Why can you do a good job in the industrial Internet?

The business world is cruel, and finding the right direction is more effective.

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Author | Yu fast

Edit | Zhang Dong

The industrial Internet enjoys the heat of the market, and it does not shy away from showing its difficulty to the outside world.

It has a high threshold, high complexity, and difficult to deploy and operate;

It is inherently insufficient, the foundation is weak, the scene is complex, and the results are slow;

It is difficult to feed in the short term, and requires long-term and uninterrupted investment in technology, funds and personnel;

Under the large, complex, decentralized and diverse industrial system, the road to industrial digital transformation is extremely difficult.

On this road of reform that should and must be taken, participants, how to release the potential of the industrial Internet?

In other words, what important qualities and capabilities should an excellent industrial Internet have?

In view of this, in the exchange with several executives in the industry, Leifeng Network has extracted several keywords to become an excellent student of the industrial Internet, hoping to be able to peek into the leopard, so as to bring some thinking to the industry practitioners.

1

Balance standardization with personalization

Standardization, or reproducibility, is a fundamental feature of modern industry.

Strong replicability, the solution can be adapted to the needs of different manufacturers at the same time, and then dilute the cost of R&D through scale effect, improve efficiency, and to a certain extent represent the profit potential.

The industrial field is very personalized, the chain is long, the process is complex, and the products are deeply customized, which can meet the needs of different scenarios and different users, but often also means that the cost rises significantly.

On the one hand, it is necessary to obtain a sufficiently large market, and on the other hand, it is necessary to maintain a healthy and sustainable profit model. The contradiction between the two is that it is difficult to effectively meet user needs when the versatility is too strong, and too much personalization sometimes means that there is no profit to be made.

How to strike a balance between the two becomes a question that must be answered.

Helkaos: Personalized customization is an inevitable trend, and it needs to rely on the transformation of mass customization production mode

To recognize that personalized customization is an inevitable trend, but also to see that the current development of industrial Internet platforms is facing the contradiction between the personalized needs of the intelligent transformation of the manufacturing industry and the lack of industrial Internet platform supply and customization capabilities, in order to achieve a balance between the two, we must rely on the industrial Internet to carry out the transformation of large-scale customized production mode with the whole process of user-driven production.

Tan Zhang, general manager of Zhejiang Lanzhuo: Dynamic balance, explore the implementation of industry commonality and rapid standardization

This problem cannot disappear completely, and standardization and personalization is a problem that requires constant dynamic balancing.

How to balance?

The small number of industry leaders and the prominent individual needs mean that the required platforms focus more on functional thickness and depth, and cover the most complete business domains.

The number of small and medium-sized enterprises is large, suitable for scale, the function emphasizes lightweight and standardization, the industrial data volume of the platform is very large, emphasizing breadth and rapid replication, and achieving cost reduction and efficiency through regional industrial cluster coverage.

And the functions required by small and medium-sized enterprises are relatively simple, which can be met by generalization scheme + customized modules / optional menus.

Tan Zhang stressed that the core of this model to be truly implemented is to explore the implementation method of industry commonality and rapid standardization, and the personalized needs are handed over to platform-based ecological developers and service providers. At the same time, the platform standardization, component standardization, code development tools standardization, the ecology is rich and open.

Liu Zongchang, Chief Data Officer of Industrial Fulian: The integration of personalization and scale is fully considered in project planning

"From the beginning of project planning, we should fully consider the integration of personalization and scale, such as solving a problem and trying to turn it into a common service." Liu Zongchang said that when encountering similar problems, it is possible to quickly reuse the technology that has been verified. In terms of technology, through the platform to achieve the replication and promotion of technology, optimize the marginal effect of technology.

He Dongdong, co-founder and CEO of Treeroot Interconnection: Personalized development, enterprise judgment, trade-offs and trade-offs are very important

After all, the resources of an enterprise are limited, and the judgment, trade-offs and trade-offs of the enterprise are very important.

When personalized development, enterprises should be able to judge whether the application is valuable and whether it can be extracted from the universality of the problem, and summarize the capabilities required by the platform from it, and continuously accumulate ecological partners and Party A customers. Therefore, individual application and versatility precipitation is a process of dynamic decision-making and dynamic balancing.

