Science and technology creator Foxconn CDO Shi Zhe: To B products should not be bloated, digitalization is not right or wrong, just better

Shi Zhe, Chief Digital Officer of Foxconn Technology Group, Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, Intelligent Maintenance System Center, University of Cincinnati, USA, was the solution leader of Beijing Tianze Zhiyun Technology Co., Ltd., responsible for strategic major customers.
Joined Foxconn in 2020 as Chief Digital Officer and Director of the Industrial Internet Office of Foxconn Technology Group, and established the Industrial Internet Office to be responsible for the group's digital transformation and intelligent manufacturing strategic planning, and to promote the implementation of lighthouse factories, digital platforms and industrial Internet.

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The son inherits the father's business, and the teacher is famous
In 1978, the second year of the resumption of the college entrance examination, Shi Zhe's father was admitted to the most important radio major of Xi'an Electronic Science and Technology University, the predecessor of Xijun Electric, and was assigned to the radio factory after graduation.
Since Shi Zhe can remember, he has been familiar with technical terms related to communication and navigation. In the 2008 college entrance examination, although I was a little jealous of the hot financial major, the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics only recruited four people in Shaanxi.
This is of course a self-deprecating joke. Facts have proved that Shi Zhe's vision and luck in choosing the direction of his life are excellent: he majored in reliability and systems engineering as an undergraduate, which is not only the preferred major for the overall units in the system, but also Huawei, ZTE, COMAC For key positions in large companies such as CRRC, the fly in the ointment is that there are few opportunities to go abroad (going abroad was not popular at that time, and everyone chose to study for graduate school or enter the system); but when Shi Zhe graduated, he caught up with the GRE from paper and pencil. Shi Zhe, whose English was originally a shortcoming, won a full scholarship in the change of the transfer test, and since then he has embarked on the road of intelligent manufacturing with a high starting point and great strides.
Cincinnati, the birthplace of the automated assembly line slaughtering industry, Henry Ford was inspired after seeing the German production line where "pigs go in, sausages come out", and he did the opposite, and developed a car manufacturing that "parts go in, vehicle comes out" assembly line.
At the University of Cincinnati, Shi Zhe spent his entire master's and doctoral career under the tutelage of Professor Li Jie, a world-renowned industrial big data and industrial intelligence expert, and Professor Li Jie's teacher is the world-famous "2mm Project" Initiator: Professor Wu Xianming, University of Michigan.

Tips·2mm Engineering The recognized body quality control mode of the global automobile manufacturing industry, involving sheet metal stamping, automatic assembly line, welding, testing and other technologies, including "all-round testing", "data analysis" and "real-time improvement" for body dimensions The equal division system, whether to apply the "2 mm project" is considered to be the measure of whether the car body size control has reached the international advanced level.
The unique tradition of the University of Cincinnati: the Co-op paid internship program gave Shi Zhe the opportunity to practice in top-level corporate industrial projects during his Ph.D., and he was sent to the National Instruments (NI) headquarters in Austin during the summer vacation of his first year. Internship, undertook a very important foreign project at that time, and got a valuable opportunity to work in Eaton Electric and Alstom in the second year of internship, "The most interesting thing is to cooperate with Alstom, when the project started, help Alstom's high-speed rail to do The detection system happened during the cooperation period in "American Trap" (Alstom was forcibly acquired by an American company), and by the time of the final integration, the partner has become GE." Shi Zhe, who was in it, did not feel the huge The twists and turns, "It's just that the recipient's mailbox has changed."
In 2016, the Industrial Internet - or information physical system, industrial big data - became popular in China. Shi Zhe felt that a historic opportunity was in front of him, and he decided to return to China before graduating with a Ph.D.

To B products reduce the function and pile up the value only if the first party can make good use of it. Shi Zhe has no plan to start a business. But after cooperating with the Information Software Company to compile the "White Paper on Information Physical System", everyone together, the framework of school-enterprise cooperation cannot really solve the pain points of Party A's enterprises, "Since the framework of the information physical system has been determined, it is better for us to do it ourselves. Apps and Services". In 2016, Tianze Zhiyun, which serves central enterprises and large-scale equipment manufacturing enterprises, was officially established to provide a complete set of solutions and services for industrial intelligence. The team lineup is luxurious. The enterprise service team from IBM is responsible for the architecture, and the test team born from National Instruments is responsible for the edge computing hardware. Since its establishment, regardless of whether the capital market has heated up or cooled down suddenly, Tianze Zhiyun, which has "strong generals + main track + leading customer resources", has always been the darling of investors.
But even if you have the capital of the sky, you still have to go to the pit of starting a business.
Kechuang people: In the years when Party B's team was responsible for BD and major customers, what profound experiences of To B services have been summarized?
Shi Zhe: Everyone knows that To B must not talk behind closed doors and talk to himself, but even if the other party recognizes your value, you must grasp the rhythm of the other party's advancement. There are too many scenes of rejecting you while acknowledging you:
First of all, "your ability is very strong, but what you have to do is not what we are most anxious about." For super large enterprises, digital transformation is first a social problem, secondly an organizational problem, and finally a technical problem.
Secondly, "your ability is very strong, but the problem you can solve is not what we want to solve the most." You tell the other party that we can detect all bearing failures, but he only cares about how to solve the problem of oil stealing quickly.
Third, "What you do is valuable, but I may not be here when it happens", not much to say.
Fourth, "You can do 9999 things, but which ones are related to me, and I don't pay for anything else." This is the particularity of To B procurement. How many functions does a mobile phone have that we do not need? But people are used to the purchase price including the cost of these sleeping features. But in the To B field, only the services that customers can use are valuable, and customers are only willing to pay for this part of the value.

