Kechuang, Black Lake Technology CEO Zhou Yuxiang: To B products should not ignore product experience, the future of manufacturing is demand-defined production

Zhou Yuxiang, Co-founder & CEO of Black Lake Technology

Graduated from Dartmouth College in the United States, with many years of continuous entrepreneurial experience in big data and industrial software products. Elected by Forbes as the "30 Outstanding Entrepreneurs Under 30 in Asia", Fast Company's most creative person in China's business, Black Lake Technology is the 2021 Global Technology Pioneer of the Davos Forum.

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Zhou Yuxiang said that he has rarely received interviews in the past six months, because he hopes to devote more energy to focusing on polishing products, and also hopes that Heihu's excellent partner team can stand on the front desk more.

At the turn of the New Year in 2021-2022, I will have a chat with "Science and Technology", "It is mainly to make a stage record for the past few years."

Heihu’s new generation of strategic products is being developed intensively. In the five years since its founding, Zhou Yuxiang’s high-quality voice has become a key move in the branding of Heihu. But then, the captain is ready to focus all his attention on the unknown route. Leading Heihu to the deep blue star sea of intelligent manufacturing.

Participate in global mergers and acquisitions
Smelling the opportunity of China's manufacturing upgrade
Yibin, Sichuan, a key industrial city in my country's third-tier construction period, has a solid industrial and manufacturing foundation.

Zhou Yuxiang was born in Yibin. Many relatives in his family were engaged in manufacturing jobs, but his ambitions were not here. The teenager put all his love and dreams on the computer. During his middle school years, he not only played in the Computer Olympiad many times, but also won the country. First prize.

Zhou Yuxiang’s formal career started at Barclays. Most of the young people who were with him were eager to join the IPO department. However, Zhou Yuxiang did not hesitate to join the manufacturing M&A team. He gave two reasons: “First, IPO work. It is a process-oriented job, and I want to face the unknown and uncertain; in addition, my dream is to create my own business, so I hope to have a more thorough and comprehensive understanding of the full picture of business operations. Compared with IPOs, mergers and acquisitions require Understanding the bones of the enterprise is obviously more in line with my pursuit."

Wise life decisions are destined to produce high dividends. The question is whether the cycle of return realization is long or short. Zhou Yuxiang did not wait too long. Globally, mergers and acquisitions are a common and frequent means of corporate expansion. Only one Siemens company executes nearly 20 merger targets each year. However, for a long period of time in the past, domestic companies have neglected this. Until 2010, the country encouraged "manufacturing companies to go global", and the pace of overseas M&A by domestic manufacturing giants suddenly accelerated. Zhou Yuxiang’s choice quickly yielded returns. Among the mergers and acquisitions he participated in, there are many top cases that have shaken the global industry map such as Shuanghui’s acquisition of Smithfield and CSR’s acquisition of ZF. The most shocking thing is the huge gap in management between Chinese manufacturing companies and international giants. "I accompanied the leaders of the same company to visit an automobile shock absorber factory in Frankfurt and found that there was hardly any paper on site, and all production line data was machined. Collecting and transmitting to the computer, the manager only needs to analyze the various monitoring information transmitted by the computer in the office to make accurate decisions; and this leader, he is very happy to tell us that a new concept has just been introduced in China: walking style Management requires middle-level management to constantly walk around the scene, look for problems, and then solve them."

"Our new concept is already eliminated by others." Seeing this huge generation gap, Zhou Yuxiang realized that this might be the entrepreneurial opportunity he was looking for. People's passionate sense of mission gushes out from the bottom of my heart.

In 2015, Zhou Yuxiang quit his high-paying job and called up two fellow friends to start his first venture in a courtyard in Beijing. The company was named "Motor Data".

An off-track first venture
Judging from the common standards in the field of technology entrepreneurship, the founding team created by Zhou Yuxiang can be described as shining stars: the three founders are from Dartmouth, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon, and they have industry experience, algorithm experience and technical experience. Among them is a partner who holds an important position in Palantir. In this grand competition called "Becoming China's Palantir", Zhou Yuxiang's team has an obvious huge advantage.

