A few years ago, Seeyon officially began its transformation from a product company to a platform company, determined to enhance the value of its platform. Outsiders are curious about what role Seeyon intends to play and what value it aims to provide in the digital and intelligent transformation of enterprises.

As Seeyon's annual grand event, the 14th Collaborative Management Forum and User Conference was held recently. This year's conference featured two highlights:

Firstly, the unified AI-COP platform foundation was introduced, upon which five new products targeting different customer segments were launched, emphasizing tiered customer management and core value. All products, based on a unified collaborative operation management philosophy, jointly uphold Seeyon's mission of "achieving excellence in organizations."

Secondly, through the platform co-creation model, Seeyon has established more practical product-level collaborations with major players such as Huawei, DingTalk, Baidu, and China Unicom, accelerating the release of platform value.

As enterprises delve deeper into digitalization, their needs have evolved beyond individual business functions. They now seek to unleash overall potential and make new productivity an intrinsic driving force within the organization.

By constructing an integrated, digital, and information-driven operation foundation, Seeyon is providing enterprises with robust support for collaborative operations. It offers a unified platform while enabling users to grow their own applications, playing a central role in digital transformation and multiplying the effectiveness of other business systems.

As a pioneer and continuous leader in collaborative operation management, Seeyon's AI-COP digital collaborative operation platform has officially entered a period of capacity release, scale replication, and implementation after five years of intensive investment since its launch.

01

What signals are conveyed behind the "1+5" platform and new products?

As a veteran in collaborative management, Seeyon has established two major technology platforms: the mature V5 platform and the heavily invested cloud-native, microservices-based V8 platform. Both platforms have been unified as the AI-COP platform foundation this year. At the Collaborative Management Forum and User Conference, Seeyon significantly upgraded its product line based on the AI-COP platform and launched five major products.

Firstly, the AI-COP | A9 Navigator Edition targets large and very large organizations, offering an integrated, digital, and information-driven comprehensive office platform and solutions to meet the governance needs of large organizations.

Currently, the A9 Navigator Edition has accumulated numerous customer case studies, such as China Oceanwide Holdings, which established a unified, multi-tenant group governance process operation and control model across five listed companies. SF Express built a group-level boundaryless collaborative information platform based on A9, efficiently handling high-performance processes for over 700,000 employees and more than 40,000 organizations.

Secondly, the AI-COP | A8 Voyager Edition targets medium to large organizations, integrating office operations, flexible customization, and lean management to facilitate efficient operations.

These mid-to-high-end customers demand highly integrated and intelligent products that enable rapid business response and efficient operations. For example, they emphasize embedding intelligent applications into traditional business processes, leveraging the unified technology platform foundation and robust low-code customization capabilities to enable users and partners to build applications on the platform independently.

Thirdly, the AI-COP | A6 Starter Edition targets small and medium-sized organizations, offering a one-stop collaborative office and business management application that supports agile operations through mobile office, application selection, and out-of-the-box functionality. The A6 Starter Edition introduces a dedicated channel product with five core capabilities, a new workbench, and lightweight collaborative applications for easy sales by business partners.

Fourthly, the AI-COP | G9 Integrated Smart Government Platform targets medium to large government organizations. With its IRS core, G9 enables full-loop digital production, management, and operation. Coupled with the integrated Seeyon-Ding collaborative platform, G9 ensures online reform results, visible innovation outcomes, and standardized application standards, providing smart services for government organizations.

The platform addresses two core issues: firstly, the manageability, controllability, and sustainability of government digital resources; secondly, the rapid implementation of systematic construction through standardized means based on national policy guidelines.

In addition to the four major product lines, Seeyon officially launched its independent AI-native application, iForm™ Form Intelligence. Incubated by Seeyon, iForm™ provides AI-powered forms for organizations, offering greater intelligence, convenience, and cost-effectiveness.

iForm™ Form Intelligence is primarily used for information collection scenarios such as surveys, data gathering, assessments, appointments, registrations, and voting. For example, when an enterprise uploads a product document or private knowledge to iForm™, it automatically generates a questionnaire or exam, reducing the burden of question creation and data collection.