Enterprise services are not taken for granted. The key person in the decision-making chain is the first person responsible for science and technology: in the face of customers who have needs but did not start the first time, what can To B companies do to promote the progress of things?
Shi Zhe: There may be one thing that Chinese To B companies must do: continuously carry out value preaching and publicity. Many To B teams in China originate from Party A or a large Party B team. There is no problem in grasping the demand points, but there are really no four words in the field of enterprise services. You need to help customers understand the importance, feasibility, Risks and costs, help customers save enough resources and eliminate internal resistance.
Some people don't sleep well. One of the reasons is that the body rhythm does not match the social rhythm. The solution is to adjust their routine to adapt to social interaction. To B is such a principle, to adapt to Party A and push the direction of A to approach you, both sides need you to find a way.

Kechuang people: Who is the most critical role in To B's procurement decision-making chain, the project leader or the person who has the purchasing decision-making power?

Shi Zhe: I think it is the person in charge of the project, or more precisely, the person who suffers the most from the existing problems. Of course, there is a constraint here. The customers of Tianze Zhiyun do not have any concerns about digital transformation. They will definitely do it. They just choose who to do it. Therefore, the advice of the responsible person is the most important. This is especially true when it comes to execution. He has the same goals as yours and can devote himself to solving problems.
I believe that as the value of enterprise services is recognized by more and more enterprises, not only the market size will become larger, but the cost of practitioners will also be reduced, and the efficiency and service quality will increase rapidly. For example, when we started our business, we couldn’t even find a professional IoTDB, so we could only use MongoDB. Now there are many products to choose from.

The key to digital transformation is to accurately set KPIs
"Industrial intelligence is a process of removing complex processes, directly solving final problems and bringing value. The basis for its goal is data and models." However, the implementation of industrial intelligence is still in the exploratory stage on a global scale. With mature experience, we can only cross the river by feeling the stones according to our model.”
Foxconn, a well-deserved leading company in the industrial manufacturing field, naturally also has this distress. Since 2018, the world's largest precision manufacturing company has paid more and more attention to intelligent upgrades. It has formed a company focused on industrial Internet (Fii), and has reached a series of industrial Internet-related technologies with Tianze Zhiyun. Cooperation, Shi Zhe also started the resident mode in Shenzhen, representing the company to settle in Foxconn and jointly plan the development of the industrial Internet.
In 2020, Liu Yangwei, chairman of Foxconn Group, formulated the F2.0 digital transformation strategy, and established the position of chief digital officer for the first time. He established the Industrial Internet Office to be responsible for the group's digital transformation and intelligent manufacturing strategic planning, and promote lighthouse factories, digital platforms and The landing of the Industrial Internet.
This year, Shi Zhe officially joined Foxconn as Foxconn's chief digital officer and director of the Industrial Internet Office.
Kechuang people: What kind of experience is it to participate in the entrepreneurial team of Party B with a high starting point and work in the absolutely giant-level Party A company?

Shi Zhe: You can fully feel how the friend who was sitting opposite was thinking about the problem (laughs). Seriously, it’s not easy to compare, Foxconn is too special, a 40-year-old company with more than 1.2 million employees at its peak, what needs to be done now lays the foundation for the development of the next 5 to 10 years, accounting for 31.5% of the global precision manufacturing industry ( According to IDC statistics), we all have the Internet of Things, capacity sharing, intelligent collaboration, etc. Here, the goal you want to achieve here is something you have never touched before: to improve the efficiency of the entire industry chain. In order to achieve this goal, there may be There are 10,000 things to be done, and we can only choose three from them every day. We must continue to do everything right, and we must coordinate with more departments...
The responsibility here is huge, but the hugeness itself is meaningful. At the beginning of the cooperation with Foxconn, Guo Taiming, who had not yet stepped down as chairman, once asked me what was the most important thing in the industrial Internet, and I said that the data foundation and the talent foundation were the most important. He immediately began to recruit talents on a large scale and began to prepare for the industrial big data analysis competition within the group. This efficiency and determination gives all participants full confidence in reaching their goals.

