Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

On September 20, Caijing magazine, sponsored by China Securities Market Research Center and owned by Caixun Media Group, officially released the "leading 100th" brand IP in Shanghai. At the meeting, Ablikim Abulimiti (Amu), vice president of Lenovo Group, vice president of strategy and business development in China, and general manager of Lenovo Hemu Consulting, shared the practice of intelligent transformation of Lenovo Group, and announced the "intelligent transformation password" for the first time, that is, "guided by enterprise operating value, strategic value, industry and social value." Systematic construction is formed in four aspects: top-level strategic consensus, digital base first, deep integration of AI and business, and organizational change. "

Since the 12th five-year Development Plan of the Internet issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in 2012 and the 14th five-year Digital economy Development Plan issued by the State Council in 2022, a horizontal and vertical digital economy strategy system has been forced. it provides a strong support for the intelligent transformation of the real industry. In this process, a number of enterprises with high degree of intelligent maturity have emerged in China. They are the first to start and move towards excellence. "leading 100" is focusing on this trend, hoping to bring together 100 successful cases of intelligent transformation in various industries, build an experience sharing platform, and jointly promote the intelligent development of Chinese enterprises.

The intelligent transformation of Lenovo Group began with the forward-looking strategic layout in 2017, and after six years of transformation, Lenovo has built itself into a veritable "double real enterprise": on the one hand, Lenovo is a company in the real economy industry with global layout and full value chain coverage; on the other hand, Lenovo provides product solutions and services for the digital and intelligent transformation of more real economy companies. Lenovo has become one of the few enterprises in China to move towards the stage of "innovative development" in terms of intelligent maturity.

According to the framework and maturity model of enterprise intelligent transformation released by China Institute of Information and Communication at the beginning of the year, the maturity of enterprise intelligent transformation is divided into five levels of L1-L5 from low to high, which are "L1-single point attempt", "L2-local construction", "L3-digital base construction", "L4-intelligent operation" and "L5-innovation and development". The maturity model has become the evaluation basis of "leading 100".

Ah Mu said when sharing his experience: "to use digital technology, and then to use AI productivity to promote enterprise transformation, we must think and layout closely in line with the strategy of our own enterprise, not just based on the trend of technology, but to promote the digital and intelligent investment of an enterprise because of fear, anxiety and confusion. Only in this way can we find real business progress and innovation value through intelligent transformation."

The practice of Lenovo Intelligent Transformation: the systematic Promotion of four Dimensions

Over the past 20 years, Lenovo has gone through the process of self-transformation with IT technology-- from traditional IT to new IT--. Before 2014, Lenovo's main strategic task is to complete the global business layout for more than 180 countries and regions, through the construction of a unified R & D platform, global supply chain platform and global resource scheduling management platform, to achieve excellent operation of global business.

After 2014, digital technology began to rise, cloud computing began to enter the vision of the industry, and Lenovo also began to do digital exploration in various departments, but it encountered a great challenge-- if analytical technology needs to rely on more and more rich data, then first of all, we need to get through the data of the whole enterprise, which makes Lenovo start the global unified construction of the digital base relatively early.

Around 2017, Lenovo began the process of intelligent transformation around the world. After 2-3 years of construction of the digital base, the cloud infrastructure is more agile and flexible, the interdependence between the technical components of Zhongtai and the ever-changing customer needs of the front end is basically unlocked, and data can be shared and flowed quickly among different departments at a relatively low cost. Digital and intelligent innovations at the business level are springing up like bamboo shoots after a spring rain. Departments from their own data within the scope of their own digitization, to every department, every process is standing on the basis of the data elements of the whole company, rethinking their own value. Such a change is also a further upgrade of intelligence.

After 2020, Lenovo further realized that its own practice is the best proofing, so it internalized and externalized its own transformation, as well as the strategic integration of its shift to solutions and services, and used intelligent innovation to drive the second growth engine.

