Suo Qiang, founder of Kechuang Wang Fanxin: The Chinese version of process mining is destined to have a completely different way of living

Suo Qiangwang Founder and CEO of Fanxin
Graduated with a master's degree from the University of Hannover in Germany, is the former head of process mining in the Asia-Pacific region of UiPath, an early member of ProcessGold, the first batch of process mining practitioners in the world, and has led the development and delivery of multiple process mining projects in more than ten countries on four continents .

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In July 2022, the process mining manufacturer Wangfanxin completed the A+ round of financing of over 100 million yuan, which is the fourth financing of Wangfanxin within one year after the first financing in July last year.
At the first moment when the conversation touched the business level of Wangfanxin, there was a strong sense of impact and an impressive interview experience.

Accidentally turned into process mining competition, and the second employee of process mining, Suo Qiang, became attached to process mining, which is a combination of coincidences:
If you don’t have the posters for studying abroad in Germany that you saw on the way back to the dormitory after the basketball game during your college days, and you find that “German universities do not charge tuition fees”, if you don’t succeed in the graduation rate of less than 20% of the computer science major at Hannover University, if you don’t get in During the internship, I found that I could not adapt to the atmosphere of a large German manufacturing company. If I did not know a German boss who studied at Tsinghua University and was able to speak Chinese well after joining Deloitte, if the boss was not the founder of Celonis, a popular process mining company in the world. Small... If you take a step away, you may not be able to hope for the birth of Fanxin.
Under the superposition of various opportunities, in 2016, Suo Qiang became the No. 2 employee of the Center of process bionic of Deloitte's process mining department (his boss was naturally No. 1), and inadvertently became a Chinese pioneer in the process mining industry. . At that time, his job content was to cooperate with Celonis in product development, algorithm, solution delivery and other scenarios, and he knew very well about the whole process of product development, trial and launch of Celonis - now, talents with this knowledge system make daily decisions. He would receive numerous headhunting calls, but in that year, Suo Qiang helped Celonis work hard for a year, but he had to face a bleak situation: one year, Deloitte CPB did not sign a single order.
This has to introduce the process of mining this very young industry:
In 1998, Professor Wil van der Aalst of Eindhoven University of Technology formed a group to study the possibility of "combining data mining technology with business process management", and proposed the first process mining algorithm in 2000; until 2009, Wil It was the first time that the concept of process mining (Process Mining) was proposed, which established the status of the "father of process mining". In 2011, Celonis was established. According to public reports, its revenue increased by 4,000% in the first four years, and won Siemens, For Fortune 500 companies such as ABB and Bayer, until Suo Qiang officially entered this field, it was difficult to find technical documents related to process mining on Google - it is a new industry.
The explosion occurred in 2017. Bosch purchased Celonis products for process management for the purpose of reducing costs and increasing efficiency, and achieved good results. After Siemens and Bosch, two absolute leading companies, verified the product value, Celonis and its representatives The process mining industry has ushered in its own explosive period. At this time, Suo Qiang has officially jumped from Deloitte to another process mining company, ProcessGold. Although he is not as famous as Celonis, he can still receive tons of tenders every day, and prospective buyers keep urging quotations.
The reason why he chose ProcessGold instead of joining Celonis directly stemmed from the technical cleanliness of the technician Suo Qiang. At that time, he thought that the Celonis software was very general, and ProcessGold was much more elegant - "a pure technical person's idea", 2022 Suo Qiang commented on himself back then.
Before joining ProcessGold, Suo Qiang had the idea of returning to China to start a business and introducing process mining into China. Therefore, he has always paid attention to the popularization trend of process mining in China, from unknown to leading companies to try out the water, and then to many The giants have shown great interest, and the time has come to 2019.
In addition to the maturity of the time, which finally led to Suo Qiang's determination to return to China to start a business, there is also a more direct fuse: In 2019, Suo Qiang led a team of more than 20 people to help a company optimize the production process. He was busy for a long time, but when he finally reported, he was led to an empty conference room.
"Because the content of this meeting may be classified, you cannot attend this meeting."
