Whether a society is fully digitized does not depend on its longest plank (i.e., large institutions, government and enterprise users, etc.), but on its shortest plank (grassroots organizations). The popularity of DingTalk will solve the problem of digital construction for a large number of grassroots organizations in China, and DingTalk will become a catalyst for the growth of grassroots digital cells in China.

——Introduction

01

I want to use digital capabilities to earn money that others cannot earn

“If I were given another chance to turn back time, I might not choose to start a factory again because it’s just too complicated and exhausting. It’s much more complex than when I was in sales before,” said Cao Xiaoping, founder of Foshan Sheyi Space Furniture Factory, half-jokingly.

His office, or more accurately, a desk, is located on the second floor of a residential building, with the furniture production line on the first floor. As a result, the air here is filled with the smell of leather, sawdust, and glue, along with deafening tool operation noises.

Cao Xiaoping has mixed feelings about this business. He loves it because it has fulfilled part of his life’s dream – before 2016, Cao Xiaoping was a salesperson at Alibaba, where he interacted with many foreign trade products daily. “Looking at those beautiful products and furniture, I felt an impulse to be the one who creates them, not just assists in their sales,” said Cao Xiaoping, explaining his entrepreneurial aspiration.

Unlike many fellow manufacturers who started from scratch, Cao Xiaoping believes he has a deep understanding of the concept of “IT systems,” which he sees as an advantage in his entrepreneurship. “Many people advised me against starting a factory, but I was skeptical. I told them I would use digital thinking and systems to manage the factory’s risks and costs effectively. With my understanding of digitization, I would run the factory differently from traditional ones. Even if others can’t make money, I can,” he said confidently.

However, Cao Xiaoping soon realized he had overestimated himself: “Later, I found that not only me but also 80% of small business owners couldn’t tell if they were making a profit or a loss, even in my factory or similar-sized ones. This is the truth.”

“The only reference we have is the balance in our bank accounts, but even if it’s positive, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re making money or how much. Our costs are scattered across numerous details, including procurement, production, worker and employee performance bonuses, inventory, promotions, etc. We lack a real-time, user-friendly tool to aggregate these dispersed data, so we have a vague grasp of our factory’s financial health,” Cao Xiaoping explained.

Many entrepreneurs among China’s 52 million micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) share similar sentiments with Cao Xiaoping, especially those with experience in large companies or institutions. However, they often overlook the fact that their smooth use of IT systems in the past was often based on large corporate work experiences. Behind a mature business system lies the company’s long-term investment in software procurement, service consulting, data collection, and personnel training. For MSMEs, there is a severe shortage of software product options, data collection tools, and trained personnel.

Cao Xiaoping soon realized that his Alibaba experience was limited. As a salesperson, he used CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems, but a manufacturing enterprise requires ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) or EBC (Enterprise Business Capability, an upgraded concept of ERP), which are significantly more complex and lacking in good products and services for SMEs.

Initially, he used a traditional SME management software developed by a company claiming to specialize in SME software, but it failed to meet his data aggregation and process management needs. The employee training was also overly complex and outdated.

Cao Xiaoping soon abandoned this system and switched to a SaaS system on a subscription basis, a light ERP tailored for MSMEs, combined with shared document tools.

After using this system for another year, Cao Xiaoping remained disappointed as it still fell short of his desired real-time grasp of the company’s status and data. The data across various processes could not be automatically connected and aggregated, and the software developer explicitly stated that customized versions for individual enterprises were not possible.

Cao Xiaoping found himself in a painful cycle: for the vast but individually low-value MSME market, there was no readily available, excellent management software. Due to their limited payment capabilities, these enterprises struggled to afford customization, leading to dissatisfaction on both sides.

As a last resort, Cao Xiaoping decided to build his system himself. He heard that DingTalk’s Yida low-code tool allowed self-implementation with minimal training, so he enrolled in Yida’s beginner training.

“The beginner training for Yida was simple and effective, completed in four video lessons. But I wanted to learn more, so I immediately enrolled in the intermediate training, which covered data correlation and system logic, precisely what Cao Xiaoping needed. I was so engrossed that I didn’t even have time to submit my intermediate training assignment because I realized the best assignment was the practical application I had built for my enterprise using Yida,” he said proudly.

Determined, he abandoned the ERP system he had been using for over a year. “Fortunately, our company only has a dozen office staff, but even so, it involves massive data re-entry. To encourage employees to switch to the new system, I forcibly stopped the old one,” he said.

As Cao Xiaoping delved deeper into mastering Yida, he became obsessed. Although supported by Yida’s customer service and provided with various materials and examples, it was still challenging to develop a system tailored to his factory’s needs.