HUAWEI CLOUD: The standard components of the Industrial Internet are the foundation

The contradiction between personalization and scale lies in how to minimize the time and cost of achieving personalization on the basis of a standardized platform, so making the standard components of the industrial Internet thick and solid, business developers in thousands of industries can quickly develop the personalized industrial applications required by low-code or no-code LEGO bricks.

2

The core capabilities of the platform are strong

As one of the three major systems of "connection, platform and security" of the industrial Internet, the platform has always been the core weapon of the entrants.

The polishing of this weapon is also extremely difficult.

The bar is high. The industrial Internet platform is an asset-intensive and talent-intensive track, with high requirements on technology and operation, long cycle, high investment, and continuous polishing and optimization.

Understand the industry. The process of designing and operating a platform is essentially a process of reorganizing all the elements, relationships, demands, roles, rules, and decisions in the field.

Strong development ecology. How to help developers improve efficiency from automated production processes to automated development processes are all problems that industrial Internet companies need to think about when improving the platform.

To do a good job in a platform, it not only requires solid technical skills, continuous financial support, and compound talents, but also the company's own strategic positioning, deep industry understanding, and strong cohesion, consistent action and perseverance.

In the eyes of executives, what kind of platform does manufacturing need? What capabilities does the platform itself need to have?

He Dongdong: Whether there is a platform or not, whether the platform is strong or not is very important

Not all companies have "true industrial Internet platforms."

China's various industries and regions have different informatization and digital foundations, and are currently in the stage of "Industry 2.0, 3.0, 4.0".

In the context of policy support and hot market, industrial Internet platforms emerge in an endless stream, but the market is mixed, behind many "industrial Internet platforms", more integration projects, application projects in the support, the market really has a platform, and real money and silver into the industrial Internet platform is not much.

The Industrial Internet is "driven by the platform", and the Industrial Internet platform is the bearer of all new technologies, especially the underlying technology.

The competitiveness of the platform is a comprehensive embodiment of the company's research and development, capital, talent input, input-output ratio, number of intellectual property outputs and gold content of the platform.

Tan Zhang: The core of the core technical capabilities of the platform lies in the thickness of the platform and the ability to abstract the business

Taking house building as an example, the industrial Internet platform is a well-laid public foundation and prefab library, and the house is a variety of industrial software, business systems, and industrial APP.

The platform needs to continuously accumulate and improve the scaffolding, standard modules and other tools (standard prefabricated parts/basic services, components) required for a building, which can greatly improve the efficiency and reduce costs of subsequent house construction compared with ordinary brick-and-tile construction.

But the tool is not produced out of thin air, it needs to know the structural function of the house and the prefabs needed, extract the commonalities like a cattle, precipitate to the platform, and require industrial scene accumulation and business abstraction capabilities.

Liu Zongchang: The platform of the enterprise should have a systematic design thinking and break through the pilot trap

One is to have a panoramic perspective and focus on the pain points and opportunity points of the value chain; the second is technology scalability, which can not only consider the feasibility of landing in a workshop and a factory, but more importantly, how to quickly and low-cost promote a successful use case, so as to optimize the boundary effect of technology investment.

Among them, digitalization is not only an investment and introduction of technology, but more importantly, the acquisition of capabilities.

The Industrial Internet has always had pilot pitfalls. In manufacturing enterprises, the early exploration of heavy investment funds, follow-up internal replication and large-scale promotion is still difficult to cross the marginal benefit threshold, in the service provider, the early focus on customization, benchmarking cases, still failed to precipitate into standardized products.

The platform technology is insufficient, the scale is insufficient, the business model is not clear, and the significance of the marginal benefits and costs of platform optimization has still not been reflected.

Breaking through the pilot trap requires systematic solution planning and long-termism focusing on the future. In addition, technical service providers should be able to adopt a platform-based technical architecture, focus on specific scenarios, standardize products, improve delivery efficiency, and improve configurability, SaaS, and cloudification.

Helkaos: The industrial Internet platform enterprise is a comprehensive embodiment of multiple dimensions such as scientific and technological strength, platform capability, empowerment ability, and ecological ability

In terms of scientific and technological strength, the company's R & D investment, the proportion of R & D personnel, key technology project breakthroughs, invention patents and other subdivision indicators.

In terms of platform capabilities, the enterprise platform has the ability to precipitate in data interconnection, identity resolution, industrial mechanism model, solutions, network security and other aspects.