That's the reason, the only reason.
"Full of anger, I just have an idea in my head: go back to China and make it myself."
In 2019, ProcessGold was acquired by UiPath. In 2020, Suo Qiang returned to China as the head of process mining in the Asia-Pacific region of UiPath. After a few months, he resigned and officially embarked on the road of entrepreneurship.

The luxury team can't escape the pit of entrepreneurship, get financing and correct entrepreneurial mentality. Because he has the idea of starting a business, Suo Qiang is very attentively looking for potential entrepreneurial partners while working hard in the field of process mining. Wang Fanxin's core trio, CEO Suo Qiang, former head of UiPath Asia Pacific Process Mining and an early member of ProcessGold, has led the development and delivery of multiple process mining projects in more than a dozen countries on four continents; CTO Li Jinfeng, graduated from France He holds a doctorate in applied mathematics from the Technical University of Troyes and holds a number of invention patents around the world. Former technical director of IBM China Research Institute East China, head of IBM enterprise-level big data solutions; COO Yu Tianyu, graduated with a master's degree in macroeconomics from Brown University and a double master's degree in business administration from John Wales University, former SAP, Cisco Sales leader, procurement supply chain consultant. Suo Qiang is very confident in the talent composition of Wang Fanxin. During the interview, he also repeatedly emphasized that "the founding team of Wang Fanxin is not only the three of us", and he has the pride of taking the lead.
The talent pool is luxurious, but in terms of financing, a few people together cannot make up a complete entrepreneurial financing experience. Suo Qiang, who has almost no connections in China, can only use the most primitive mail bombing method to reach all the investment institutions he can search. However, three or four hundred emails were sent, and the number of replies was 0. "It was very painful at that time, and I suddenly found that I didn't know how to start a business, and I really realized how difficult the road I had to take."
After being unable to raise money for a long time, several partners have already put on the house certificate and are ready to fight to the death. In the end, the same plot of "My manager is the founder of Celonis" happened again: Suo Qiang was introduced by an acquaintance and joined the GGV GGV Capital startup training program to learn how to set up an equity structure and how to find investors... Not only did he gain a lot of necessary knowledge for starting a business, but one of his classmates also became a popular angel investor.
In addition to some detours in early financing, there are also many other challenges, big and small, such as a core team around 30 years old, a brand new track, "whether it really has the ability to create excellent products", becoming an early investor of Wangfanxin The most questioned question, Suo Qiang and CTO Li Jinfeng simply created a version of Demo, bypassing verbal and paper deductions with visible results, and quickly established in the capital market "Wangfanxin is a professional team of process mining. "image perception.
The origin of the name of Tips·Wang Fanxin The founding team initially drafted dozens of names that could not be registered. Suo Qiang's favorite name was "urbans", which means "when you are staring at the abyss, the abyss is also staring at you" . In the end, the daughter of CTO Li Jinfeng gave the name "Wang Fanxing", and just changing one letter has the meaning of "insight into the complicated information in the world".

Process mining in foreign countries: Picking bones in eggs Process mining with Chinese characteristics: Spelling eggs out of bones Tech-creators: What unique plans did Wang Fanxin make for the Chinese market in the start-up stage? Suo Qiang: There is no plan. It can be said that we are quite blind in the start-up stage. We only have experience in serving overseas customers. Therefore, at the beginning of the start-up stage, we planned to make a Chinese version of ProcessGold. As mentioned earlier, I think its technology is very good; after a period of time, I Realizing that ProcessGold didn't work for a reason, such as it's not easy to use, it's too professional, and at this point I thought we should make a Chinese version of Celonis.
So in the first half of the year, we only had developers, we didn’t need business, we didn’t have contact with customers, and we didn’t understand the needs of China’s localization. We just wanted to learn from others to make a process mining tool first. It was not until half a year later that we had contact with a lot of Chinese customers, and then we slowly formed some ideas for the Chinese market.