Reviewing Lenovo's history of intelligent transformation over the past years, A Mu said with emotion: "the intelligent transformation strategy is easy to formulate, and whether it is learning from other enterprises or through high-level discussions, it can form a basic strategic framework." but the consensus process is very difficult. "

The difficulty of strategic consensus is how to find the value of the combination of technology and business, such as whether the orientation of intelligent transformation is the topic of IT or enterprise transformation, whether the goal is to reduce cost and increase efficiency or to innovate business model, how to improve customer experience and so on. Amu said that between 2016 and 2018, Lenovo spent a lot of time and energy repeatedly discussing and demonstrating that it finally reached a deep consensus on the value of intelligent transformation to strategic transformation, and formed a clear structure and transformation roadmap.

At that time, the consensus reached by Lenovo included three points: first, to carry out intelligent transformation, we must first create an agile and flexible digital base; second, we should reorganize the business and rethink every business on the basis of the public data platform; third, we must introduce AI technology into the business operation process as a new productivity.

"without an agile and flexible digital base, the digitization of business is impossible." Ah Mu said that after completing the construction of the digital base of the new IT, we can gain the advantages of agility and flexibility, timely response, intelligent operation and maintenance, cost reduction and so on. In this process, the precipitation technology should be unified. Lenovo began to build a digital base in 2017, building a two-state infrastructure based on the combination of hybrid cloud, sensitive state and steady state, and the cooperation of edge cloud network, while integrating and precipitating the agile and flexible technology center, and establishing AI-driven intelligent operation and maintenance as well as full-stack security capability. At present, Lenovo has built a hybrid cloud integrated infrastructure in 17 cities around the world, reducing the cost of the entire digital infrastructure by 30%, and the efficiency of delivery and management has changed from a natural unit to a minute level.

At the same time, AI must be deeply integrated with the business. "AI has come and transformed into a new type of productivity, to embrace AI, we must let AI and business deeply integrated." Amu said that in the current business practice, Lenovo has integrated AI capabilities into all aspects of operation, promoting the upgrading of the whole value chain, including intelligent supply chain, smart marketing, smart sales and smart customer service, to achieve cost reduction and efficiency, and enhance customer experience.

Amu said that in order to quickly promote digitization and intelligence, Lenovo has taken many measures at the same time: it has set up a digital innovation team, integrated business with IT, established a digital / intelligence-driven decision-making and operation system, introduced a large number of data scientists and AI engineers, and encouraged the team to learn intelligent technology through diversified activities such as all-staff intelligent innovation competitions, so as to realize the wide application of AI (man-machine cooperation). In order to create a well-trained "intelligent" team.

"organizational talent reform is often below the surface, but it is precisely the basic premise of ensuring intelligent transformation."We must be more determined to carry out the construction of professional and digital transformation organizations, the introduction of talents, the construction of all-staff digital literacy, and the establishment of a decision-making culture driven by data and intelligence." Ah Mu stressed.

Although the whole process of intelligent transformation of Lenovo Group has experienced ups and downs, it has finally formed a systematic promotion in these four dimensions: top-level strategic consensus, digital base first, deep integration of AI and business, and strong organizational change. Ah Mu believes that this is not enough to constitute a "password for intelligent transformation." more importantly, while doing systematic construction, we must adhere to value orientation, that is, to identify the operational value, strategic value, industry and social value of the company's digital and intelligent transformation.

Today, the "value-oriented systematic promotion" set of "intelligent transformation code" has been verified in different business scenarios of Lenovo, which has greatly improved the efficiency of Lenovo's production and services.

Fully embrace AI and create best practices

Ah Mu shared the two practical scenarios and achievements of Lenovo's comprehensive embrace of AI in smart business operation.

The first is a customer-oriented front-end scenario. Lenovo has been promoting the transformation of its new business model from product-centric to customer-centric and service-oriented since 2014. In this process, the first problem that needs to be solved is that the transformation of the customer-oriented direct business model is to operate around the customer's full-cycle value (Lifetime Value), rather than around trading activities, to create a new business architecture that combines digitization with the transformation of the business model.

According to A Mu, taking the "whole life cycle value management of savior gamers" as an example, Lenovo has created a digital platform for intelligent business operation aimed at the whole life cycle journey of a game player community interaction, watching live streaming, and buying products. Through the business intelligence platform, delivery platform, online and offline integration platform, as well as Internet service platform to achieve customer tracking and service. There are more basic content and decision-making platforms under the platform, as well as communities and member centers at the lower level.

