There are many stories about Huawei’s process change.
At the end of 1997, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei led a team to Silicon Valley to visit many large IT companies. After seeing the management gap with world-class companies, he was determined to change Huawei’s internal processes. In 1998, he invited the IBM consultant team to start a long-term meeting. 10 years of cooperation.
So far, Huawei has spent tens of billions of dollars in process changes, and the results are obvious. Before the change, Huawei’s per capita income was less than 1 million yuan, and the per capita income after the change exceeded 4 million yuan.
Not only that, Huawei’s move also sent a group of process management talents and experts for the subsequent development of the domestic process management field.
Chen Zhiqiang is one of them.
He was the first director of Huawei’s process management department. In October 1998, he was appointed to build Huawei’s internal process management system to promote the continuous optimization of the company’s processes. He summarized the methodology and tools of IBM consultants at that time and formed Huawei’s process management system. , and then implement it in various business areas and functional areas.
This experience directly affected Chen Zhiqiang’s later life trajectory. In 2005, Chen Zhiqiang went to sea to start a business and established Shenzhen Jiecheng Heli Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Jiecheng”) focusing on process management.
Since 2005, Chen Zhiqiang has been in business for 17 years. If the average life expectancy of small and medium-sized enterprises in China is only 2.5 years, according to the American “Fortune” magazine, then Jicheng, founded by Chen Zhiqiang, has already broken through 7 “ghost gates” in a row.
Entrepreneurship is a life-and-death experience. In the nearly two-hour interview with Chen Zhiqiang, Leifeng.com outlined and summarized the reasons why Jiecheng can continue to maintain vitality from the perspective of the company.
Chen Zhiqiang is a person with a strong sense of boundaries. In the past 17 years, the constantly changing market trends and hot spots have created many opportunities for wealth creation, but Chen Zhiqiang has always been cautious and focused on the subdivision of process management.
But within the boundaries, Chen Zhiqiang has a bold and radical side. In the 17 years since he started his business, Chen Zhiqiang has made two major strategic adjustments to the company focusing on “how to serve more Chinese enterprises” and “how to realize the value closed loop of services”.
The first time was in 2008-2009, when Chen Zhiqiang decided to transform from process management consulting to become a process management software – EPROS; the second time was in 2021, taking advantage of the digital development of the enterprise, Chen Zhiqiang decisively invested in the research and development process mining platform – XPROS , to achieve a closed loop of process management.
On the way of transformation, Jiecheng has also experienced a long period of suffering. This suffering is not only from the pain caused by the transformation of the enterprise itself, but also from the weak awareness of process management in the domestic market.
In recent years, as enterprises attach importance to refined operations, Jiecheng’s process management platform EPROS has been widely used in various industries, and leading enterprises in many industries have imported EPROS, such as Kingdee Software, Trina Solar, Haitian Converse, Yangtze River Storage, Inovance Technology, etc. At the same time, the newly developed XPROS has also been commercialized.
Founded in 2017 and transformed twice, Jiecheng’s development trajectory to some extent also reflects the development trend of Chinese enterprises: gradually from rough to refined.
The first transformation:
From consulting to software, telling new stories across borders
In 2005, when the market economy was relatively active, the total revenue of private enterprises representing Lenovo exceeded 100 billion yuan for the first time, reaching 108.189 billion yuan.
Chen Zhiqiang vaguely saw a group of domestic private enterprises with a high degree of marketization, and has realized that they need to carry out process management. Jiecheng was also established in this context and began to provide business process-related consulting services to enterprises.
However, just three years after the company was established, Chen Zhiqiang was determined to make a transformation, to transform Jiecheng from a business process consulting-based company to a process management software-based company.
It’s a big leap and an adventure. Needless to say, the technical difficulties are of course, at the same time, the initial investment in the development of software is not a small expense. If the transformation is unsuccessful, the company may simply go out of business.
However, Chen Zhiqiang’s transformation was very firm. On the one hand, doing consulting management did not match his original entrepreneurial ideals. “As a consulting company, we can serve 20 or 30 companies at the same time, but it is difficult for us to serve thousands or tens of thousands of companies at the same time,” said Chen Zhiqiang.
On the other hand, the demand of the consulting industry, the unstable talent team, and the high talent requirements make it difficult to ensure the quality of project delivery and the scale of the industry. In addition, for a long time in the past, most companies with process management awareness hope to solve all problems through 1-2 projects of the consulting team, but in fact, consulting services are often time-sensitive, please consult consultants to solve the current problems. “Nearly fire”, but after two years, the consultant left, and with the continuous development of the company’s own business, new process problems appeared.
Therefore, Chen Zhiqiang decided to change the path. By solidifying the best practices of process management into a set of software, enterprises can build a process system that adapts to the business according to their own needs, and can carry out continuous iterative updates.
In 2008, Jiecheng began to transform, and it took two years to develop the process management platform – EPROS. Enterprises can use this platform to plan, design, publicize and optimize their internal processes.
