementation.

However, although IPD can provide enterprises with more efficient and lower-cost collaborative office, it is not a panacea. The success of an enterprise is inseparable from multi-dimensional factors such as market, channels, brands, products and even opportunities. There is no management method that can cure all diseases, and the same is true for IPD. It is just one of the management models in the development process of R&D management.

In addition to IPD, major companies also have a variety of other excellent development models in the market, 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 look beyond IPD. Behind IPD, what is more important is a management philosophy, a complete closed-loop management thinking from top-level planning to customer demand analysis and implementation.

In the process of pursuing R&D management reform, it is not important for enterprises to use the name of the R&D management system. The key is to adopt a solution that suits them and adopts a system. The reason why these enterprises choose DingTalk project Teambition is that it is mature and open at the tool level, and can flexibly implement a variety of management ideas.

To date, the DingTalk project (Teambition) has served more than 10,000 corporate customers and more than 50 IPD customers, established a strong service team and consulting partners, and formed a complete and proven service guarantee system that can meet the diverse needs of corporate customers and ensure the successful implementation of the tool.

In addition, what is more important for enterprises is that no matter what kind of management method change, it needs long-term top-down development. During the IPD promotion period, many enterprises did not implement it successfully.

Wang Haixu pointed out: "IPD is like a long-acting medicine. It is very dangerous to expect IPD to cure the management problems of enterprises. If you want IPD to really see the effect and have strategic determination, you need to treat it as the "number one project".

The white paper also mentioned that if enterprises expect IPD to immediately solve all management problems, it is undoubtedly a dangerous and unrealistic fantasy. This will not only affect the solid implementation of the pilot work, but also be detrimental to the comprehensive promotion of the IPD system.

In the process of IPD upgrading, only a system that can truly break down the information silos of an enterprise and achieve transparent communication throughout the entire process from top to bottom can truly provide an effective platform for the coordinated development of the enterprise's organizational structure.

At present, China's manufacturing industry is in a period of rapid development and is gradually shifting to a new stage oriented towards product research and development and technological innovation. However, in the process of rapid development, the internal organizational structure and management system of enterprises also need to keep up with the pace of development.

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, jointly pushing the operating efficiency and management level of manufacturing companies to new heights.

Enterprise development and industry development complement each other, and this will inevitably push the entire Chinese manufacturing industry to new heights.