The three friends hit it off. Zhou Yuxiang can still remember the day when they discussed entrepreneurship on Zhongguancun Chuangye Street. The streets were filled with various entrepreneurial projects "scanning for support". From the street to the end, the towels, soap, and edible oil were enough to solve the problem. The life needs of the three "Xinbei Diao"-the same scene also happened when Orson was running while scanning the code to collect water. "At that time, there was no such word as'involume'. Several of us were holding a bunch of things from others. On the one hand, we can't go to such a crowded track (laughs)".

At least in 2015, "data-driven manufacturing industry upgrading" is a blue ocean. The excellent team and refreshing strategic positioning quickly captured the "heart" of angel investor Xu Xiaoping, and then Zhou Yuxiang quickly spread across the country.

However, things did not go as smoothly as expected. The design logic of the founding team's first-generation product is to analyze and optimize based on real-time factory data, identify equipment failures and capacity bottlenecks, and achieve the purpose of reducing inventory. In 2022, this logic is easy to understand, but in 2015, a large number of factories — even top companies such as Yili and Sany Heavy Industry — are still using paper slips to record information, Excel for resource planning, and troubleshooting. Schedule, assign tasks, "Data is not yet online, how can it be'data-driven'?"

Zhou Yuxiang sensed something was wrong and decided to turn around. He shut down the motor and took the founding team to "go down to the factory" to experience life, eat and live with the workers. "If you don't understand the current status and real logic of the core manufacturing unit of the factory, it will be impossible to build a service in the digital world. Empowering tools for manufacturing".

This round of field surveys lasted for nearly a year. In the bottom line of the manufacturing industry, Zhou Yuxiang and his partners unearthed a strategic positioning with long-term value: a new generation of industrial collaboration driven by digitalization. platform.

"From a macro perspective, the consumption segment of the supply chain has been digitized, and the circulation segment is being completed. We need to complete the final closed loop of the digital supply chain in the manufacturing and production segment. From a micro perspective, the information foundation of manufacturing companies was generally weak, even if it was The use of industrial software from foreign companies such as Siemens also has factors such as high cost and slow launch. In our survey, we found that the channel for workers to connect to the outside world is their mobile phone. It is difficult for them to learn traditional industrial software, but it is difficult to operate mobile apps. Very skilled, if you adopt the'mobile APP + public cloud model' to build a collaborative product with flexible development and flexible configuration, it should be able to achieve low-cost implementation and quick start."

In June 2016, Zhou Yuxiang and the founding team walked out of the factory and started to build new products with the most vivid perception and first-hand experience.

Technologist: Why did you choose to move to Shanghai to start Black Lake?
Zhou Yuxiang: The northern manufacturing sector is dominated by large state-owned enterprises. For an early start-up company, it is difficult to obtain even POC opportunities, or there is a small probability that companies will appreciate you very much and cooperate in the form of a project. I am not interested in customization, and we are determined to take the product route. There are a large number of private manufacturing companies in the southern Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai areas. There are already many second-generation conscious factories succeeding them, but most of them have not encountered high-quality technology service providers. When we visited, we found that the other party welcomed us very enthusiastically, even Willing to cooperate with us in innovation, and cooperate with Heihu when the product is still in the early stage. When I found that I was allocating more and more time to enterprises in the south, it was more convenient to move to Shanghai simply.

Technologist: The name Black Lake Technology is very cool. What's the special reason?
Zhou Yuxiang: At that time, due to some circumstances, we were particularly anxious to register a company. A very senior cooperation consultant in business registration suggested that the combination of "color + rivers, lakes and seas" should be used to avoid registration failures and to exclude some ugly names. , Black Lake sounds pretty good. Then we found that this name is also very appropriate for the digital transformation of Chinese factories: in the past, a large amount of data sank on the bottom of the factory lake, we could only see the dark water surface, and what Heihu has to do is to throw a piece of water into the lake. The "digital" stones make ripples in the lake water, thereby using the data in the lake to drive the production and business of the factory.

Pay attention to user experience and create characteristic barriers
"If there is a chance to go back to the beginning of the second business in 2016, what would you say to yourself at the time?"

"(Thinking slightly) Nothing, no mistakes have been made along the way to the Black Lake."