Fiberhome is one of the earliest seed users of Jiecheng. Chen Zhiqiang told Leifeng.com that at that time Fiberhome had three companies to bid, two foreign software companies, and the other was Jiecheng. In the end, Fiberhome chose Jiecheng because EPROS was easier to use and better matched with Chinese companies. Process maturity.
At the beginning, FiberHome completed the construction of the procurement management process system based on EPROS, which played a very good demonstration effect. The leadership of Fiberhome gave a high evaluation, so it carried out comprehensive promotion and application. According to Chen Zhiqiang, the company later more than 1,000 items Processes are planned, designed, released and publicized through the EPROS platform.
Even though a batch of seed users was accumulated in the early stage, during the period from 2010 to 2016, Chen Zhiqiang and Jiecheng, and even the entire process management industry, went through a difficult period.
Since 2011, the development of the mobile Internet has entered the fast lane, creating a new BAT giant, but also setting off a gold nugget boom, and countless entrepreneurs rushed into it, “Internet +”, “+Internet” and “O2O”, one after another. A new concept of waves emerges.
“At that time, the whole environment was relatively impetuous. Everyone was looking for an outlet, and they didn’t have much interest in refined management,” Chen Zhiqiang told Leifeng.com.
When the company continues to have no revenue growth, confusion and doubt will follow. It is like a person who is lost in the desert. He has walked towards his determined route for a long time, but he has not seen the oasis for a long time. At this time, he will doubt whether it is meaningful to be a process management platform.
Nobody has an answer. Some early shareholders who used to start a business with Chen Zhiqiang also couldn’t stand it at this stage and chose to leave.
Second transformation:
Taking advantage of digitalization, decisively develop a process mining platform
Returning to the essence of process management, it is still an important proposition for the sustainable development of enterprises. In the short term, formulating processes can help companies solidify the best practices. In the long run, the quality of processes can directly affect corporate profits.
If a company with a small organizational scale wants to grow bigger, it must sort out and formulate the process, so that the company can get rid of disorder and become orderly, and get rid of the rule of man and move towards doing things according to the process. For large companies, through continuous optimization of the process, they can get rid of the bloated organization, so as to respond to the rapidly changing market.
Based on these thoughts, Chen Zhiqiang did not stop the pace of transformation, but put more energy into the creation of process management software. This state has continued for 6 years. When the time passed 2016, the process management industry began to take off again.
What impressed Chen Zhiqiang the most about this year was that Chinese companies began to pay attention to the cultivation of internal strength. Process is the basis for the orderly and efficient operation of an enterprise. More and more enterprises are beginning to configure the function of process management, and there is a need to import the process management platform.
There is an obvious phenomenon that more and more people are starting to learn about Huawei. There are countless media reports about Huawei, and courses to learn about Huawei are also popular in the market. High-frequency words in the family, enterprise digitization has also begun to be further put on the agenda.
In the field of investment, in the past two years, the wave of digitalization has fueled investment in the service track of Chinese enterprises. General-purpose SaaS such as OA, HRSaaS, SCRM, as well as vertical SaaS and enterprise service companies in various industries have received a lot of financing, and start-up companies that use big data and artificial intelligence technology to do process mining have also begun to appear in the field of process management.
Under the dual influence of the economic environment and enterprise digitization, Chen Zhiqiang believes that the time has come for the promotion of process mining. At the beginning of 2021, the Jiecheng team resolutely invested in the research and development process mining platform – XPROS. XPROS is now online and commercialized.
Chen Zhiqiang has been planning to build XPROS for a long time. It comes from the enterprises that the Jiecheng team has served in the past. Although a relatively complete process has been formulated, it is still difficult to dynamically grasp and analyze the process execution process.
XPROS is like an X-ray machine. Based on data restoration and perspective of enterprise business processes, it can intuitively monitor the operational performance and compliance of each process, discover and analyze process bottlenecks in a timely manner, and drive process improvement.
Take the procurement process as an example, from procurement to payment, from the whole process to each link, XPROS can accurately monitor, and at the same time analyze and improve process performance in multiple dimensions.
“Process planning, sorting, monitoring, and optimization are originally a closed loop. Only by opening up the closed loop of the entire process management can it really play the role of process management and let enterprises demand performance from process operation.” Chen Zhiqiang said.
Looking back on the road of entrepreneurship in the past, Chen Zhiqiang sighed with emotion, determined the direction, and focused on cultivating on one path. Maybe in the next three years, many people will compete with you on the same stage, but if you look at the longer term, 7 years or even 10 years, you can cooperate You have fewer people competing because few companies are willing to take that long-term perspective.
It is also obvious in the business revenue of Jiecheng. Last year, the revenue doubled, and the revenue structure has also undergone substantial changes. In 2016, the process management software of Jiecheng accounted for only about 20% of the total revenue. , and now has reached 50%.
In the near future, Chen Zhiqiang will introduce new strategic partners and continue to work hard in the field of process management to help more Chinese enterprises transform into efficient and compliant process-oriented organizations.
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