The challenge lay not in implementing specific functions, as simple drag-and-drop operations sufficed. “The real challenge was for the business owner to comprehend the entire logical loop,” Cao Xiaoping explained. “During that time, I thought about it day and night. Sometimes, while eating or drinking, I would suddenly stop to ponder and then ask employees next door if we could simplify a three-layer logic into a two-layer one. This state persisted until our system was initially mature.”

By any standard, this system was rudimentary, but it addressed Cao Xiaoping’s core fear – that his business would suddenly collapse. DingTalk helped him achieve his initial goal of real-time data-driven understanding of his enterprise’s operations.

Reflecting on his DingTalk application development journey, Cao Xiaoping summarized his experience as “one avoidance, one overcome, and one expectation.”

One avoidance was preventing the sudden demise of his enterprise. In his industry, many businesses “suddenly disappear.” Fundamentally, this happens because owners cannot effectively aggregate data to manage their finances. “I was terrified, so I decided to implement a system from the start to avoid blindly rushing ahead and ensure I knew what I was doing,” Cao Xiaoping said. “In reality, DingTalk, or more specifically, Yida, solved this problem by enabling full-process digitization at a very low cost – around RMB 20,000 annually, much cheaper than any system I’d used before.”

Beyond avoiding blind rushes, Cao Xiaoping hoped to overcome the temptation of “thinking you’ve found the right path but not realizing the next step is a cliff,” which required overcoming the impulse brought by large orders.

Like many startups, new orders are lifelines, and large orders are irresistible temptations. Early on, Cao Xiaoping couldn’t resist the lure of hundreds or even thousands of orders, even if the prices were low. “I thought big orders allowed for price concessions, and we could save costs without compromising quality, generating profits,” he said.

However, after implementing the system, he realized the cost calculations for large orders differed significantly from small ones. Large orders often involve price pressure, quality maintenance, longer wait times due to coordination with other furniture factories, potential hidden costs of inventory and backorders, and stringent inspections that wasted time. “When my DingTalk-based system was fully developed, I realized that clear cost estimation, not blind pursuit of scale, determines an enterprise’s survival. I’m grateful to DingTalk for helping me fulfill my initial aspiration nearly a decade into my entrepreneurship – using digital systems for management to earn money that others can’t,” he said gratefully.

Regarding DingTalk’s future empowerment direction, Cao Xiaoping had a clear expectation: “I hope to integrate AI capabilities soon. While Yida’s initial automated data collection functions are promising, they’re still far from my expectations.”

Cao Xiaoping envisioned full-process automation where customers could simply drop an image into a chat window, and the system would identify the product, assess feasibility, cost structure, and respond immediately. “I’m not sure if this is generative AI in the broader sense, but it’s the AI I want. I believe only DingTalk can best empower me with AI capabilities because our entire process and applications are built on DingTalk, making intelligent upgrades from this angle most efficient and logical,” he said confidently.

02

RMB 20,000, 4,000 Students, and DingTalk

China has over 10,000 secondary and higher vocational schools, among which Qingyuan Vocational and Technical School, with over 4,000 students, is an ordinary yet special member.

Its special status stems from being designated as a “Benchmark School for Teaching Quality and Teaching Reform in Vocational Education in Guangdong Province” and the only selected vocational school in Guangdong’s relatively economically underdeveloped regions.

Within this school lies another special individual, Qin Dagui, affectionately called “Gui Ge” (or “Precious Brother”) by teachers due to his energetic and responsible nature.

In Qin Dagui’s view, the moment he encountered DingTalk, certain things were destined to change.

Like many schools, Qingyuan Vocational and Technical School began using DingTalk in 2019 for standardized needs like attendance and OA approval. However, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, DingTalk’s importance soared, becoming the primary tool for online classes. Through live streaming, it successfully ensured “classes without stopping” and protected students’ learning.

Qin Dagui played a pivotal role in this transition, serving as both the project leader for Guangdong’s only benchmark construction project for vocational informationization in the eastern, western, and northern regions and an avid DingTalk enthusiast.

Unlike many schools that reverted to normalcy post-pandemic, Qin Dagui was determined to continue harnessing DingTalk’s potential, which was closely tied to his role as the informationization construction project leader. On one hand, he managed substantial IT infrastructure, including a 2Gbps total network export bandwidth, wireless network coverage across the school, 2,670 desktop computers, and smart boards in every classroom.

On the other hand, the school’s location in an economically underdeveloped area limited its informationization budget. With limited funds, the challenge was to cost-effectively build a smart campus.

