Located in the northwest of Beijing, a building stands out for its unique appearance. The long and narrow shape is like a solid base, and the curved design of its top is like a wave of clouds. With a floor area of 10,000 square meters, it is located in Yonyou Industrial Park and is called “Digital Intelligence Enterprise Experience Hall”.
By restoring the real scene, this is an experience center for Yonyou to show the full view of “digital intelligence enterprises”. The exterior design of the building is a metaphor for Yonyou’s concept of creating a ‘digital intelligence base’ in the changing times.
In 1988, Wang Wenjing, Chairman and CEO of Yonyou Network, founded “Yonyou Financial Software Service Agency” in a small room of 9 square meters in South Haidian Road. Today, Yonyou Industrial Park of 680 acres is a landmark on Beiqing Road in Beijing. As the leader, he has led Yonyou through 35 years and several technological cycles. To this day, he still struggles in the front line of enterprise development.
In this episode of “Practical Knowledge of Digital China”, we will go to Yonyou Industrial Park to find the key to the continuous development of enterprises in the era of digital intelligence business by a deep discussion with Wang Wenjing, Chairman and CEO of Yonyou Network.
| “Six Dimensional” Portrait of Digital Intelligence Enterprise
As a typical example of local and global cloud service and software providers, Yonyou has been with many enterprises from the information age all the way to the digital intelligence age, enabling them to transform. In Wang’s opinion, so-called “digital intelligence enterprises” have some significant characteristics.
First, customer oriented. A customer-centric model and process that connects with customers through new technology.
Second, ecologically prospered. Linkage between upstream enterprises and downstream enterprises to create and develop with all ecological partners and groups.
Third, employee initiative. Employees are empowered based on digital intelligence platforms to enhance their ability and proactively initiate instead of being passively directed from top to bottom.
Fourth, real-time perceived. From a technical point of view, “digital intelligence enterprises” have three characteristics, perception of consumers, perception of ecology and perception of the latest employee status. Then enterprises get the perception and feedback of production, supply chain and equipment operation.
Fifth, data driven. Data has become an important asset for enterprises and a key driver of production, marketing and decision making, which is a complete change to the original business model that is process-driven.
Sixth, intelligent operation. As AI becomes the center of global IT technology and industry innovation, business innovation is entering a phase of digital intelligence innovation in all aspects. The development of technology and intelligent drive methods make enterprise operation intelligent.
We can find that more application of digital intelligence technology in enterprises is no longer digital intelligence in a single enterprise, moving towards industry-level digital intelligence. These six characteristics form a portrait of “digital intelligence enterprises”, involving internal and external operations, organization, process, technology, etc. in an enterprise. So, how to carry out such a comprehensive capability reshaping?
| Success or Failure in Digital Intelligence Lies in the Ability to Match up with Strategy
“Promotion of enterprise digital intelligence is a project for the progress and development of enterprises rather than being digital intelligence for the sake of digital intelligence”, when it comes to the transformation method of enterprise digital intelligence, Wang said that during the process of promoting digital intelligence, first of all, an enterprise should closely combine the digital intelligence strategy with its development strategy and use this as a guide to develop related digital intelligence planning to support strategy implementation.
The coming of digital intelligence age makes enterprises dazed and anxious, and many of them blindly carry out digital intelligence transformation, making them “unacclimatized”. In the final analysis, the truth is, many enterprises encounter obstacles in “top-level design”, and some even stay at a cognitive level of “digital intelligence means doing an informatization project”.
These “misunderstandings” often lead to a disconnect between an enterprise’s digital intelligence strategy and development planning, making its digital intelligence project and goal are uncoordinated, which results in a waste of resources and inefficiency.
In Wang’s view, the underlying logic of digital intelligence is “reconstruction and innovation of business and management”, the core of which is to put data to work through data intelligence tools and platforms to empower enterprises’ business operations and management operations. Therefore, success or failure of the transformation and upgrading of enterprise digital intelligence depends on whether digital intelligence tools and data resources are highly integrated with enterprise business. Digital intelligence is not a result but a method. To bring value to an enterprise, you need to obey and serve to its development strategy.
As a long-term investment, the process of digital intelligence transformation is full of uncertainties. How to evaluate the input-output ratio of digital intelligence? This is a difficulty for many enterprises. Regarding this, you can evaluate the impact of digital intelligence transformation on business growth and ROI more accurately if digital intelligence planning is integrated with development strategy, product and business innovation, and organizational and management change. “From this point of view, digital intelligence is not only expenditure but also an investment with a return.”
| Significant Beholder of China’s Digital Intelligence Development History
In addition to deep insight, Yonyou’s exploration of transformation for years cannot be ignored.
Founded in 1988, Yonyou is now 35 years old. It could be said that Yonyou is not only a beholder but also a participant and promoter of Chinese enterprises’ digital intelligence transformation. Yonyou’s development history is the epitome of China’s digital intelligence process.
Specifically, Yonyou has undergone two transformations. The first was the transformation from departmental financial software to enterprise-level ERP. The second transformation was from ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) to BIP (Business Innovation Platform).
In Wang’s words, each of them means an evolution of Yonyou’s products and service methods.
During the 1.0 era, Yonyou mainly offered financial software to serve the financial and accounting departments of over 400,000 enterprises and institutions. In the 2.0 era, Yonyou offered ERP Service that was not limited to a single department but covered business informatization of multiple departments such as human resources, finance, logistics, production, supply chain and sales. Yonyou is now in the 3.0 era. With the coming of digital intelligence age, it launched the flagship product, Yonyou BIP, a business innovation platform, aiming to be a top three cloud service and software provider for enterprises in the world.
