Written by Wu Kunyan

Edited by Wang Pan

From a distance, mountains look like ridges, but up close, they appear as peaks. Our observations of a thing from different perspectives are quite different, which means that the digitization of enterprise organizations is inevitably an art derived from practice.

According to iiMedia Research, in 2024, 77.21% of Chinese enterprise employees chose to use internal OA systems for 2-3 years or less. This shows that China has a large number of SMEs, and the digitization process to reach these SMEs has been slow, even for basic OA systems.

On the other hand, after three years of "black swan" events, the penetration rate of OA-based collaborative office tools in enterprise organizations has reached an unprecedented level. The biggest challenge for enterprise organizers in digital transformation has shifted from "why" to "how."

In fact, under the changing macroeconomic environment and the endogenous demand for operational efficiency improvements, SMEs do not lack the internal driving force for digital transformation. It's just that business owners often approach problems with a hammer looking for nails.

From the perspective of digital tool developers, it is difficult to adapt software and hardware development to local conditions. They can only roughly target the overall situation of a particular industry or business practices. In contrast, the perspective of SME organizers is like "peering through a straw."

Especially under the constraints of scale and capital, few people pay attention to these subsets of varying sizes. Today, this "silent majority" is being captured by DingTalk's low-code platform, Yida.

Without data, you don't even know when you're losing money

The global furniture industry looks to China, and China's furniture industry looks to Foshan.

Driving south along Foshan Avenue, the smell of different types of wood becomes increasingly intense, and Foshan Sheyi Home Furnishings is located in an inconspicuous corner near the street. Surrounded by old residential buildings that appear to be 20 years old, the randomly parked private cars in the alleys do not affect the factory's punctual start of work in the morning.

In China's most densely populated furniture industry cluster, such scenes seem ubiquitous. As of early 2024, Foshan's furniture industry output value exceeded one trillion yuan, with over 30,000 local enterprises. However, Cao Xiaoping, the owner of Sheyi Home Furnishings, has the confidence to quote a price of 500,000 yuan when peers seek to purchase internal digital systems, even though this system was pieced together by Cao Xiaoping himself on Yida.

He was once a member of Alibaba's renowned "Iron Army," well-versed in CRM entry, telemarketing visits, and the execution and evaluation of plans. With a digital mindset and internal drive, since founding his factory in 2016, Cao Xiaoping embarked on a journey to find digital tools for his factory.

"I have a digital mindset, and I should run my factory differently from traditional ones. They can't make money, but I should be able to," Cao Xiaoping never imagined that this would lead to years of frustration and dead ends.

Out of loyalty to Alibaba, Cao Xiaoping early on chose DingTalk as the foundation for digitization. However, soon after establishing the factory, the digitization of Sheyi Home Furnishings encountered resistance due to varying levels of personnel quality. Sales and clerical staff, at least with college diplomas, could use computers proficiently, but workers struggled to understand even basic concepts and could only punch in and out at the entrance.

A more significant obstacle lay in the information silos between different systems and the incompatibility of low-cost procurement systems with the furniture industry.

In the early stages, Sheyi Home Furnishings used Xiaoquan ERP within the DingTalk ecosystem, and data aggregation and transfer were handled using Shimo. However, this only covered Sheyi's role as a furniture sales company, lacking in areas such as customization, production scheduling, and other production management tasks. Additionally, cross-application data transfer often encountered issues such as forgotten or incorrect data entry by workers.

"In our industry, the only way for the boss to know if they're making money is to check their bank account balance because they have no data," said Cao Xiaoping.

Although Sheyi Home Furnishings' digital transformation pain points were apparent and had a clear direction, implementation fell short of expectations due to limitations in digital investment and the fragmentation of subsystems. Consider this: with only basic functions and an annual investment of around 10,000 yuan, how can software vendors afford to customize development?

Instead of blindly seeking loans to keep the factory running, it's better to build their own system piece by piece using the increasingly mature low-code technology of recent years. However, regardless of how low the barrier to entry for low-code may be, the underlying logic and potential for expansion cannot be hidden, requiring developers to have the ability to do secondary development to adapt to different processes and scenarios.

Before Yida, Cao Xiaoping had tried other low-code platforms, but found them lacking in developer guidance. "I didn't know how to use it, and when I asked customer service, I got no response," he said. In the end, it was on DingTalk that he obtained a low-code developer certification through online learning.

In practice, Cao Xiaoping encountered many problems. One that factory owners can all relate to is the influx of small-batch orders for the same product, which can lead to data flow issues at different stages.

For example, Sheyi Home Furnishings once received two orders for the same furniture made using the same mold, but one required six chairs, and the other eight, each with custom colors. Soon after production began, another order for three chairs of the same furniture came in, and data entry errors occurred. The order for six chairs became nine, the order for eight chairs became eleven, and the custom requirements conflicted and could not be linked.