Behind the certainty and self-confidence are countless correct decisions, large and small: adopting cloud native + microservice architecture, building block deployment is convenient and fast, and the development of new requirements and new components is more agile and efficient; based on mobile devices such as mobile phones Achieve low-cost landing, do not require customers to re-purchase hardware for embedded transformation and development, and make full use of the "portability" of such devices to achieve the last-meter implementation of data-driven collaboration; in order to solve cross-departmental and cross-enterprise data islands For the problem, using abstract modeling methods, all activities of the production line are divided into four sections: production management, quality management, material management, and equipment maintenance, and then each section is divided into planning layer, execution layer and data analysis layer; "Only line Only up-scale, structured, and relational data can be called "data assets", otherwise it is just data garbage." In order to achieve data structuring, natural semantic analysis technology is used regardless of cost...

One of the most impressive is Black Lake Technology's ultimate pursuit of product experience. Does To B need product experience? Most of them will answer the needs politically correctly, but if you really want to invest real money in experience optimization, how many start-ups are willing to bleed?

Heihu is a different kind. The first-line experience of more than a year has made the founding team of Heihu fully aware of a problem: data-driven industrial collaboration, data online is a barrier, in addition to deploying more intelligent hardware to collect data, how to enable workers to Easily and conveniently record data and complete work, at least in the early stages of digital transformation, to a certain extent, will determine the success or failure of industrial collaboration software.

Therefore, since the first day of product development in Heihu, a dedicated person is responsible for the product experience. After financing is in place, UX (user experience) positions are set up to continuously optimize the experience; applications based on App development will allow workers to try them out; Go ahead and go to the scene. "Traditional big factories' "sales-collection-delivery-demand analyst-engineer" all the way down, the engineers have no idea what they are doing"; regular invitations to customers to talk, "coercion, profit and lure" all kinds of methods , Just to let customers complain more; compared to the evaluation of the factory owner, they are more concerned about the status of the use of the products by the front-line workers. When working with Nongfu Spring, the Heihu engineer stayed in the Qiandao Lake water source base to dig deep, just to find the most suitable The product form of the workers...

To give a detailed example: when the Black Lake engineer team ran into the front line in the early days, they found that the reminder notification function often fails for the workers working in the factory. The factory is generally noisy, no sound reminders can be heard, and the tooling is generally loose and it is difficult to feel the vibration. Reminder, and "notification invalidation means that the entire system is scrapped." In the end, the Black Lake team gave a solution that really applies to the scene: the notification function is realized through the flashlight of the mobile device, which completely solves the problem of low notification arrival rate.

The product concept does not matter whether it is right or wrong, only more suitable. Based on the full understanding of the pain points of the first-line scenarios and the rational application of technical means, the Black Lake Smart Manufacturing Cooperative System can complete system training within one week and complete the system launch within 4-6 weeks, which solves the problem of slow and running-in traditional industrial software in the past. The problem of long cycles.

Technologist: In your opinion, for To B products, is user experience a differentiated advantage that is enough to become a barrier, or is it just icing on the cake?
Zhou Yuxiang: It depends on the positioning of the product. If it is a reporting system, only to meet the demands of the management, it does not need to be particularly heavy on product experience optimization and the other party is willing to renew it. But Black Lake is not a reporting system. We believe that the factory in the future will be decentralized. Decentralization will change the relationship between "factory-worker" and "function-function". Everyone should make judgments based on data. , Instead of making decisions based on a reporting system. In such a scenario, I believe that experience is an important and necessary product value for every operator who can reach the data.

A small work order starts with an unexpected return in good faith
If Heihu Intelligent Manufacturing is a strategic product with in-depth research, meticulous planning, and continuous polishing, the Heihu Small Work Order is more like a good result from a good relationship.

The epidemic hits in early 2020. Compared with the gimmick of some companies exchanging traffic for free, Black Lake Technology has given a sincere anti-epidemic support plan: all companies that have contributed to the fight against the epidemic can use black for free for two years. Black Lake’s flagship product, Heihu Zhizhi, was launched online by Heihu experts’ remote support. “Actually, lawyers suggested that legally speaking, you can’t claim to be free for life. In fact, Heihu’s support for such companies will last longer.”

