Hu Bowei Duomei Group CIO He used to be the IT director of the finance department of a state-owned enterprise, leading the planning and construction of the enterprise information system, network system and hardware system. The current CIO of Weiduomei Group is fully responsible for the construction of the group's informatization team and IT strategy, and leads the business, selection, negotiation and implementation of multiple IT systems such as OA, ERP, and CRM. Leading Wedome to become the first self-service cash register system based on video recognition technology in China, laying a solid foundation for the group's informatization development in the next 5-10 years.
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The first batch of e-commerce undergraduates in China
To this day, Hu Bo can still recall the days when he worked as a network administrator in an Internet cafe in college. He experienced the most down-to-earth IT operation and maintenance work amid the pungent smell of smoke and the cries of "the network management machine is broken".
In 2003, Hu Bo graduated from Xi'an University of Aeronautics and Technology, majoring in e-commerce. According to today's standards, this is the earliest e-commerce major in China. It has a bit of a patchwork meaning: "electronics", which includes courses such as computer and programming; "business", which includes economics and economic law... When Hu Bo was looking for a job, his professional background in e-commerce was not a bonus. , "I haven't heard of any company that recruits graduates specializing in e-commerce." Instead, his practical experience as a network administrator helped him find an IT operation and maintenance job in a star-rated hotel.
Hu Bo is a typical northern man with a rather forthright personality. He is not afraid of problems and has a sense of responsibility. Once the internship period is over, he will be promoted to supervisor, and he will quickly be promoted to the top leadership rank in the department in a short period of time.
I have worked in the star-rated hotel Hubo for 8 years. Not only has I completed all the work in the field of IT operation and maintenance, but also because I am reliable, serious and responsible, I have become the cashier supervisor of the hotel. You don’t have to change jobs frequently. You can achieve growth beyond the timeline by working hard in a position, breaking your own boundaries, and establishing effective trust with every reliable collaborator.
In 2011, Hu Bo noticed that the star-rated hotel industry was entering an obvious decline. It happened that his former master recommended him the job of the person in charge of the information system of Weiduomei. After a brief balance, he decided to leave his hometown in Inner Mongolia and go to Beijing to take up the post.
Leading the whole process of Weiduomei Information-Digital Transformation Technology Creator: Since 2011, as the leader of Weiduomei Information-Digital Transformation, you have personally experienced the whole process of continuous iteration and optimization of a traditional enterprise through technology empowerment. What problems are relatively difficult to solve for traditional enterprises in the start-up stage of digital transformation?
Hu Bo: I believe that most traditional enterprises embark on the path of informatization and digitization because of business pressure, that is, business development has encountered a bottleneck, and hope to achieve breakthroughs through IT means. When I joined Weiduomei, Weiduomei had less than 200 stores in the Beijing area. There was no IT department, but there was a statistics department with 70 people. The speed of the store expansion caused the audit ability of the statistics department and the financial department to keep up, so the leadership Determined to go to ERP.
Kechuang people: ERP is basically the only way for large-scale enterprises to undergo informatization transformation. There are many failed cases and painful lessons. What problems did you encounter in the past, and how did you overcome them in the end?
Hu Bo: The baking industry is a labor-intensive industry. For such enterprises, the biggest key to information-based transformation is the acceptance of employees. In 2011, few people had heard of the concept of informatization. The cultural level of employees in labor-intensive enterprises was low, and it was difficult for him to understand the part beyond his cognition.
Out of a full understanding of the company's own characteristics, we have planned a small-step jogging change plan. Only the store cashier has planned four phases: from one store, to more than a dozen stores, to all stores, the whole process for more than a year. In the later stage of the factory production, this part is more difficult, because it involves many elements in the financial field, and it took more than a year to achieve normal operation.
However, during the three-year implementation process, we discovered many new problems: the industry is changing, the market is changing, and business logic is bound to change. Many things planned at the beginning can no longer adapt to the market environment three years later, so we immediately started to upgrade. iterate. At that time, I really realized that ERP is the IT implementation of enterprise business logic. There is no so-called "success" and "deadline", and there is no turning back. .
The truth of digital transformation lies in the field of science and technology: "cognitive ability of business" determines whether a technical manager can become a qualified technical decision-maker. Your own business, but also to understand industry trends and market changes, how do you digest such complex information?