"Behind the product tiering lies a focus and trade-offs: firstly, to more efficiently align with our target customers; secondly, to more precisely and effectively hone our platform and product capabilities," Jiang Shuge, Senior Vice President of Seeyon, told Digital Frontline, highlighting one of the core reasons for Seeyon's product line revamp.

The new product launches are an extension of Seeyon's corporate development strategy. In recent years, Seeyon has deepened its customer-centric and industry-focused operations, meeting customer needs while enabling digital self-growth and solving industry challenges. However, each industry has its unique characteristics, necessitating a nuanced approach to industry-specific application development, which lies at the heart of industry-focused operations.

In reality, selecting software products involves a complex matching process. Large companies may adopt smaller products, while small companies may opt for more complex ones. This underscores the importance of trade-offs in product design, especially in the B2B space, where no single product can satisfy all customer needs.

While Seeyon's products are generally industry-agnostic, the diverse customer segments pose varying requirements.

For instance, large state-owned enterprises often have multiple listed subsidiaries. From an operational perspective, the group requires unified construction and cross-business operations, such as circulating notifications and official documents across the entire group. However, the listed subsidiaries, due to compliance considerations, require relatively independent IT environments, including data segregation.

This complexity is unimaginable for other small and medium-sized enterprises, necessitating that platform providers consider the needs of different customer segments from the outset in technology selection and development.

Furthermore, a precise customer focus facilitates targeted research and development to address customer needs. For example, A9 Navigator Edition customers boast substantial scale and market prominence, demanding high IT capabilities. Beyond cloud-native and microservices, they often require granular microservices tailored to business development needs, necessitating dynamic resource allocation and operational support across multiple business functions.

Therefore, Seeyon's five-product layout effectively guides its alignment with customer needs and proactively matches product value with customer demands in the current business environment.

02

The secret to customer digital success lies in collaborative operations

In the past, Seeyon was often perceived as an OA product company. While OA demand persists, its growth potential is limited. OA, as a rigid software product, serves a wide range of organizations from Fortune 500 companies to small and medium-sized enterprises with fewer than 50 employees. However, this characteristic falls short of meeting enterprises' needs for continuous operations, system integration, and self-growth. Notably, medium to large enterprises exhibit a stronger demand for collaborative operations.

A few years ago, Seeyon officially embarked on its transformation from a product company to a platform company, determined to enhance the value of its platform. Outsiders wonder what role Seeyon intends to play and what value it aims to provide in the digital and intelligent transformation of enterprises.

Before answering this question, let's examine the profound changes underway in enterprise digitalization. According to Deloitte's report, many organizations initiate their digital transformation by reshaping their operational models. Among enterprises that have successfully transformed, 77% have implemented their strategies and business models through operational excellence.

Meanwhile, data from a survey on China's enterprise digital transformation reveals the challenges facing the current transformation. Only 2% of Chinese enterprises have embarked on comprehensive reshaping, optimizing operations and leveraging robust digital capabilities to reinvent various business units and functions. These enterprises embrace the concept of comprehensive reshaping, recognizing that focusing solely on individual business units or functions is insufficient. To address multifaceted pressures, enterprises must take a holistic approach, integrating reshaping efforts across all aspects.

The ceramic tile brand Mona Lisa serves as a prime example of collaborative operations. Leveraging Seeyon COP, Mona Lisa has achieved end-to-end integration across its entire business chain, encompassing marketing, manufacturing, logistics, and financial operations. When a customer places an order on the COP platform, the platform's algorithms and models support scheduling at four production bases, which then undergo collaborative approval. These data are exchanged with Mona Lisa's ERP system, enabling automatic work order generation on Mona Lisa's proprietary APS (Advanced Planning and Scheduling) platform, thereby monitoring the entire production process. Production data is also synchronized to the COP platform, allowing users to view real-time progress.

