On the day of the interview, just outside the interview room, the 2021 China Enterprise Digitalization Summit and SiE Information User Conference were being held. More than 700 experts, scholars, executives, and others from all over the country gathered in Suzhou to jointly explore feasible paths for digital transformation and upgrading of enterprises in the digital economy era. This is the first time that Zhang Chengkang has held a user conference in East China since the establishment of SiE Information for 16 years.
Based in South China and entering East China, SiE Information seems to be expanding its physical market space, but in reality, it is a quantitative change in technological research and development that triggers a qualitative change in business models. As Zhang Chengkang said, SiE Information has upgraded from solving user needs to insighting into user needs.
Strengthening the foundation and consolidating the foundation for more than ten years, leapfrog and ascend overnight. The 3.0 era of SiE Information is about understanding customer needs, exploring new application scenarioses, and combining different digital technologies, products, and services to continuously bring value to customers. "Zhang Chengkang explained," Over the past 16 years, the original intention of SiE Information to empower enterprises in digital transformation has never changed. Our goal is to 'make Chinese enterprises become global enterprises'
Opening the user list of SiE Information casually, well-known manufacturing enterprises such as Midea Group, Huawei Technology, Panasonic Electric, China Aerospace Industry, CRRC, CIMC Group, etc. are everywhere.
The industrial upgrading of China's manufacturing industry, from a manufacturing powerhouse to a manufacturing powerhouse, software driven is an important direction. Zhang Chengkang believes that under the trend of industrial integration development centered on the digital economy, the rapidly developing high-end manufacturing industry in China is expected to further enhance its resource integration capabilities, which also makes SiE Information clear the core significance of promoting intelligent manufacturing.
SiE Information's intelligent manufacturing business has formed its own characteristics, and our strategy is to focus on the manufacturing industry. "Zhang Chengkang introduced that currently, more than 90% of SiE Information's customers are manufacturing enterprises. Taking the first half of this year as an example, 219 million yuan of SiE Information's 867 million yuan revenue came from the intelligent manufacturing business, a year-on-year increase of 93.93%, corresponding to a gross profit margin of 38.54%. If compared to the pan ERP business, the gross profit margin of the intelligent manufacturing business has even increased by more than 6 percentage points year-on-year.
The strong market demand for intelligent manufacturing is evident.
It is understood that SiE Information is based on the design concept of digitalization and intelligent chemical plants to create an SMOM (SiE Intelligent Manufacturing Operation Management Platform) with independent intellectual property rights. It focuses on six core business modules: planning and scheduling, logistics management, production management, quality management, equipment management, and operation management, providing enterprises with a service system from business operation management to workshop manufacturing management.
Manufacturing enterprises use this system to bridge the information silos between demand, procurement, production, and delivery processes, and achieve efficient internal and external collaboration through digital means, thereby improving product quality and reducing operational costs. Taking the intelligent factory built by SiE Information for Mengna Socks Industry as an example, its automated and digital production line not only greatly improves the production efficiency of the entire process from data collection to logistics sorting, but also enables a worker to monitor three devices to simultaneously monitor one production line, greatly reducing labor costs.
It is worth mentioning that green manufacturing has become an important part of SiE's intelligent manufacturing business system.
The general trend of the manufacturing industry is to reduce consumption and increase efficiency. SiE Information has specialized modules for green manufacturing, and uses data analysis to achieve green manufacturing. "Zhang Chengkang introduced," Intelligent monitoring and analysis are used to identify the root causes of problems in the energy consumption process, and optimization schemes are effectively used to reduce energy consumption levels. As a result, some customers have reduced their electricity consumption by 30%
Two Legs Parallel: The Secret to Steady Forward
From a regional enterprise to a listed enterprise with 17 subsidiaries and delivery centers nationwide, SiE Information, which originated in South China, has grown into an industry leader in more than 10 years.
According to the third quarter report, SiE Information achieved a revenue of 1.367 billion yuan in the first three quarters of this year, a year-on-year increase of 42.46%; The net profit attributable to shareholders of the listed company was 132 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 20.76%. From the perspective of performance data alone, SiE Information's operating revenue and net profit levels in the first three quarters of this year have approached the level of the entire year last year.