Hu Bo: It may be determined by the characteristics of my position. I don't pay too much attention to technical details. Most of my attention is mainly on the business side, including the development and changes of the process and industry in the enterprise and even the overall economic situation.
Internally, I fully understand the cash register system of our store and the entire logistics process of the factory. I have experienced the simplest and most basic sorting process all night and all night. Only when I go to the field and work on my own can I truly understand the process comprehensively. At the same time, we know the problems and optimization points of each link, and then we can combine technology to propose solutions. Going deep into the front line and understanding the overall business and details at the same time is the basis for doing a good job in informatization and digitization.
Externally, it is necessary to visit a large number of peers, participate in exchanges inside and outside the industry, watch more and listen more. It can be said that I have a basic understanding of the business models of well-known baking companies in the country, and I will also capture the latest IT application cases outside the industry as soon as possible. .
From the initial technology response to business needs, to today, Weiduomei's IT department has been able to feed back the business and drive business innovation through technological innovation.
Driven by technological innovation: the goal must be clear, the trust must be accumulated to innovate against the epidemic, and the mini program mall should alleviate the impact of the epidemic. Tech-creators: This is a topic that many people are curious about, and many technical decision-makers are distressed by "I have a good technical solution" , but why is it so difficult to promote?" Can you share this kind of successful experience?
Hu Bo: The digital transformation of an enterprise is nothing more than two major goals and three promotion methods. The two major goals are open source and cost reduction, and the three promotion methods are business needs, top-level strategic needs, and active reform of technology departments. I believe everyone can feel that the most difficult way to promote is the third way, but as long as your plan can achieve the two goals of increasing open source and reducing expenditure, the most important job is to build consensus. You must not only have the ability to clearly and accurately explain the ultimate effect of technological change, explain the principle and mechanism, but also keep accumulating successful cases to convince everyone that what you are promoting is reliable.
As mentioned earlier, when Weiduomei had less than 200 stores, there were more than 70 people in the statistics department. After the ERP was launched, this department was downsized to 10 people. Now the number of stores has exceeded 300, and 10 colleagues are still doing this work; There is also sorting. We have built a sorting system with electronic labels, which saves half of the factory's sorting manpower... Saving money is an effect that is easy to see in the early stage of digital transformation, but open source is relatively complicated. Some, because open source itself means a whole new line of business, which cannot be done independently by the IT department and requires the full cooperation of the business department. For example, e-commerce, from the initial Tmall and JD.com, to self-built online stores, to private domain traffic pools, and recently added live e-commerce such as Douyin, these are all channels for IT to develop and innovate. Among them Some are also pits, but most of them can actually drive business growth, so technical decision makers cannot be overwhelmed by the possibility of failure, and should continue to explore more possibilities for business growth.
Kechuang people: The biggest negative variable encountered by the catering and retail industry in the past years of the epidemic, what technological innovations did Weduomei take to deal with the epidemic?
Hu Bo: Mini Program Mall. At first, when we were doing e-commerce, we built an official website mall for PC. Later, with the popularity of mobile terminals, we created H5 mobile terminal malls. However, after the emergence of the mini-program ecosystem, we believe that the entire e-commerce system must be changed to a small one. program to do it.
There are several reasons for deciding to build a mini-program store: first, the model of external e-commerce channels is rigid and the rules are relatively rigid. There are indeed many issues worth thinking about, so I won’t say more. For Weiduomei, the self-developed e-commerce system is more suitable for its own business model; secondly, the maturity of the private domain traffic model has made the WeChat ecosystem a A powerful incremental channel.
Because the layout started relatively early, about 80% of the mini program mall has been developed when the epidemic came. The team worked overtime and finally realized the "epidemic-featured" sales model of customers placing orders remotely and picking up goods at the store, which greatly offset the epidemic. the impact.
Never underestimate the difficulty of change when the self-service cashier system is hindered Which experiences have you drawn from them?
Hu Bo: We currently have a big project, the self-service cash register system. The objective fact is that in the supermarkets and convenience store industries in first-tier cities such as Beijing, the habit of self-checkout has obviously been realized, so the progress of this project is relatively slow, and the reason should be that we have encountered some problems that are not easy to solve.