"I keep my office door open now just to listen for any commotion outside. If someone complains about the system not working or making mistakes, I rush out to teach them hands-on and then optimize it in the background," said Cao Xiaoping.

Under the continuous improvement efforts of the boss, different applications born from "drag-and-drop" began to penetrate all aspects of Sheyi Home Furnishings' operations. In a sense, digitization is truly a "boss project."

Looking back, Cao Xiaoping recalls that he had no choice but to push forward under operational pressure. This approach also made Sheyi Home Furnishings one of the few furniture companies in Foshan where the owner knows whether they are making money on each order.

After unifying inventory management, production management, and internal OA on DingTalk and steadily advancing digitization, Sheyi Home Furnishings' annual revenue did not change significantly, but its profits tripled. In terms of production capacity, even though Sheyi is not a high-precision manufacturing company, it achieved flexible manufacturing that is typically only seen in the apparel industry, allowing for customized orders for even a single piece of furniture.

"I can build a system worth one million yuan without spending a dime," said Cao Xiaoping.

"As teachers, besides teaching well, we must continuously improve our professional skills. Promoting school digitization has become my hobby during my free time," said Teacher Qin Dagui, who spoke excitedly about digitization and pulled out a draft textbook from his briefcase. The pages were obviously well-thumbed, indicating frequent use. The textbook focused on current AI trends, including practical AI tools like DingTalk Memo and AI Assistant, and Qin was one of six co-authors.

Qin's "hobby" takes place at Qingyuan Vocational and Technical School in Guangdong Province (hereinafter referred to as Qingyuan Vocational School). As the deputy director of the school's equipment office, Qin teaches eight information technology classes per week. The rest of his time is spent figuring out how to better use DingTalk and AI.

With an aging workforce and rebellious students, managing a large school is as difficult as managing a medium-sized enterprise. Qingyuan Vocational School, with over 4,000 students and teachers, is no exception. More importantly, in terms of digitization, resource-constrained vocational schools lag behind many small and medium-sized enterprises, with traditional paper-based reporting methods still prevalent for scenarios such as student entry and exit, leave applications, teacher party building studies, and campus equipment management.

It wasn't until the "black swan" events of the past three years that free collaborative office software like DingTalk entered campuses through online classes, accelerating school digitization.

After online classes, digitization continued to spread top-down. While students vented their frustrations and gave DingTalk one-star reviews in app stores, teachers, liberated from cumbersome process reporting by OA, were already won over.

Especially at Qingyuan Vocational School, where resources are relatively scarce compared to the Pearl River Delta region, DingTalk's group chat, meeting rooms, cloud classrooms, documents, and knowledge bases quickly became part of teachers' workflows. By comparison, DingTalk had 200 million users in June 2019 and surpassed 700 million by the end of 2023.

Beyond basic OA, Qin also hoped DingTalk could do more. Initially, he used Yida to build a small app for student attendance and leave information reporting in just two days. Later, he leveraged DingTalk's openness to develop a certified internet access application based on DingTalk, allowing school staff to access the internet from any device at any time without the need to register MAC addresses.

However, what Qin is most proud of is an electronic information screen on the first floor of the teaching staff building. From information on borrowing and returning school property and equipment to detailed construction progress of Guangdong's high-level school construction projects, everything is displayed on this electronic screen for all school staff and students to view at any time.

"When we went to other provinces for exchange and learning, we saw such an information screen, and they invested millions just for that screen. But after researching, I found that I could build it on DingTalk with Yida. In the end, we basically only spent money on buying the screen," said Qin.

It's worth noting that while Guangdong is a well-known strong province nationwide, the 12 prefecture-level cities in its northern part, including Qingyuan, are still underdeveloped. As a "victim" of survivorship bias, Qingyuan Vocational School cannot afford to splurge millions on digital systems and supporting hardware like some urban schools they visited for exchange and learning. Low-code became the only economically viable option.

Qin's oft-repeated "DingTalk+" mindset emerged from this, which involves reconstructing every workflow within the school using DingTalk. This simple yet inclusive idea is actually a microcosm of the digital transformation of domestic enterprise organizations—integrating general-purpose tools into actual workflows through understanding and modification.

In his view, the annual fee for DingTalk's Professional Edition is only 9,800 yuan, which not only enables data visualization and builds an intuitive management decision support system but also provides ample cloud storage for teachers' lesson plans, student records, and other information, eliminating the need for expensive self-built data centers and servers.

With the advent of the AI era, Qin has added "AI+" to his "DingTalk+" mindset, giving rise to the aforementioned draft textbook. Teaching and educating students is a teacher's natural duty, and the spark of "inclusiveness" will continue to spread to more schools in China as Qingyuan Vocational School teachers share their experiences during exchanges.

Efficient chicken farming and egg production with "math"

What can a packaging box change?

For Chen Hui, Chairman of Haoniaotou Food (hereinafter referred to as Haoniaotou), the small packaging box behind his egg products represents a 40% cargo loss rate and a series of problems such as after-sales complaints and negative reviews.