Kechuang people: Are there any impressions that impressed you after contacting the market, enough to influence Wangfanxin's development strategy? Suo Qiang: After six months to nine months, I found that I had to face up to the fact that what we are going to do cannot be said to be slightly different from ProcessGold and Celonis, but completely different, except that they are both called process mining. In addition, the core of the business and the problems to be solved are all very different. This is determined by the characteristics of the Chinese market and is also related to the management style of oriental culture. Process mining can be understood as the X-ray machine of an enterprise. It is a software that finds faults in the process of the enterprise. To use a common analogy, it is to pick the bones in the egg, and Wang Fanxin plays the role of a doctor. The overseas companies we have served, after a very long period of accumulation and years of polished management systems, often have mature enterprise operation systems that have been iteratively optimized for decades. However, Chinese enterprises often develop rapidly within a decade or two and lack the construction of a mature system. Serving foreign customers is nitpicking, "your process system is very sound, as long as you optimize these points, you can increase the efficiency by 1%"; while serving domestic customers, to put it bluntly, there are no eggs, but all bones.
To be honest, at one point I thought we were dealing with a completely wrong market, one with no process standardization. In the face of such a market, it becomes very suspicious to make an X-ray machine, but it is possible to produce a medical report, but the parameters in it are completely meaningless, because the data itself is not standard.
Kechuang people: In the face of such a subversive situation, how did the Wangfanxin team find the breaking point? Suo Qiang: We must return to the process to tap the essential value of this industry: to help companies benefit from correct and healthy process management. Wang Fanxin concluded that enterprise process construction requires roughly three stages: BPR process creation (process reengineering), BPM process sorting, and BPI process improvement. First, the enterprise process must be specified, and then the paper process must be implemented into the system software, such as OA approval. Process, the third stage is to use process mining or consulting services to optimize and iterate the set process. Foreign process mining products mainly focus on the third stage, which is the process improvement stage. The development path of Chinese enterprises is not like this. In the period of rapid development, enterprises often find a problem and establish a process, rather than building a complete process system first, which leads to the discovery of tens of thousands of processes after 10 years of development Running, no one can sort out the clues, and can only rely on data technology to sort out. Foreign customers are specialist doctors. Today, the procurement process will be changed, and the sales process will be optimized tomorrow. We must act as general practitioners to meet the needs of Chinese customers: using data to help companies shape complete business processes.
That is, to make an egg out of bones.

Under the hot scene, crisis-ridden strategic adjustment, delaying the creation of EMS
Kechuang people: Process mining is almost the first hot word in the data intelligence sector in the first half of 2022. In addition to a professional team with core process mining capabilities like Wang Fanxin, there are also upstream data-based capabilities extending from downstream RPA to process mining. Process mining, starting a new business and doing things across fields, and big factories that are moving in response to the wind... Under the scene of thousands of boats racing, is there such a subversive change in the underlying logic?
Suo Qiang: I firmly believe that what we observe is the objective fact. I think that there is serious misinformation in this industry, such as UiPath's acquisition of ProcessGold, because UiPath is in the limelight, people will habitually think its judgment is correct. The fact is that a company with a market value of 35 billion acquired a company with a valuation of 10 million euros. The correctness of this matter remains to be seen and debatable. UiPath is trying to make a bold attempt to link automation technology and process mining. Together, but based on what I have observed in my experience since 2016 and my post-M&A work experience, I think these are two very different things.
The popularity of this track is more like the market needs a sexy story. The premise of the healthy development of the process mining industry must be to solve real problems for real customers, rather than following the trend and imitating the dance steps of overseas companies. Facts have proved that our insights have won us more customers and more capital attention. It can be said that we have really found the needs of the Chinese market.
Kechuang people: In the face of such completely different market demands, how does Wangfanxin construct the next development strategy? Suo Qiang: In a nutshell, it is to use data technology to infer and help companies establish processes that are suitable for the company itself. To give a real example, a customer of an Internet giant has been developing for more than 20 years. In the past 20 years, new problems have been encountered and new processes have been established. Gradually, the boss found that the decree was out of the office, because many small processes were intertwined into one. The huge ball of twine blocked the execution system of the enterprise. The boss is very rational, and put forward the principle of "recycling two old processes for each new process", which is called "process garbage collection mechanism", but the problem comes, tens of thousands of processes are interdependent and entangled, you There is me and I have you. Even if the people below want to implement this mechanism, they don't know where to start. This is our most common customer scenario. First of all, we need to help the boss to describe clearly how the company is running at present, but this is not enough. The most important thing is to tell the boss how the company should run. It's a very big challenge, but sexy enough. In the past, Huawei may have to pay billions of dollars to invite the world's top consulting companies to do this. What we have to do is to replace people with data technology to achieve the same or better results.