Even so, Zhang Chengkang explained that the performance growth rate of over 40% was still the result of his "stepping on the brakes". "Enterprise development is a two legged process: one is the market, and the other is operation. If the market moves too fast but the operation cannot keep up, it will become disconnected. The process is gradual, and the company can steadily move forward
The style of stable operation is also reflected in the layout of SiE Information's "East China Strategy".
According to Zhang Chengkang, SiE Information plans to build a 1000 person East China headquarters within 3 years, with Shanghai as the core to radiate to the Yangtze River Delta region. We are very optimistic about the East China market. Whether it is the economic size of the manufacturing industry, or the market demand for digital transformation and industrial management software, the East China market is very large. Based on this, he regards the establishment of a mature delivery team as the primary task of the East China headquarters, with the first being to deliver talent; Secondly, we need to recruit talents on the talent highland of Shanghai; Once again, the East China headquarters will also become the company's research and development base in the future.
In fact, since 2018, SiE Information has been gradually "settling" in the East China region. In June of that year, SiE Information completed the acquisition of 51% equity of Jingtong Technology, and completed the acquisition of the remaining 49% equity in September of the following year, making it a wholly-owned subsidiary of the company. At the end of 2020, SiE Information further acquired 51% equity of Gidian Information.
Zhang Chengkang's plan to acquire two companies rooted in Shanghai is not simply to include them in the scope of consolidated financial statements. Jingtong Technology is a gold medal partner of SAP, with over 400 successful implementation cases of SAP in China; Jidian Information has a self-developed financial digital platform that provides products and services for enterprise management accounting, financial operations, and other aspects.
In addition to Shanghai and Suzhou, we have branches and delivery bases in the Yangtze River Delta regions such as Hefei and Hangzhou, accumulating a large number of customers in industries such as equipment manufacturing, electronic information, and medicine. These companies and businesses gather together to form the East China headquarters, further consolidating the business layout in East China. In Zhang Chengkang's view, with the integration of Jingtong Technology and Gidian Information, SiE Information not only further strengthens business collaboration, customer development The advantages in field coverage and other aspects have also laid a solid foundation for the establishment of the East China headquarters.
Nowadays, SiE Information has upgraded from the initial implementation and development of ERP in the "SiE 1.0" era to the "SiE 3.0" era of industrial software practitioners and enterprise digital empowerment. Zhang Chengkang further summarized "SiE 3.0" as a "one body, three wings" strategy that drives and serves the digital transformation of enterprises, with user needs as the main body, strengthening the construction of new technologies, constructing new business scenarioses, and improving the new organizational ecology as the three wings.
We will focus on laying out industries with great potential for future development, such as electronics, semiconductors, fast-moving consumer goods, medical devices, etc. SiE Information will grow together with enterprises in these fields. Zhang Chengkang said that SiE Information, as an integrator of enterprise digital transformation systems, is building an ecosystem that includes partners such as basic cloud and hardware manufacturing under the trend of combining software and hardware.
The 16 year "upgrade" has led SiE Information to form a "9+9+9" product system, consisting of 9 agent manufacturers, 9 independent products, and 9 ecological partners, with a focus on expanding and laying out digital solutions in 23 industries. On this basis, SiE Information has established an enterprise digital transformation service system that integrates digital consulting, implementation, technology development, and operation and maintenance, providing solutions for the digital transformation needs of enterprises at different development stages.
In addition to SMOM, SiE Information also launched a self-developed technology platform called "Gu Shen" in 2020, which is an enterprise cloud platform that integrates design, development, integration, implementation, application, and governance. In the digital era, enterprises need to consider how to leverage the value of massive data. Only by combining it with the latest digital technologies and business scenarioses can the value of data-driven enterprise development be reflected. 'Gu Shen' is a modular universal technology platform that can quickly respond to user differentiated needs. In Zhang Chengkang's view, the emergence of 'Gu Shen' means that SiE Information has a 'matrix' of industrial internet.
To B software does not have a 'internet celebrity model' and needs to be continuously polished and shaped as an 'evergreen model'. As long as the reputation is good, there is no shortage of orders. Zhang Chengkang believes that the catching up process of Chinese industrial management software manufacturers should be gradual, must have a spirit of craftsmanship, and should invest resources to carve high-quality products. We hope to achieve a competitive advantage in the field of industrial management software, especially in certain industries, to develop independently developed software, and ultimately follow the pace of China's manufacturing industry going global