Kechuang people: How to understand that the digitalization of an enterprise can improve the efficiency of the entire industry chain?

Shi Zhe: The so-called leading enterprise is actually the main body that aggregates resources to the greatest extent in the industrial chain, so its every move will bring about changes in the industrial chain.
For example, Apple's drive to the supply chain has enabled every company in the supply chain to have today's brilliant performance, and even become an industry leader. At that time, the change of the back cover of mobile phones from plastic to metal and glass material saved a large number of machine tool factories in China. Because the back cover of metal or glass material must require machine tool cutting technology, the demand has suddenly increased. Before that, many machine tool factories in China had a bad time. This does not mean how well these machine tool factories are doing. What is important is the evolution of the industry's leading products, which drives the competitiveness of the industry chain.
The national level is also aware of the importance of competition in the industrial chain. The 2022 "Government Work Report" has clearly pointed out that the implementation of leading enterprises' chain maintenance and chain stabilization projects will maintain the stability of the supply chain and industrial chain. Special attention should be paid to leading enterprises as "chain length", through leading enterprises to drive small and medium-sized enterprises in the upstream and downstream chains, to stabilize the supply chain through the industrial chain, and finally realize the intensive and high-quality development of the value chain.

Leading companies must challenge
Extreme Kechuang from Engineering Method: As a CDO leading the digitalization process of an enterprise, in your opinion, what are the key factors of digital transformation?
Shi Zhe: Determining a KPI, that is, a goal, is of no value if it is set low, and it is "too ambitious" if it is set high. Therefore, a goal that is just right is what the person in charge of digital transformation needs to consider most. In addition, there are two key elements. First, the formulation of this goal must be the result of multi-party participation and consultation. Second, this goal cannot be the goal of system construction, but must be the goal of organizational development.

In addition, it is very difficult to clarify the intermediate output. It has no templates and no standardization. Here we share a technical model. The bottom layer is science, the middle layer is technology, and the upper layer is engineering method. Most enterprises do not have a scientific layer, but a part of the technical layer, but in the end, most of them need to invest in engineering methods, how to better integrate IT technology and organizations to form core competitiveness. Therefore, the intermediate process may be to improve efficiency, streamline personnel, and reduce costs. Most companies are OK if they do this, but for leading companies, it is better to bring value growth and efficiency improvement, rather than pure cost. reduce.
Moreover, the leading enterprises want to create social value, not just corporate value. For example, the biggest issue in the world now is ESG (Environmental, Social Responsibility, Corporate Governance). If digitalization brings business growth, but does not contribute to carbon reduction and environmental protection, it is not worth much. . We have also formulated a new sustainable development goal, which considers sustainable development = EPS (earning per share) * ESG.

There is no absolute right or wrong in digitalization. The most advanced changes can also learn from the wisdom of Chinese medicine. In the face of huge resources and huge responsibilities, each of your roles is of great significance. How can you build a set of feedback decision-making progress, avoid too The mechanism of big losses?

Shi Zhe: I don’t think there is a universal solution at present. If we want to develop and innovate, we must constantly adjust the organizational structure, use the system platform to solve problems, and at the same time, we must check the pulse like an old Chinese medicine doctor. The formation of an organization has taken a long time, and every logic, every system, and every thing has the necessity of "the reason why it is like this", so you must take the pulse and carefully select from the limited medicinal materials. Carefully select the formula and formulate the dosage. These prescriptions are digitized, and the core of digitization is to respect the original mechanism of the body while improving the ability of the signal pulse.

Kechuang people: There is no universal method, can it be understood that there is no universal standard for measuring the right and wrong, pros and cons of digitalization?
Shi Zhe: I think so, because digitization did not happen today. It has been around for a long time and has affected a lot of things. We cannot infer whether it would be better to go the other way, but to ensure that we choose The way to get out of the effect.
For example, the layout of mobile phone cameras, if Steve Jobs hadn’t died, would Apple’s back cover be what it is today? It shouldn't, but isn't it good to reduce the design of the camera? That's not necessarily true. In reality, users need more cameras. You can't blindly define today's iPhone as a detour or wrong.
Of course, the advantage of digitalization is high-frequency iterative optimization. Many systems we use today have long-term fixed interfaces and little changes, but the systems behind them are still constantly being upgraded and strengthened. From this point of view, there seems to be an old saying that is quite vulgar but very descriptive of digital: there is no best, only better.