Currently, Mona Lisa's suppliers, distributors, and employees are all on the COP platform, facilitating integrated digital construction and collaborative operations throughout the entire process.

Previously, an approval process could take two days, as each node required approval by a key individual before proceeding. Now, the average time has been reduced to just 1.5 hours. This significant efficiency improvement is the result of phased transformations, including moving offline processes online, optimizing approval process nodes, and adjusting organizational and business models to accommodate collaborative operations.

Driven by continuous construction and operational thinking, Mona Lisa has increased its order fulfillment rate from 70% to 95% and reduced its production deviation rate to just 2% (compared to an industry average of 10%), generating over RMB 200 million in benefits.

"Mona Lisa's digitalization is not a question of whether to continue building but rather how to deepen it," said Yuan Huaming, CIO of Mona Lisa Group. IT must not only empower but also lead business operations.

Mona Lisa's digital transformation underscores the core keywords of process, integration, data, and operations throughout. Collaborative operations have become an essential path in digital transformation.

Xu Shi, Chairman of Seeyon, stated that as a driving force for new productivity, digital intelligence necessitates collaborative operations as the hub of digital transformation. By constructing an integrated digital intelligence operation foundation, Seeyon helps organizations build composable capabilities, enabling customers and partners to achieve digital self-growth and continuously develop future-oriented core competencies.

This implies that rather than creating a comprehensive product or satisfying all customer needs through customized solutions, Seeyon chooses to strengthen its platform foundation, offering generalized products such as integrated office portals, and empowering customers and partners to grow their own applications on the platform, granting them greater autonomy.

At this year's Collaborative Management Forum and User Conference, Seeyon unified its V5 and V8 technology platforms into the AI-COP platform, reinforcing the digital foundation.

In particular, the V8 platform, a true cloud-native, microservices-based, and domain-model-driven platform, boasts robust customization capabilities and professionalism, supporting ultra-large-scale and highly complex critical business processes.

Since last year, the V8 platform has officially transitioned from development and refinement to sales. To support the implementation of the AI-COP platform, Seeyon invested over RMB 750 million in R&D over the past three years. Now, having surpassed the initial intense investment phase, Seeyon has entered a period of fruition, scale replication, and promotion.

Moreover, platforms inherently rely on the strength of ecosystem partners. Recently, Seeyon has actively forged strategic partnerships with various major players, enhancing the value of its platform and ecosystem. These partnerships facilitate deep value conversion, integrating each other's ecosystems, and supporting Seeyon's platform-based business strategy.

For instance, shortly ago, Huawei's pure-blood HarmonyOS announced its public beta launch in October, accelerating the HarmonyOS ecosystem. Seeyon was among the first collaborative management software vendors to list its HarmonyOS native applications. At Seeyon's User Conference, both parties held a launch ceremony for Seeyon's HarmonyOS native applications.

Apart from Huawei, Seeyon has also signed a strategic partnership with DingTalk, jointly launching the "Seeyon-Ding" product based on the "platform + portal" model. This integration enables a new, intelligent collaborative mode that integrates management and collaboration on a single portal and supports applications through a central platform. Seeyon's strategic partnership with Baidu primarily revolves around "large models + application implementation," leveraging Baidu Intelligent Cloud's Qianfan large model capabilities and Seeyon's industry expertise in collaborative operation management to drive the development of native AI applications, AI-driven iterations of existing applications, AI solutions for key industries, and the practical implementation of large models in vertical domains.

It is evident that Seeyon is entering a period of large-scale value release, whether through its AI-COP tiered value focus and new product launches or through value co-creation partnerships with major players to integrate and implement a series of products and solutions. Collaborative operations, grounded in holistic and systematic value, can further unlock the potential of ERP and other business systems, jointly driving qualitative changes in the digital transformation of numerous organizations.