Author｜Wei Shiwei
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36氪 was informed that the APS manufacturer “Qingzhi Optimization” recently announced that it has completed an angel round of financing of tens of millions of RMB. This round of funds will be mainly used for product development and market expansion.
Qingzhi Optimization was established in April 2022. The core team consists of alumni of the Institute of Operations Research and Data Science of Tsinghua University and alumni of the University of Hong Kong. The company mainly provides intelligent decision-making services such as APS, WMS, TMS, etc. for manufacturing enterprises based on the intelligent decision-making technology of operational research optimization, covering supply chain links such as production, transportation, procurement, inventory, etc., so as to reduce costs and increase efficiency and income of business at all levels. It can be widely used in aerospace, new energy, new materials and other industries.
It is worth mentioning that Qingzhi Optimization was officially selected as the “Golden Partner” of Yonyou YonBIP one month after its establishment, and is expected to achieve revenue of 10 million yuan this year.
Dr. Meng Yize, the founder of Qingzhi Optimization, graduated from the Engineering Department of Tsinghua University, and studied under Shen Zuojun and Deng Tianhu. The two teachers were selected as Franz Edelman Laureate in 2018. The highest award in the field of management science established by the Institute of Academic and Management Sciences (INFORMS), known as the “Nobel Prize” in the industrial engineering field.
Meng Yize told 36氪 that before the establishment of the company, she worked for UF for three years, during which she served as the head of the industrial brain operations research algorithm team of UF Intelligent Manufacturing Division, responsible for the algorithm design and code of multiple industrial intelligence projects and industrial brain products. accomplish.
In the process, she found that there are structural opportunities in the market. First, as the Z-generation group has become the mainstream consumer group, the personalized demand is increasing day by day, which puts forward requirements for the factory’s flexible production capacity of multiple varieties and small batches; second, At present, manual decision-making lacks the support of scientific theory, and there is still a lot of room for improvement in decision-making efficiency and quality; third, China’s digital economy is developing rapidly, and after the gradual completion of digital automation, people begin to pay attention to the promotion of intelligent decision-making to the development of enterprises.
“In the context of the L-shaped growth of the entire economy, enterprises no longer grow extensively as before, but instead pay more attention to lean management and fine control of costs. Therefore, the effect of decision optimization will directly affect the competition of enterprises.” Meng Yize talk.
Specifically, Qingzhi’s optimized APS products can not only integrate with ERP or MES systems, but also provide services independently in a lightweight way. When providing technical services, the company first needs to describe the decision-making process faced by customers in mathematical language, and clearly define the constraints such as equipment, personnel, technology, and production capacity that need to be considered in this decision-making process, and then set according to customer needs. Optimization objectives, such as equipment utilization, benefit optimization, etc., are finally based on operational research optimization theory to efficiently calculate the optimal solution or approximate optimal solution, and convert the original complex decision-making process into a mathematical optimization model for solution. The entire average deployment time is two weeks.
Compared with manual decision-making, intelligent decision-making based on operations research optimization algorithm has the advantages of fast response, high decision-making quality, and stronger traceability, which can greatly reduce the dependence on manual work.
From an industry perspective, there are many types of manufacturers providing intelligent decision-related services at home and abroad, including IBM CPLEX and Gurobi that provide commercial solvers, and APS manufacturers such as Asprova, Planet together, and Yongkai that provide advanced planning and scheduling. Traditional enterprise service IT providers such as SAP APO of informatization/intelligent management software, UFIDA/Alibaba Industrial Brain, and decision optimization service providers that provide overall intelligent decision-making solutions based on operations research optimization like Qingzhi Optimization.
“At present, high-quality APS, WMS, and TMS suppliers are relatively scarce on the market, and the optimization effect is directly related to the profit margin of the enterprise.” Meng Yize explained that customers need the ultimate optimization service, but modeling and algorithm design based on operational research optimization It requires deep academic accumulation, high technical threshold, and requires the R&D team to have a rich understanding of the industry. Therefore, the underlying solvers in this area have long been monopolized by foreign countries.
Meng Yize believes that the advantage of Qingzhi Optimization compared with its peers is that the team has a deep accumulation in operations research algorithms and industrial landing scenarios. “Today, our APS platform has covered hundreds of intelligent decision-making models, which can cover the decision-making optimization of the entire chain of enterprise procurement, production, storage, sales, transportation, etc., and maximize the production capacity, inspection capacity and inventory capacity of each production base. , to achieve cross-regional, multi-base coordinated production.” Meng Yize said, especially now that the product structure and sales system are becoming more and more complex, how to flexibly adopt the production scheduling plan to maximize the efficiency of assets is an enterprise that reduces costs and increases. key to effectiveness.
In terms of product planning, Qingzhi optimization is currently mainly based on built-in scenarios or industry templates, and quickly builds requirements with industry-wide constraints, and then automatically matches model libraries and solvers based on scenarios. The solutions are simulated and compared, so as to help customers obtain satisfactory intelligent decision-making solutions, and even make real-time decision-making optimization adjustments.
In terms of implementation, at this stage, Qingzhi optimization focuses on building benchmark customers, and product services are charged on a project basis. Therefore, the company’s revenue now mainly comes from customized projects in the form of private cloud deployment. Customers include listed companies in aerospace, new energy, new materials and other fields, as well as some large customers of state-owned enterprises/central enterprises.
It is expected that in the second half of this year or next year, the company will expand cost-sensitive small and medium-sized enterprises by invoking the intelligent decision-making model, and gradually provide SaaS subscription-based services based on the public cloud.
“The large-scale popularization of operations research in the industrial field has just started. It is roughly estimated that the solution market of the entire intelligent manufacturing system is in the 100 billion to 1 trillion scale.” Meng Yize mentioned that the company has the opportunity to become a domestic leader in three to five years . One of the leading companies in the field of intelligent decision-making and APS.
Investor says:
Views of Li Hongyan, Vice President of Inno Angel Fund Investment
Viewpoint of Tang Ke, Investment Director of TusStar Venture Capital
Viewpoint of Wang Xuehui, Partner and Executive Director of Shuimu Tsinghua Alumni Seed Fund
media coverage
36Kr investment community start-up state
Related events
- Financing丨“Qingzhi Optimization” received tens of millions of yuan in angel round financing, led by Inno Angel Fund2022-06-28
- Business intelligence decision-making company Youhualin completed nearly 100 million yuan in financing2021-03-02
- Decision optimization technology helps companies strategize, “Shanshu Technology” received nearly 100 million yuan in Series B investment 2020-11-23
- Ou Yi An Dun received tens of millions of financing2020-04-14
- “Helong Optimization”, a service provider of intelligent optimization solutions for the process industry, completed 50 million Series B financing2019-09-16
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