For example, after we help enterprises complete process modeling, enterprise managers can directly delete and modify the process on the model, and the system will feedback its impact according to each action, so that enterprise managers can clearly and accurately optimize their own management processes, we It is called "giving enterprises the ability to self-consult".
Kechuang people: It is really sexy to twin a sandbox of enterprise management in the digital world and simulate the impact of process changes. There is a problem here. The western version of process mining emphasizes consistency detection, that is, whether the digital process is consistent with the offline process. One of the important values of traditional consulting company services is to benchmark against industry best practices. Let's call it the "enterprise process sandbox" product, what is the target? Suo Qiang: I don't think there is any external comparison sample. The manager knows his own situation best, and the optimization and adjustment will be based on his judgment criteria. In the Chinese market, companies often lack BPR, so there is no possibility of consistency detection, and there is no offline version of the process at all; if the enterprise is like this, it is generalized to various industries, so there is not so-called best practice.
But what China lacks most are outstanding entrepreneurs with innovative spirit. As long as they are provided with the ability, they will definitely be able to make the closest decision.
Kechuang people: Celonis created EMS (Execution Management System) after process mining products, which greatly expanded the market boundaries, but EMS seems to be a tool for BPI process optimization? So, will Wangfanxin follow the development path of Celonis?
Suo Qiang: No, we have adjusted the product development route. After the process of mining the product, we need to create a product that builds eggs. The EMS product has been temporarily pushed back to the third stage.
Core Strengths: Technology and Industry Insights Future Focus: Accumulation of Industry Databases Tech Makers: As a start-up company, where does Wang Fanxin decide to accumulate its core competitiveness and establish differentiation barriers?
Suo Qiang: The first is industry insights. I personally think that we have a leading position for two or three years.
The second is technical ability. Wang Fanxin has very clear technical requirements for process mining, and already has a deep enough technical accumulation. Leading technology capabilities can help us to continuously transform industry insights into product value, and through leading in market competition, attract more external resources and continuously improve the service capabilities of China's process mining industry.
Kechuang people: The success factors of Celonis clearly include technical strength and the accumulation of industry databases. Does Wangfanxin also have a formed plan in this regard?
Suo Qiang: Celonis' accumulation of industry databases is something we must learn from. It has proved that the accumulation of industry databases has huge market value. The cooperation model between Celonis and consulting companies is very successful. Wangfanxin has already started cooperation with consulting companies and started to accumulate industry data.
Kechuangren: There is still a certain gap in the maturity of Chinese market consulting services compared with Western markets. Will this gap affect the development speed of Wangfanxin?
Suo Qiang: I don't think so. Wang Fanxin believes that enterprise managers have self-consultation capabilities that they do not know. Wang Fanxin wants to help enterprise managers tap their potential. Although industry databases have reference value, for the leading enterprises in the industry, they are the best practices in the industry themselves and the objects to be imitated by others. It is precisely this kind of enterprise with large scale, complex processes and good data infrastructure that is process mining. The main customers of the industry. In the face of such customers, it may be enough to provide a handy tool.
We will not give up the construction of the industry database, nor will we bet on this point, and we will take multiple steps in parallel.
Kechuangren: You just talked about the customer portrait of process mining. For the western version of process mining products, large enterprises with complex processes and good data foundation are recognized as the main customers, but you plan to build eggs with bones. Is the new model more suitable for small and medium-sized enterprises with simpler processes?
Suo Qiang: Not exactly. Building eggs with bones also requires basic IT foundation, but making eggs with bones can further explore the market for process mining from large enterprises to medium-sized enterprises.