Heihu’s anti-epidemic charity has been reported by many leading media, and something unexpected happened by Zhou Yuxiang: Heihu is an industrial synergy product for large and medium-sized manufacturing companies, but among the companies that come to ask for help through reporters, Small and micro enterprises account for the vast majority. This type of company has a high enthusiasm for learning. "We organized training and tinkered with our products by ourselves, but after three or four months of running, we paid a return visit and found that Heihu Zhizhi did not really run much in small and micro enterprises." — —Although Heihu is a product with a convenient process to build, there is still a process after all, but when visiting small and micro enterprises, Zhou Yuxiang found that the process of such enterprises is changing almost every day, "not even the material code" .

"For these kinds of companies, even if Heihu Zhizhi is free, it will not help them much. During that time, I was thinking every day, how can we help them?"

The kindly sentiment drew a kind response. It coincided that the person in charge of a domestic IM head manufacturer came to the door, and the other party brought an interesting message: During the epidemic, many small and micro enterprises used IM software to check in and perform temperature measurement. For epidemic control work, the other party actively proposed to build a management software that can really help small and micro enterprises based on its own public cloud + IM system and cooperate with Heihu.

At that time, the customers served by Heihu were mostly industry giants such as China Resources Group and Nongfu Spring. When the other party suggested, Zhou Yuxiang nodded his head readily, "First of all, I have always had a belief that I don’t want black Heihu has developed into China’s SAP, only serving head customers and large enterprises, but hoping to help more small and medium-sized enterprises bridge the growth gap; second, Heihu’s natural microservice architecture and structured data specialize in various We hope to establish links between factories. We hope to serve the entire manufacturing industry chain. Sooner or later, we will reach small and medium-sized enterprises. If we do not have the digital capabilities for these factories, the link in Black Lake’s dream will have no foundation."

In September 2020, the "Black Lake Intelligent Manufacturing · Lightweight Self-launched" version of the POC ended, and the MVP verification ended in March 2021. After that, it was officially named "Black Lake Small Work Order", and the commercial closed loop was officially completed. Without terminal hardware and no APP, this small program, which personally serves China's small and micro manufacturing enterprises, was born out of goodwill, and it has reaped generous returns from this goodwill: quarter-on-quarter revenue growth of 200%.

From design-defined production to demand-defined production
After Heihu Zhizhi and Heihu’s small work order, Heihu’s third product is in the secret development process. From Zhou Yuxiang’s excited expression, he can feel his full confidence in the new product. In addition to "chain technology", he still managed to be tight-lipped.

Technologist: Tell me about your judgment on the future trend of the industrial collaboration field, right?
Zhou Yuxiang: In the past 10 to 20 years, the digitalization and automation of the manufacturing industry have focused on "how to improve productivity". Cost reduction and efficiency increase and capacity utilization are the core keywords. But in the future, changes in manufacturing will be reflected in changes in production relations. In the past, the manufacturing industry was design-driven, and "design-production-marketing-sales" was the main model. However, in today's era, the consumer Internet has eliminated the asymmetry of consumer information on a large scale, and the model of acquiring customers through advertising has become more and more expensive , And the influence of advertising on consumers is also declining.

Under this trend, the production relationship will gradually change from design-driven to consumer-defined manufacturing, which is to define manufacturing with demand instead of design-defined manufacturing. What consumers need, there may be no inventory at all before the live broadcast. After the demand information is received during the live broadcast, the factory will produce and develop. As long as the coordination efficiency of the entire industry chain is high enough, the factory can achieve basically zero inventory, and all production behaviors are targeted. Rather than plan or even shoot the forehead.

To achieve such a production relationship, the digital transformation we are doing will not only focus on the goal of reducing costs and increasing efficiency. The phenomenon of reducing costs and increasing efficiency will still appear, but only as a by-product. The core of the change is how to make factories respond flexibly. The ability of demand, from the consumer demand to the primary, secondary, and tertiary engineering needs, and then to the raw material engineering needs, cloud computing naturally has this penetrating power, and SaaS itself is a low-cost product form that cuts into this system.

This is Heihu's definition of the future, and all of our product lines will work hard to realize this vision.