Lenovo has built a customer pyramid in this way. after completing the transformation of the customer direct business model on the consumer side, the number of members has been close to 200 million, and the income generated through customer member value management has been close to 40%. The proportion of direct operation has increased from 2-3% to more than 30%, and the per capita output of sales has increased by three times. On the major customer side, customer coverage has increased by 55% on the existing basis, while SME customers have achieved a direct operation scale of 7 million +.

The second practice scenario is the supply chain, which achieves an exponential increase in efficiency with the introduction of intelligent services. Ah Mu said: "the supply chain is a very important intelligent business, but also a major issue that can not be bypassed by enterprises in the real economy, and it is the only competitiveness of large enterprises."

Lenovo started the construction of intelligent supply chain in 2017, applying a number of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, Internet of things, advanced analysis, digital twinning, block chain, and so on, and gradually established an intelligent supply chain covering the whole value chain of "research, production, supply and marketing service". By 2021, Lenovo's supply chain intelligence has achieved remarkable results: the time from the expected delivery date to the commitment of the supply chain has been shortened by 50%, the accuracy of order delivery has increased by 32%, and the failure rate of insured products has decreased by 22%. The cost of the entire supply chain has been saved by about $143 million. Lenovo also ranked eighth in the world and number one in the Asia-Pacific region in the 2023 Gartner global supply chain TOP25 ranking.

At present, AI technology is showing a breakthrough development. In the process of systematic promotion of intelligent transformation, enterprises should fully embrace AI technology. "We must introduce AI technology into the process of business operation as a new productivity. Instead of using data to assist people, AI can make more unpredictable but very effective decisions." Amu also stressed that the security and intelligent operation and maintenance is very important in the process of deeply integrating AI technology with business scenarios.

Build the second growth engine and accelerate the Intelligent Transformation of Chinese Enterprises

"Intelligent transformation is not an one-off task, it is not a plan for three years, nor is it possible for us to directly purchase IT systems, software, products and solutions. This is a process." Ah Mu said.

Through its own endogenous practice and customer service needs, Lenovo has precipitated a set of cloud native, Zhongtai and AI embedded intelligent IT engine-giant. Today, it constitutes Lenovo's second growth engine, AI's native "solution services" business. According to Amu, Lenovo Group has completed a full-stack intelligent layout based on the new IT architecture of "end-edge cloud intelligence", including: AI embedded intelligent terminals, AI-oriented infrastructure, AI native solution services.

"AI's native solution services business has become the fastest growing of Lenovo's three major businesses. It has transformed our internal intelligent transformation into business. To this end, Lenovo has integrated its own IT department into the solution services business group and become the main R & D force of the solution services business group." Amu said that Lenovo has achieved the transformation from a hardware company to an intelligent solution provider, and completed the magnificent transformation of "elephant turning".

In the past few years, Lenovo has attached great importance to external empowerment. Through the way of "endogenesis and externalization", Lenovo has accumulated practice and experience gained from a large number of cost inputs, forming an one-stop full-cycle capability, including transformation consulting, scheme design, deployment, and operation and maintenance, to help more enterprises achieve the collaborative effect of "mass action and distance". Up to now, Lenovo can provide full-stack and full-cycle new IT services to many industries, such as manufacturing, government, education, finance, operators, Internet and so on, and has created practical application cases of nearly a thousand large and medium-sized enterprises.

Amu said: "Lenovo has deeply realized from its own practice that if we want to serve other customers, we should respect the law of continuous change of intelligent transformation: provide training services when he is confused." provide consulting services when he formulates strategies, provide integrated services when he designs projects, and provide various solutions and products when he lands on the ground. To provide him with support, operation and maintenance and consulting services as he continues to explore and optimize iterations, only in this way can we really conform to the law of enterprise transformation. "

Finally, he said that when selecting the "leading 100" with Caijing, he will quantitatively evaluate everyone's performance in strategy, digital base, business operation, and organizational talent culture changes based on the maturity model. and work together to find the leading and intelligent enterprises in various industries to provide more experience for more enterprises in the same industry and help more enterprises move from innovation to excellence.

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