On the day of the interview, just outside the interview room, the 2021 China Enterprise Digital Summit and SIE Information Users Conference was being held. More than 700 experts, scholars, enterprise executives from all over the country gathered in Suzhou to discuss the feasible path of enterprise digital transformation and upgrading in the digital economy era - this is the first time that Zhang Chengkang has held a user conference in East China since he founded SIE 16 years ago.

Based in South China and entering East China, SIE Information seems to be expanding the market space in the physical sense, but in fact, the quantitative change of technology research and development leads to qualitative change of business model. As Zhang Chengkang said, SIE Information has changed from "upgrading" to insight into user needs.

Strong foundation and solid foundation for more than ten years, surpassing the level overnight. "The 3.0 era of SIE is to gain insight into customer needs, explore new application scenarios, and combine different digital technologies, products and services to continuously bring value to customers." Zhang Chengkang explained, "In the past 16 years, the original intention of SIE enabling enterprises to transform digitally has never changed. Our goal is to 'let Chinese enterprises become global enterprises'."

One original intention: empowering enterprises with digital transformation

Open the user list of SIE, and there are many familiar manufacturing enterprises such as Midea Group, Huawei Technologies, Panasonic, China Aerospace Industry, CRRC, CIMC, etc.

"The industrial upgrading of China's manufacturing industry, from a big manufacturing country to a strong manufacturing country, software driven is an important direction." Zhang Chengkang believes that under the trend of industrial integration and development with the digital economy as the core, the rapidly developing high-end manufacturing industry in China is expected to further enhance the ability to integrate resources, which also makes SIE Information clear the core significance of intelligent manufacturing.

"SIE's intelligent manufacturing business has formed characteristics, and our strategy is to focus on the manufacturing industry." Zhang Chengkang introduced that at present, more than 90% of SIE's customers are manufacturing enterprises. Taking the first half of this year as an example, 219 million of SIE Information's revenue of 867 million yuan came from intelligent manufacturing business, with a year-on-year growth of 93.93%, corresponding to a gross margin of 38.54%. If compared to the general 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 has built a SMOM (SIE Intelligent Manufacturing Operation Management Platform) with independent intellectual property rights based on the design concept of digital and intelligent factory. It focuses on six core business modules, namely, planning and scheduling, logistics management, production management, quality management, equipment management and operation management, and provides 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 operating costs. Taking SIE Information as an example of the intelligent factory built by Mengna Socks Industry, its automated and digitized 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 simultaneously to 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 a special module to do green manufacturing, and uses data analysis to achieve green manufacturing." Zhang Chengkang introduced, "using intelligent monitoring and analysis to find out the crux of the problem in the energy consumption process, and effectively reduce the level of energy consumption by optimizing the program, so some customers have reduced their power consumption by 30%."

Parallel Legs: The Secret to Steady Forward Movement

From a regional enterprise to a listed enterprise with 17 subsidiaries and delivery centers across the country, SIE, which originated in South China, has grown into the industry leader in more than 10 years.

According to the third quarter report, SIE Information achieved an operating revenue of 1.367 billion yuan in the first three quarters of this year, up 42.46% year on year; The net profit attributable to shareholders of the listed company was 132 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 20.76%. From the performance data alone, SIE Information's operating income and net profit in the first three quarters of this year have approached the level of last year.

Nevertheless, Zhang Chengkang explained that the over 40% increase in performance is still the result of his "stepping on the brakes". "Enterprise development is walking on two legs: one is the market, and the other is operations. If the market moves too fast but operations cannot keep up, it will be disconnected. The process is gradual, and the company can move forward steadily

The style of steady operation is also reflected in the layout of SIE Information's "East China Strategy".

According to Zhang Chengkang, SIE Information plans to build an East China headquarters with 1000 people in three years and radiate to the Yangtze River Delta region with Shanghai as the core. 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 building a mature delivery team as the top priority of the East China headquarters, with a focus on delivering 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 "settled" in East China. In June of that year, SIE Information completed the acquisition of 51% shares of Jingtong Technology, and the acquisition of the remaining 49% shares in September of the next year, making it a wholly-owned subsidiary of the company. At the end of 2020, SIE Information went further and acquired 51% equity of Gideon 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 SAP Gold Partner with over 400 successful SAP implementation cases in China; Gideon Information has a self-developed financial digital platform, providing 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 Hefei, Hangzhou and other Yangtze River Delta regions, and have accumulated a large number of customers in equipment manufacturing, electronic information, medicine and other industries. These companies and businesses have gathered together to form the headquarters in East China, further consolidating the business layout in East China." In Zhang Chengkang's view, with the integration of Jingtong Technology and Gideon Information, SIE Information has not only further consolidated its advantages in business collaboration, customer development, field coverage and other aspects, but also laid a solid foundation for the establishment of the headquarters in East China.

3.0 Era: "Number" Theory of Intelligent Manufacturing in China

Today, SIE has upgraded from the "SIE 1.0" era when ERP was initially implemented and developed to the "SIE 3.0" era of industrial software practitioners and enterprise digital enablers. Zhang Chengkang further summarized "SIE 3.0" as an "integrated three wing" strategy that drives and serves the digital transformation of enterprises, with user needs as the main body, strengthening new technology construction, building new business scenarios, and improving the new organizational ecology as the three wings.

"We will focus on some industries with great development potential in the future, such as electronics, semiconductor, FMCG, medical equipment, etc. SIE will grow together with enterprises in these fields." Zhang Chengkang said that SIE, as an integrator of enterprise digital transformation system, is building an ecosystem that includes basic cloud, hardware manufacturing and other partners under the trend of combining hardware and software.

The "upgrading" of 16 years has enabled SIE to form a "9+9+9" product system, that is, 9 agent manufacturers, 9 independent products, 9 ecological partners, focusing on the expansion and layout of digital solutions in 23 industries. On this basis, SIE Information has established an enterprise digital transformation service system integrating digital consultation, implementation, technology development and operation and maintenance, which can provide solutions for the digital transformation needs of enterprises at different stages of development.

In addition to SMOM, SIE Information also launched a self-developed technology platform called "Gushen" in 2020, which is an enterprise cloud platform integrating design, development, integration, implementation, application and governance. "In the digital era, enterprises need to consider how to give play to the value of massive data. Only when combined with the latest digital technology and business scenarios can the value of data driven enterprise development be reflected. 'Gushen' is a modular general technology platform that can quickly respond to the differentiated needs of users." In Zhang Chengkang's view, the advent of "Gushen" means that SIE has a "parent" of the industrial Internet.

To B software does not have 'internet famous models', it needs to continuously polish and shape' evergreen models'. As long as the reputation is good, there will be no shortage of orders. ”Zhang Chengkang believes that the catching up process of Chinese industrial management software manufacturers should be gradual and require a spirit of craftsmanship, and resources should be invested to create high-quality products. We hope to achieve a transition from following to running parallel in the field of industrial management software, especially in certain industries, to form competitive capabilities, develop independently developed software, and ultimately go abroad with the pace of China's manufacturing industry going global