The purpose of promoting the self-service cash register system is to improve efficiency and save labor costs. However, the baking industry is different from the supermarket and convenience store industries. It also has the attributes of the retail industry and the catering industry. The specific point is that many of our products are made on-site in the store. The products here do not have barcodes and cannot be scanned as easily as in supermarkets. code checkout.
The method we take is AI recognition. I saw this technology when I visited Taiwan in 2015. Since 2017, we have cooperated with domestic visual recognition companies, and iterated 10 generations of products, ranging from recognition rate to interaction mode. Iteration, now the recognition rate has increased from the initial 80% to more than 99%, and the interaction efficiency is also very convenient.
However, in 2018, we launched a self-service cash register system based on this technology, and the leading companies in the baking industry have followed suit. But now everyone except us has basically given up. I believe that consumers who are delicious are not only IT friends , may not know that we have such a convenient self-checkout mode in our store. This is a typical problem encountered in the process of technology-driven innovation. It is difficult for you to solve things other than technology. If the technology moves too fast, and there is a generational difference in information with the business side, the promotion will be hindered.
Sometimes we talk about transformation and change, but it is actually a revolution. To impact the interests of many people and to change many existing processes and models, the technical team needs to have the ability to explain and verify, and it also takes time, so deep changes are often long. process.
This project is currently only slowing down, not terminated. The benefits it can bring to the company are still relatively clear, but it just needs to wait for a more suitable time.
Not optimistic about the [Commercialization of Party A's Mature IT Solution] model Kechuang people: There is an obvious trend now that leading enterprises in the industry with a high degree of digitalization will export digital products and services to the industry. Does Weiduomei have such a plan?
Hu Bo: Frankly speaking, whether it is an actual case or a theoretical and logical deduction, I am not very optimistic about this model. The characteristics of this model are that it looks beautiful, but it is actually difficult to operate. Patterns, the more the surface, the more similar, the deeper the more different.
Let’s talk about the actual case first. Wumart’s multi-point management system is very good, but the sales volume of Wumart’s multi-point technology for product output is not good. Obviously, the problem is not that the products are immature; in the catering field, some leading brands are also doing similar. things, but the results are not good.
In the final analysis, everyone looks alike, but the underlying business details are very different. For example, in the baking industry, to summarize the mainstream operation mode of this industry, it is the words "front shop, back factory", but it really comes down to the details. They all work in completely different ways.
Aside from the model of the industry's leading companies doing their own output, we only talk about mature third-party service providers. In the process of landing large and medium-sized enterprises, they generally have to do three or four proportional two openings in order to successfully implement them. It is basically impossible to use the original standardized products directly, which is also a big minefield for To B services.
Taking the most popular private domain traffic services in recent years, the complete set of solutions and various tools provided by service providers have become less and less usable as supervision becomes stricter. We believe that benign development should not rely on services and tools with gray attributes. We can only continuously optimize the most suitable model according to our own business. , to accurately judge the core value of an event, we believe that McDonald's private domain operation is very successful, but in contrast, McDonald's investment in private domain operations is not all companies have the ability to achieve. Just saving some "dead groups" is still far from a successful private domain operation system.
In the future, we will still focus on channel change
The interview is coming to an end, and the topic turns to "new retail". How does the baking industry represented by Weiduomei respond to the new retail revolution? In Hu Bo's view, since the birth of the concept of "new retail", the industry's understanding of the nature of change has become more and more profound. On the one hand, it is a relatively violent but short-term marketing model, which does not have much long-term value. The method is worthy of reference”; on the other hand, the transformation of traditional channels and the birth of new channels require long-term attention and continuous attempts.
"Starting from the online store, Weduomei has never been afraid to try various new channels. Some new methods, such as smart stores, may not work well, but this is the price of exploration. The development of channels is too fast, and we can keenly capture some of them. , follow up immediately, some can only respond quickly and follow up after the rise of the new model, the most typical is the impact of live online shopping, which is completely unpredictable.”
In addition to constant changes, finding the quantification in the change cycle is also a key topic for Hu Bo to invest a lot of energy. "At present, private domain operation is a stable, long-term and effective method. Channels can be continuously expanded and changed, but private domain operations are not Pay attention to it, and the possibility of waiting for the company is to bid farewell to the stage in an instant.”
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