On the one hand, economies of scale bring marginal cost savings and loss reduction, but on the other hand, any small change can have a ripple effect. Slight deformations in the long-used packaging materials during long-distance transportation can lead to significant losses due to changes in load-bearing capacity. Human experience and judgment are of little help here, and only near-full-process digitization can complete the review and attribution.

After several days of multi-dimensional investigation and attribution, Haoniaotou was able to test and optimize the packaging and box materials over the next month. This was all possible because Chen Hui had been using DingTalk's Yida as the foundation for digitization since 2021, gradually replacing native code applications with low-code development.

"Work during the day, code at night" was Chen Hui's reality before using Yida for digital system development.

At the turn of the millennium, Chen Hui, who had worked in software development in Zhuhai, returned to the countryside due to family responsibilities and took over his father's chicken farming business. However, this was no ordinary story of a son following in his father's footsteps. With his development experience, Chen Hui sought to digitize the family business from the start, writing code for management and using VB to create report analysis systems as part of this process.

According to Chen Hui, others raise chickens with "language," but Haoniaotou does it with "math." While native digitization helped Haoniaotou establish a foothold in the industry, it also brought more complex problems.

As is well known, developing processes with native code is cumbersome, involving steps from environment setup to data underlay to user interaction, all of which require painstaking effort line by line. The development cycle costs of solo projects and communication costs with third-party contractors remain high. Faced with less controllable chicken farm management, these hidden costs are also inadvertently amplified.

It's difficult for outsiders to fully grasp that digitization, for large-scale chicken farms, is akin to a "burden." Even slight changes in a chicken's daily feed intake can reflect underlying issues in henhouse management. For example, if feed intake gradually decreases from 115 grams to 90 grams over a few days, it may indicate that the chickens are losing their appetite due to illness, leading to cross-infection among henhouses and impacting egg production and quality for an extended period.

Could agile development and real-time expansion be achieved for multi-dimensional data collection and analysis? Chen Hui, who was initially experimenting with low-code development, leveraged his past development experience to create a financial approval process application for a medium-sized enterprise with nearly 200 employees in just half a day.

However, low-code platforms are not a silver bullet. Applications developed on different low-code platforms, like Haoniaotou's, which completed overall digitization in 2013, are separated by different system platforms.

As a leader in its niche market, Haoniaotou does not lack the capital to purchase third-party systems and data collectors. However, repeatedly entering the same data into different systems is akin to reinventing the wheel, and the tens of thousands of software purchase costs pale in comparison.

This is the fundamental reason why Chen Hui, as a developer, led Haoniaotou to choose DingTalk as the foundation for digitization during their incremental progress. Yida's API interfaces are integrated with seven major e-commerce platforms and Kingdee, enabling fully automated order processing with just three people handling a monthly sales volume of 15 million yuan.

Digitization is never achieved overnight. Over the years, Haoniaotou has completed the digitization of over 90% of its processes, and internal management is not allowed to rely on verbal or paper communication. Data is entered into the system where it occurs.

Today, Haoniaotou is the top merchant in the egg category on Douyin and ranks high on Taobao and Xiaohongshu.

Looking back on 20 years of digitization, Chen Hui couldn't help but remark, "Digitization is like installing a dashboard on your production, operations, management, and finance sectors. Otherwise, it's like driving blindfolded."

Digitalization must 'sink'

Through the aforementioned cases and details, we can perceive the critical role that practical entrepreneurs play in the top-down process of digitalization.

Cao Xiaoping, the owner of Sheyi Home, has completed his transformation from a self-taught developer to a successful factory owner with sheer determination and courage; Qin, the director of a vocational school in Qingyuan City, provided us with a model of digital management for a scale of 4,000 people; Chen Hui, the chairman of Haoniantou, discovered multiple dimensions of data collection in uncontrollable situations and demonstrated the transformation practices from a developer's perspective.

As a low-code platform with inclusiveness, scalability, and integrity, Yida's role in the aforementioned enterprises' digital transformation cannot be overlooked.

Low-code is not a silver bullet. Essentially, it is just a low-threshold, standardized, and generalized development approach. Unbeknownst to many, DingTalk has entered its fourth year of promoting low-code. Its economic viability, rapid adaptability, and openness to ecosystem interfaces are hallmarks of DingTalk's phased evolution.

PaaS, which was once 'desensitized' in the industry, is not simply 'integrated'; nor is it a vast ecosystem built alongside DingTalk's growth. Rather, it represents the delegation of development rights, enabling SMEs to embark on their digital practices at low costs.

For DingTalk, the encouraging shift we observe from the aforementioned cases is that it is no longer confined to the developer ecosystem but is instead casting a wider net towards the user ecosystem. After all, what SMEs and organizations truly need may not be 'out-of-the-box' solutions but rather 'ready-to-configure' ones that can genuinely propel their digital transformation forward.