In terms of empowerment capabilities, the number of enterprise service enterprises, the construction of industrial Internet platforms in vertical industries, and the first degree of subdivision of industries are data.

Ecological capabilities are reflected in the number of partners of the enterprise, the developer ecosystem and other relevant indicators.

3

The ability to accumulate and manage ecology

Ecology is an ultra-high frequency word in the mouths of industrial Internet business executives.

Ecology is not like a platform, can rely on technology casting, nor like customers, can rely on sales to expand, it needs to step on the right point in time, long-term layout and step by step accumulation.

Ecology pays attention to large, thick, complete, live and open, and its success is a comprehensive embodiment of multiple capabilities.

Through its own accumulation and open source and open ecosystem, promote users and ecological partners to contribute project applications and content, the platform can continue to iterate stronger and stronger, and the ecology and the platform can achieve mutual achievements.

How to make the ecology go steadily and well?

Tan Zhang: Talking about ecology more, less real money and silver investment, industrial APP application and ecological system improvement is more important than revenue

For industrial Internet cross-industry and cross-field platform enterprises, if the importance is in order: the number of customers, the number of ecological partners, the number of platform APP, and revenue.

In the long run, the large number of industrial users and the scale effect of the number of uses, the innovation and open ecology of all walks of life and the accumulation of rich and perfect industrial APP are the premise of revenue.

The difficulty of a good ecosystem lies in the comprehensive embodiment of technology, model, operation, mentality, and strategy.

But there are more people who talk about ecology, and less real money and silver are invested.

Establish a sound industrial APP ecosystem, not only test the platform's data fusion, microservices and low-code development capabilities, but also be able to form a perfect basic service support system for APP development, testing, distribution, trading, etc., so that developers can profit from industrial Internet APP.

Around the standardized platform of industrial interconnection, establish an ISV ecology, channel ecology/agent ecology, implementation ecology, and service ecosystem to achieve the separation of product platform providers and implementers. Only in this way can we truly realize the promotion of the application of the industrial Internet in a large amount and a wide range.

He Dongdong: The platform and the ecological partnership are like marriage, the platform provides stable orders, and the partners are responsible for the quality of delivery

The essence of the ecology is the trend, it must be a third-party developer to do the development model based on the platform, the general platform + industry solution provider model, not an individual developer, but a software developer, integrator, solution provider of To B.

The establishment of the platform and the ecological partnership is like falling in love, trying a few projects first, building confidence after cooperation, and gradually integrating in product technology, and will go through a process of introduction, dating, and marriage.

Ecological partners are the process of funnels, and the funnel will always exist, constantly trying new and precipitating excellent ecological partners. Those ecological partners who have settled for long-term cooperation are the result of two-way verification and selection.

From the perspective of the platform, the platform, as the first responsible person, needs to be responsible for the delivery quality of the partner, and the platform first needs to examine the quality and reliability of products and services.

Secondly, the pursuit of product competitiveness, that is, to provide customers with valuable products;

Moreover, it is like-minded, and both sides must have the willingness to innovate and upgrade the driving force of iteration.

From the perspective of ecological partners, in the early stage, we are most interested in whether the platform can bring business opportunities, that is, stable orders, foreseeable opportunities, etc., and in the later stage, we pay more attention to the comprehensive capabilities of the platform such as technology, sustainable development and market development.

At the same time, the breadth of industry and scene coverage corresponds to ecological partners, after all, the more partners, the more scenes can be covered.

Helkaos: Products will be replaced by scenes, industries will be replaced by ecology, and the future is the competition between platform and platform, ecology and ecology

An industrial Internet enterprise must first be an open platform to build a win-win ecosystem.

There are two obvious trends in the era of the Internet of Things, products will be replaced by scenes, industries will be covered by ecology, and competition between enterprises will surely evolve into a competition between platforms and platforms, ecology and ecology.

The platform embraces the Internet of Things and partners with an open mind, not turning partners into a competitive relationship, but into a real co-creation, co-construction and sharing relationship, attracting global high-quality resources to build this platform.

The head enterprises of the industry can establish a vertical industry platform as the chain owner on the platform, and small and medium-sized enterprises do not need to repeat investment to feel the stones and cross the river, learn from the successful experience of the industry on the platform, and take a detour.