At each stage, Yonyou offers different core values to enterprise customers. In the information age, the main purpose was to optimize and improve the operational efficiency of enterprises by ERP. In the digital intelligence age, it focuses on business innovation and development rebuild, empowering enterprises of product and business innovation and organizational and management change, and reshaping development. Data-driven becomes the key driving mechanism at this stage.
Regarding how to grasp the timing of each transformation, Wang put bluntly that it was about keeping up with the times. Yonyou’s transformations were mainly based on consideration in two aspects. First, pay attention to the development of technology. Second, pay attention to changes in customer demands and be actively adapted to changes by industry development.
| Long-standing Planning in the Field of AI
In terms of acumen in technology, Yonyou was the first in the industry to propose the concepts of “Digital Intelligence” (digitalization + intelligence) and “Digital Enterprise” several years ago, which expresses an idea that intelligence creates new value based on digitalization.
Yonyou started to develop BIP at scale in 2017. It is worth noting that the original purpose of BIP was to help enterprises achieve digital intelligence, and a number of intelligent middleware service capabilities were included in it.
Based on these capabilities, Yonyou developed several intelligent application services. For example, iuap, a PaaS platform of Yonyou BIP, offers intelligent middleware that has intelligent functions such as RPA, VPA, smart search, rule engine, knowledge graph and AI workshop. It also offers intelligent services such as enterprise portrait, talent portrait, business opportunity recommendation, supplier recommendation, and provides with thousands of AI scenarios in business field application such as finance, human resources, procurement, manufacturing and marketing.
Wang pointed out that AI has undergone decades of development worldwide. But he already foresaw around 2012 that with the rise of deep learning and big data sets, the development of AI will move into an innovative business stage, which is a significant turning point. Until the end of 2022, conversational AI had further driven AI into an universal application stage, global IT technology and industry innovation centered on cloud computing had started to be centered on AI. The digital intelligence business age has come.
According to Wang, Yonyou’s research in AI application falls into three main categories.
The first is automatic interaction, that is, the human-computer interaction between different application systems or service systems.
Second, fast and intelligent upgrading of enterprise applications, especially personalized applications, which can accelerate application generation with large language models and low-code platforms.
Third, intelligent management of enterprise business and functions, which involves more and multilingual aspects. For intelligence in enterprise application business, it is necessary to train the large models for enterprise business and management through the AI mode and technology according to years of experience in the field of enterprise applications. Still, there is much room for innovation in this field.
“Next, Yonyou will further accelerate its development in intelligence and invest relevant resources to initiate the training of large models for enterprise applications”, Wang added.
| Deepen Industry Innovation Value
In early 2023, Yonyou saw an internal upgrade. Its digital intelligence solutions and services for large enterprise customers were upgraded from the previous organizational mode “Region-based, Region + Industry” to the operational mode “Industry-based, Industry + Region”. From the upgrade of organizational structure, we can see Yonyou’s determination to align with customer needs.
The logic behind this radical upgrade is to get adapted to the market demand and be in front-end business scenarios in different industries.
As mentioned, Yonyou’s products evolve from departmental to corporate and even social level. Behind the scenes is the continuous acceleration of digital intelligence transformation in traditional industries, and the role of technology is no longer to only solve problems at certain point or on certain line, but to promote business optimization and mode innovation in all enterprises, all industries and all aspects.
The deeper you go, the more industry differentiation will come to the surface. Generic solutions in the information age are hardly applicable to different industries and enterprises. For example, difficulties in industrial manufacturing are almost impossible to be solved with approaches in finance industry, and even challenges in process manufacturing are not similar to those of discrete manufacturing.
Thus, as a technology product and service provider, it is necessary to get closer to where the data takes place, that is, the front-end business scenarios with industry attributes. In this way, Yonyou’s organizational change is an industry trend, which is an inevitable choice to “meet” customer needs.
| Embracing Long-term Vision, Surging at the Forefront of Innovation
In the midst of the rapidly accelerating wave of digitization and intelligent transformation, if we apply Wang Wenjing’s dynamic model of continuous business operations, known as the “surfing model”, we can understand that these waves of innovation occur in cycles, and their frequency is increasing.
“Surfing Model” is a dynamic model developed by Wang Wenjing based on Yonyou’s own experiences and insights. It emphasizes that enterprises, at every occurrence of a new wave rather than a specific one, should continuously and proactively drive innovation in the new phases of product, businesses, operating model, and management systems, just like surfers, in order to maintain a leading position in the industry. This is because even when the current wave passes, the next wave will inevitably come. The key to successfully navigating the wave of digitization is the ability to sustain innovation continuously.
For employees in the company, it is equally important to continuously learn and update their skills during this process, equipping themselves with new technologies and driving the development of the company.
Taking software developers as an example, with the visible acceleration and application of AI technology, many codes can be generated by machines in the future. This means that individuals can focus on higher-level development work and delegate routine tasks to machines. This not only enhances work efficiency but also enables faster software product innovation.
According to Wang Wenjing, new technologies will continue to emerge and evolve. In this process, both businesses and individuals should adopt a more proactive and positive attitude towards embracing them.
So, what is the “key” that drives Yonyou to navigate through technology cycles time and again? That is: “Technology and customers” serve as the yardstick, and in addition to that, there is a proactive and adaptable mindset.