From a cost perspective, Qin Dagui believed DingTalk offered an affordable price. He only needed to pay an annual subscription fee of RMB 9,800 for DingTalk’s Professional Edition and RMB 10,000 for cloud storage. Although modest, this reflected teachers’ growing familiarity and frequent use of DingTalk.

Efficiency-wise, Qin Dagui differed from many school informationization construction leaders we’ve encountered. Most, even excellent ones, focused on migrating conventional teaching and administrative management tasks online using DingTalk. Qin Dagui, on the other hand, belonged to the 1% with a forward-thinking approach. He aimed to leverage DingTalk’s potential to automate repetitive, low-level tasks, reducing administrative burdens on staff and allowing teachers to concentrate on core educational work.

He summarized this direction as “DingTalk+,” where everything could be DingTalk-enabled. Leveraging DingTalk’s robust digital foundation, user insights and products, and the user-friendly Yida low-code tool, virtually any function became achievable.

In implementation, Qin Dagui had a clear sense of direction. First, he capitalized on DingTalk’s openness, integrating previously procured applications like Modian Campus, Chaoxing Education Administration, Cloud Party Building, and Library Book Borrowing System into DingTalk, enabling data interoperability and process automation, thereby maximizing previous IT investments.

Secondly, Qin Dagui conducted an in-depth study of DingTalk's free features. Based solely on these, he discovered and leveraged these basic, free functions to implement seven functional modules, including the organizational framework for a digital school, facilitating teacher-student communication and live broadcasts, OA, and an AI knowledge base. It can be said that he has fully exploited DingTalk's free features. He candidly admitted, "In terms of free features, DingTalk, as the foundation, has essentially covered most of the demands for a school's information technology construction, achieving great wisdom with minimal cost."

Finally, for demands that were not met by previously procured systems or readily available free features, Qin Dagui leveraged his perseverance and made full use of DingTalk's Yida low-code platform. Through a graphical interface and preset templates, he quickly built a series of custom applications tailored to the specific needs of Qingyuan Vocational School, including a campus data display platform, teaching supervision, work dashboards, a recruitment platform, DingTalk-authenticated internet access, venue inspections, and venue logs. These significantly enhanced the school's information technology level and management efficiency.

Now, this campus display panel, which rivals those of many large enterprises and institutions in functionality, yet was developed using DingTalk's Yida low-code platform for an annual fee of just 9,800 yuan, is prominently displayed in the main lobby of the Qingyuan Vocational School's Inspiring Building, refreshing data continuously.

In just three years, Qin Dagui, leveraging DingTalk's platform and Yida's capabilities, independently developed 17 educational and teaching network applications for the school's information technology construction. These applications cover various aspects of teaching management, significantly elevating the school's information technology level. Among them, two applications, including the "DingTalk-based Recruitment System," received two national computer software copyright patents.

Throughout this process, Qin Dagui was not alone. He also cultivated a group of technically proficient and innovative talents within the school, a new generation of "DingTalk enthusiasts," laying a solid foundation for future development.

"Currently, the DingTalk+ model has achieved phased success, and my next focus is on AI+", said Qin Dagui. "As of December 31, 2023, DingTalk has accumulated 7,997,331 data entries and 1,008 data items, providing valuable data support for school decision-making and sustainable development. I believe these will also serve as the data foundation for our future AI+ initiatives."

In fact, efforts to deeply integrate AI into daily teaching and management have already begun. Qin Dagui's various application-level AI features have been compiled into a comprehensive textbook Upcoming publication . In practice, by integrating with Alibaba's Tongyi large model, DingTalk's platform at Qingyuan Vocational School is poised to evolve into a smart education hub, with real-time intelligent Q&A systems, intelligent creation tools, and personalized AI assistants already in widespread use.

Contrary to popular belief that older individuals learn new technologies slower, 100% of Qingyuan Vocational School's management team uses DingTalk. On the day of our visit, Xiao Guanghui, the school's Party Secretary, demonstrated how DingTalk, empowered by AI, supports rural revitalization efforts in conjunction with the school's Party building work. He personally presented a song titled "Song of Rural Revitalization," with lyrics penned by himself and music composed using DingTalk's intelligent creation tool. This underscores the advanced level of information technology and smart tool adoption among Qingyuan Vocational School's management team.

DingTalk, with most of its functionalities available for free and providing rich features to over 4,000 teachers and students for an annual fee of just 20,000 yuan, underpins the digital future of this vocational school in an economically underdeveloped region. Such a miracle could only happen in China.