In this way, a positive cycle can be formed and become an ecosystem like the "tropical rainforest" of the industrial Internet.

Wang Xiaodong, general manager of Alibaba Cloud's IoT business unit: Do not touch specific applications, respect the industrial division of labor

Do a good job of platform products, do not touch the specific application products, the rest to the ecology of the consulting, implementation, development partners, so that customer needs have quality assurance, but also to create a large-scale, high-quality ecology.

In this way, we can maximize benefits and enter the standard product business model of large-scale revenue and profit.

HUAWEI CLOUD: The platform needs to have various basic capabilities, and developers can profit from them

For the developer ecosystem of the platform, HUAWEI CLOUD believes that the industrial Internet platform needs to have sufficient data and mechanism models, and has basic capabilities such as microservices, low-code, and development pipelines.

The ecological environment of industrial Internet apps should be sound enough, developers can profit from the ecology, and have enough motivation to develop and maintain industrial Internet apps.

4

Deep industrial knowledge, customer value

China is the only country in the world that has all the industrial categories in the United Nations Industrial Classification, and each type of industrial enterprise has its own unique industrial Know-How and industry knowledge.

However, at present, many of China's industrial Internet platforms lack industrial genes, most of which provide digital and cloud-based solutions, and truly solve the lack of industrial mechanisms and industrial models.

Industrial Internet, surname "industry", industrial attributes are the first, followed by Internet rules.

The industry characteristics of "one meter width, one hundred meters depth" are very professional industry knowledge behind it.

In the context of increasingly involuted technology, industrial Internet companies that can thoroughly understand industrial knowledge may have been successful for the most part.

Tan Zhang: Enterprises and benchmark customers are co-creation rather than party A and party B relationship, industrial APP should let front-line workers use quickly

App on Android or iOS can be used out of the box, but industry can not, industrial software and business systems are not simple download and deployment, requiring basic data collection, demand docking, customer deployment and configuration.

Most of the users of industrial APP are front-line workers, and to let them use quickly, it is not only the software itself, but also the integration of the entire factory management system and management processes.

In order for enterprises to be able to apply as quickly as possible, industrial Internet companies need to be fully familiar with the business processes in the factory and formulate a fast and efficient customer implementation methodology.

Therefore, in the early stage of entering the industry, the relationship between enterprises and benchmark customers is not the relationship between Party A and Party B, but the relationship of co-creation.

"It is not that the company develops a product for customers to use, but in the process of development, it jointly develops some good product functions and designs, nor is it a passive collection of customer feedback, but a team that innovates and develops together."

Helkaos: The platform with "industrial genes" occupies the top of the double cross-list, and the platform enterprises should enrich their own application scenarios and precipitate industrial knowledge, and do a deep and thorough job in the industry

From the top 15 double-cross industrial Internet platforms in 2021 selected by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, it can be found that the platform for incubation of manufacturing enterprises with "industrial genes" occupies the top of the list.

Judging from the review links such as the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's double-cross-platform practice inspection this year, the requirements for industrial Internet platform enterprises are that they must go deep into industrial practice to solve industry-specific problems, and enterprises must enrich their own application scenarios and precipitate industrial knowledge, do the industry deeply, and make real value.

He Dongdong: Valuable applications cannot be developed in the office, and industrial applications have to go to the field

Compared with the consumer Internet, the application development attribute of the manufacturing industry is more important. First of all, only in the office can not develop valuable applications, industrial applications to go to the field, with users, scenes for deep interaction and communication in order to continue to polish and iterate. Secondly, for industrial applications, users usually need not a single function, more personalized, the product is thicker.

For the platform, to attract ecological partners, the platform needs to have a lot of industrial knowledge and reduce the difficulty of development.

The platform should be able to continuously gather and precipitate industrial knowledge in different industries and fields, and decompose it into a standard, partner-understood, and used algorithm model, so that they can easily and quickly build professional-grade industrial applications.

5

Data capabilities

The industrial field is an absolute data giant, and at the same time, data is also the core "fuel" that drives the industrial Internet forward.

Compared with the consumer Internet, the industrial Internet scenario data requirements are more stringent, the industrial chain data involved is more complex, for the industry, data in various forms throughout the research and development, production, testing, operation and other life cycles.

But massive data does not equal valuable data, and a large amount of industrial data value is not developed.

Most industrial Internet companies are blocking the gate of data.

In the future, companies that can solve data problems to the greatest extent will build absolute barriers.

He Dongdong: Data is easier said than done, the most difficult is data acquisition and data twin, and data analysis is the easiest

In terms of industrial data acquisition capabilities, there are many types of industrial equipment, and the communication protocols, control point tables, and hardware interfaces are very different.

If the access to Internet data is a high-quality oil field that is easy to develop, then the data in the industrial field is "chicken nest coal", which is extremely scattered, extremely expensive to extract, and inefficient.

"Industrial data device connectivity is very cumbersome, but a lot of people don't pay attention to this."

Data capitalization is a question of how to turn crude oil into diesel.

Industrial big data, the essence is the accurate mapping of the physical space in the industrial field, including a large number of industrial mechanisms, industrial operation logic, industrial models, after the reconstruction of digital twins, data can become an asset, but the current market understands the industry does not understand technology, understand technology does not understand industry, compound talent is extremely lacking.

The hardest thing is data acquisition and data twining, and data analysis is the easiest.

This is also the watershed of excellent enterprises in the industrial Internet, empty data analysis technology, far from enough to play the value of data, the platform should first solve the first two difficulties.

Chen Jun, IT director of midea: Enterprises have no knowledge of internal data or it is difficult to obtain the desired form, and internal data structures and data asset catalogs should be open to the entire enterprise

In Chen Jun's view, enterprises need to have the ability to plan, govern, store, and share and collaborate on the entire data asset.

"Data collection is an important factor restricting the development of the entire industrial Internet." Chen Jun said that only on the equipment connection, there is a problem that the protocol and interface are not unified, and some old devices do not even have digital interfaces, which require huge time and energy to transform.

The amount of new equipment data added by industrial enterprises every day is very large, but only 5%-10% of the data may be utilized, and the massive amount of data lies in the storage device.

A common problem with digital transformation is that businesses don't know anything about internal data or struggle to get the form they want.

For an enterprise's data to be able to fully exert its value, it is important that the company's data structure and data asset catalog are open to the entire enterprise.

6

What kind of industrial Internet products

Can it be called a good product?

For this issue, different executives have their own emphases and consensus.

Wang Xiaodong summed it up as "useful, easy to use, and safe".

Chen Jun believes that it solves user pain points, has professionalism, openness, and ecological perfection. Openness means that the industrial Internet platform is not bound to users, users can freely go up and down the platform, and the ecological construction is perfect, and users can have no worries after going to the platform.

In Tan Zhang's view, good industrial Internet products need to meet three points: first, the product should become a necessity and have core value, secondly, the product experience should be good enough, and finally, it can be rapidly iterated.

He Dongdong believes that how to expand from a single function, or copy to another workshop, or even another subsidiary, to avoid redevelopment is crucial, scalability, reusability and the ability to open up data silos, all need the support of platform capabilities, at the same time, applications should be able to coordinate with each other.

In his eyes, the standard of a good product is that it has customer value, can reduce costs and increase efficiency, and the application of products is scalable, replicable, and scalable.

Helkaos' definition of a good industrial Internet product is to help companies to achieve three "one points": sell a little more, sell a little more profitably, and sell faster.

Enterprises sell more orders than before, profits are higher than before, capital occupation is less than before, and turnover is fast, and enterprises will be competitive.

On this basis, the product is not limited to the product function itself, but as a carrier, so that the enterprises that use the product form an ecological adsorption capacity on the platform.

HUAWEI CLOUD proposes different perspectives, and good products should be able to coordinate at the edge of the cloud network, coordinate global data, make intelligent decisions, develop applications simply, reuse assets, and continue to evolve.

7

epilogue

This article only selects a few of the more important keywords, and may only get a glimpse of the appearance of the "excellent students" of the industrial Internet.

In the case of a complex industry with a wide range of industries, the problems faced may be much more complex than any previous industry.

This feature of industry requires suppliers to have a full understanding of the process of implementing, designing, manufacturing and verifying functions, and become an all-round player.

At different stages of development, the industry's requirements for suppliers are also different: in the early stage of the industry, technological breakthroughs are the key; in the landing stage of commercialization, the gap in productization and commercialization capabilities may bring a new round of reshuffle.

At that time, what kind of appearance the industrial Internet players will look like is still waiting for you to dig up and answer.

END