Now renowned for his expertise in information technology construction and AI applications, Qin Dagui has been invited to share his experiences with schools such as Guangxi Daxin County Vocational and Technical School, Hunan Miluo Vocational and Technical Secondary School, and Dongguan Electromechanical Engineering School. He has also conducted specialized AI empowerment lectures for schools like Liannan Vocational and Technical School, Qingyuan Boai School, and Qingyuan Vocational Education and Adult Education Association.

"Sometimes when I meet with IT construction leaders from other institutions and companies, I often want to tell them that with DingTalk, their problems might be solved for just tens of thousands of yuan, when I learn that their IT investments often reach millions or even tens of millions," Qin Dagui joked.

In fact, Qingyuan Vocational School is but a microcosm. Currently, there are over 10,000 vocational schools nationwide, with 28.5718 million enrolled students. Secondary vocational enrollment stands at 6.0037 million, accounting for 41.70% of high school education. Most of these schools should draw inspiration and comparisons from Qingyuan Vocational School's digital inclusivity example.

03

A Programmer's Chicken Farming Life

After taking over his father's chicken farm, Chen Hui still spends five hours a day programming, perhaps believing deep down that he is, at heart, still a programmer.

The Anhui Xinlian Poultry Industry, which he inherited from his father, was established in 1982 and originally specialized in layer breeding. Through the "transformation and upgrade" of Chen Hui, the second-generation owner, they launched their to-consumer business in April 2023 with the "Good Idea" brand of eggs sold online. In just three months, they became the top seller in the egg category on Douyin and Xiaohongshu, while also ranking among the top on Taobao platforms, selling a cumulative total of 2 billion eggs.

Chen Hui recalls that this success is attributed to his strong digital mindset. From the first day he took over, he pondered how to manage the chicken farm digitally.

Before DingTalk, they tried developing a feed tower system to predict potential diseases in chickens based on feeding and consumption patterns.

However, like any traditional system, these faced issues such as high development costs, siloed information, and difficulty in data integration, until DingTalk emerged.

As a seasoned programmer, Chen Hui has profound insights into programming and using low-code tools: "Programming isn't exactly difficult, but it's far from easy. With programming experience, using low-code tools like Yida is like driving a car after driving a truck – it's effortless and easy to master, even for those without programming experience."

For Chen Hui, DingTalk's adoption has at least three significant implications:

It reduces the sunk costs of pre-DingTalk era subsystems, which can now be integrated into the DingTalk platform and interconnected;

As a seasoned programmer familiar with traditional coding, Chen Hui's appreciation and praise for DingTalk's Yida platform are backed by professional expertise and practical experience, making it incredibly easy to use;

The overall budget for DingTalk is lower than the combined cost of any standalone subsystems built previously;

Against this backdrop, Chen Hui made a bold decision – before 2021, the company relied on in-house and third-party systems for digital management. Starting in 2021, they began using DingTalk's Yida to build various business applications and eventually replaced all third-party systems with Yida.

Unlike the stories of Cao Xiaoping and Qin Dagui, Chen Hui's company had a more established in-house system, making the decision to abandon it more costly.

To motivate employees to overcome their reliance on old systems, Chen Hui demonstrated how to build a financial approval process on Yida, completing it in just half a day – much faster than their previous in-house or third-party systems.

However, Chen Hui soon realized that such demonstrations were insufficient. Employees lacked sufficient time to develop a habit of working digitally across the entire organization. Changing this work habit wasn't just about switching systems, especially in a company of nearly 200 people.

After much contemplation, Chen Hui came up with the humorous slogan "Paperless Chicken Farming" and issued a mandate to his employees: internal management must be done exclusively through DingTalk, eliminating oral and paper-based communication. Data must be entered directly into the system where it originates, even if it's just a sentence or a number.

Under this pressure, Xinlian Poultry fully adopted DingTalk's Yida platform, replacing other third-party digital systems. Leveraging Yida's convenient development capabilities, the company achieved a 90% digitization rate, covering the entire chain from chicken production to sales, significantly improving operational efficiency and data accuracy.

Against the backdrop of comprehensive digitization, Chen Hui made a pivotal decision to shift from purely B2B to a dual B2B and B2C strategy, leveraging e-commerce to sell their core product – eggs – online through B2C e-commerce channels.

Xinlian had previously dabbled in e-commerce without much success. Chen Hui attributed this to a lack of e-commerce expertise within the company, forcing them to rely on manual processes like assigning dedicated staff to handle orders and invoices, exporting and aggregating data across multiple interfaces, resulting in lengthy and complex workflows that undermined the convenience of e-commerce and added intangible costs.

Chen Hui's solution was to integrate Yida's API with seven major e-commerce platforms and Kingdee's system, automating order processing. This allowed just three people to handle monthly sales of 15 million yuan.

As a result, Chen Hui ventured into new territories uncharted by his father's generation. His egg business became the top seller in the egg category on Douyin and ranked highly on Taobao and Xiaohongshu platforms, expanding into offline community group buying. This traditional poultry farming enterprise is undergoing a strategic transformation from traditional breeding to a food company and from a traditional industry to a new consumer brand.

Regarding future visions, Chen Hui shares a striking similarity with Cao Xiaoping. He also aims to develop a real-time profit analysis system using Yida, but with a greater focus on monitoring profits across live streaming, influencer marketing, and shelf e-commerce channels, optimizing operations around profitability. He plans to integrate RPA (Robotic Process Automation) into Yida-built systems to calculate daily profit, sales, and conversion metrics.

This highlights two key points:

Firstly, understanding "where the money goes" is a critical need for all business owners, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises with insufficient digital capabilities. Secondly, impressively, all practitioners who have encountered and become familiar with Yida believe in its ability to build real-time profit analysis systems, demonstrating Yida's powerful capabilities. Thirdly, combining DingTalk's foundational capabilities with Yida's low barrier to entry, DingTalk is increasingly becoming a universally accessible and national digital system construction and operation tool, setting a clear path for businesses to evolve from partial to comprehensive digitization and ultimately towards intelligence.

04

Conclusion

Currently, new-quality productivity has become a particularly important topic as it essentially represents the answer to China's future prospects.

From a consumer perspective, China has nearly 1.1 billion internet users, indicating that the society is poised for widespread digitization. However, for a vast array of small and medium-sized organizations, how to digitize faster and better remains a significant challenge.

Individual-level digitization is nearing its ceiling, while organizational-level digitization, while lacking precise global data, is likely to face significant challenges due to regional economic disparities.

For instance, China has over 52 million small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). According to third-party data, the vast majority (98.8%) have embarked on digital transformation, with only a minority (1.2%) yet to do so.

However, a deeper dive reveals that 62.6% of SMEs are still in the early stages of digitization, while only 3.2% have achieved a relatively high level of digitization driven by intelligence.

For these numerous foundational organizations, it is conceivable that their level of digitization will vary significantly based on their geographical location and the economic development of their regions.

In this field study of DingTalk, we selected Luxe Furniture, a small and micro-enterprise in the midst of digital construction, Qingyuan Vocational School in an economically underdeveloped region, and Xinlian Poultry, a well-established enterprise with a solid digital foundation in an economically developed area. Our goal was to gain insights into the diverse profiles of social organizations undergoing digital construction across different regions and levels of development. The findings largely confirmed our hypothesis of significant variations.

Yet, there are also encouraging news.

For instance, we discovered that DingTalk has emerged as the minimal unit for digital transformation and system establishment for most individuals, organizations, and institutions, with remarkable results.

Notably, during our extensive field research, we found that digitization (DingTalk adoption) in small organizations is often driven by a single individual, who can propel the entire organization's digital transformation. These individuals embody the concept of "super-individuals."

DingTalk's low-code tool, Yida, has proven to be the most user-friendly assistant for grassroots digital system builders, truly embodying the idea that "giving a man a fish feeds him for a day, but teaching him how to fish feeds him for a lifetime." As evidence, the number of applications built on DingTalk's Yida low-code platform has surpassed 10 million, with 100,000 already transitioning towards AI applications.

DingTalk's pricing structure and efforts to lower barriers fully demonstrate its inclusive nature. More importantly, DingTalk serves as a bridge for most grassroots organizations to cross from the mobile internet era into the AI era.

A society's level of digitization is not determined by its strongest link (i.e., large institutions and government enterprises) but by its weakest link (grassroots organizations). DingTalk's prevalence will address the digitization challenges faced by a vast number of grassroots organizations in China, acting as a catalyst for the growth of digital grassroots cells.

While DingTalk is not perfect, it is one of the best answers to the questions of digitizing China and fostering new-quality productivity. Its value in promoting technological inclusivity and equality among small and medium-sized organizations is particularly prominent.

Long hindered by various constraints, the informatization construction of grassroots organizations now seems to have found its optimal solution in DingTalk, a platform with inclusive features suitable for most organizations to build their own systems, thus holding immense development potential. DingTalk's value lies not merely in the fees it generates but in transforming the digitization of countless grassroots cells into reality, thereby enhancing data transmission across the social system and boosting societal efficiency.

—END—