Drag, pull, drag, a few simple operations, you can develop a digital application DEMO. A small DEMO can bring about significant digital change for a company of nearly 8,000 people. With the help of low code, FAW-Volkswagen Chengdu Branch is setting off a workshop "revolution".
Cui Guangming is a senior engineer at the painting workshop site of FAW-Volkswagen Chengdu Branch, mainly responsible for the technical system and equipment management of the painting workshop. In the workshop, he encountered a lot of tricky things. Cumbersome approval processes, cluttered paper documents, manual checks over and over again, and more. As an industrial digital enthusiast, he began to find ways to deal with these challenges.
Cui Guangming, a senior engineer at the painting workshop of Chengdu FAW-Volkswagen Chengdu Branch
In order to improve the organizational and business efficiency of the workshop, Cui Guangming taught himself Python, Java, JS and other languages, and tried to develop a digital system for the workshop. However, the development of full code requires a lot of experience, there are also certain technical thresholds, and the needs in the workshop are endless, which requires a more convenient and efficient solution to improve the level of digital management.
In May 2021, FAW-Volkswagen Management Service Department promoted the mobile office platform within the company, and Cui Guangming was exposed to the DingTalk application development platform. It's a platform that almost everyone can get started with, and Cui Guangming and his colleagues have developed a series of digital applications that have transformed more than 30 core businesses such as quality, safety, and efficiency.
This is not a small step forward. Not only people, workshops, enterprises, industries, have changed because of this progress. DingTalk has become a unified interface for production management and a gateway for mobile office at FAW-Volkswagen.
Directly hit the difficult points, the painting workshop digital transformation
Change happens little by little. In Cui Guangming's workshop, a person in charge of quality comes to the scene every day to check the standardization of quality work. This work looks easy, but it requires strict quality control, such as the painting process of painting the body, the temperature, pressure and PH value of the paint, and the need for workers to go to the site every two hours to check the key parameters point-to-point to ensure that they are within the safety range. After the worker has completed the inspection, the data is entered into EXCEL, and then the problem feedback and tracking are carried out.
In this way, there are problems such as slow feedback, easy to forget, and the value of data cannot be fully utilized, and abnormal parameters may cause great fluctuations in the quality of body paint.
Now, the quality inspection workers can directly report the quality inspection situation on the QR code on the scanning equipment at the moment of inspection, and DingTalk displays it in real time. Compared with the time-consuming and laborious manual filling of EXCEL in the past, the current quality inspection process directly eliminates the work of data summary and meeting supervision, and once reported on the platform, the relevant personnel at all levels and the leaders of the corresponding supervisor quality can find and track in time and deal with it on the spot.
A security management system based on DingTalk low code development
Another welcome change is that after the digital management of these parameters, a trend change is formed, which is convenient for the staff to intervene in advance before the change, rather than having to wait until the site survey to correct it, reducing the trouble for the business personnel.
Another important task of the painting workshop is environmental protection management. Cui Guangming said that 90% of the "three wastes (wastewater, waste gas, waste") in the automobile production process come from the painting workshop, and any abnormality or exceeding the standard will cause serious pollution to the surrounding environment. The traditional practice is to discharge after environmental protection treatment according to the convention, but there is no sensor on the equipment, and environmental management personnel can only go to the site if they want to know the real-time emission indicators.
FAW-Volkswagen Chengdu Branch Valley Painting Workshop
The painting workshop is very large, more than twenty discharge ports, and there is no one who can't walk down for an hour. Later, the corresponding sensors were installed on the environmental protection equipment of the workshop, and the sensor data was integrated into the DingTalk end, and the staff could see the indicators of "three wastes" emissions in real time. Once an exception occurs, it will also be pushed directly to the corresponding device owner and manager.
The same is true of the production process. In order to organize the production of workers in an orderly manner, FAW-Volkswagen's production line management team leaders need to grasp the production data of the factory in real time - such as today's estimated output, current actual output, and production line reserves.
In order to summarize these data, the production line has set up a special scheduling position, and whenever the production line captains call to ask for specific data, the dispatching colleagues need to search and view the company's system. Every day, FAW-Volkswagen has hundreds of production managers who pay attention to the real-time output situation, but there are only a few people responsible for scheduling, and the workload can be imagined.
Through the production management section on DingTalk, each production manager can see real-time production data, almost without any time difference, and the business efficiency is greatly improved. Previously, the inquiry process alone took 15 minutes.
Auto giants use DingTalk, low-code to go deep into the core business
For most traditional manufacturing companies, every time a new requirement is raised by the business unit, it has to wait for IT to collect data, report it layer by layer, and wait for a long development cycle. It is true that THE department has the most professional technology and can solve problems at the company level, but it is difficult to take into account all the scattered needs of the business site.
And low code solves this problem.
At the beginning of 2021, when FAW-Volkswagen Management Service Department transformed IT, it found that DingTalk's low-code development tool was suitable for use, and immediately opened this tool to all employees, and actively promoted the landing of low-code platforms in the company.
Starting from the most basic drag, pull and drag, accompanied by the full counseling and support of the DingTalk after-sales team, FAW-Volkswagen employees have gradually learned to develop more advanced applications from not understanding DingTalk.
Cui Guangming remembers that at the beginning, he saw that some manufacturing counterparts were using DingTalk to assist in epidemic prevention, so he decided to use Yidai to develop an epidemic prevention and control application. Based on DingTalk's simplest punch card function, the company can grasp the employee body temperature, nucleic acid test results and visits to various places in real time, and under the situation of normalization of epidemic prevention and control, Chengdu Branch needs approval when going out of the province and out of the city, DingTalk directly changes the time-consuming paper approval into online approval, and the approval efficiency is greatly improved.
Developed an epidemic prevention and control platform based on DingTalk low code
Today, nearly 500 people in FAW-Volkswagen use Yi tie on DingTalk for low-code development, and more than 90% are front-line personnel. Faw-Volkswagen Management Service Department has allocated a number of technical personnel interested in digital technology in each business department, as "digital specialists", who have specially implemented the digital needs of production lines, and they have become "experts" who understand both business and technical means.
Through Yitao, many small applications have been born in various business departments of FAW-Volkswagen, including travel approval, safe operation, point inspection, spare parts management, etc. A maintenance engineer in Changchun Factory realized the digital maintenance function through DingTalk low code, so that spare parts, equipment maintenance and other information can be grasped in real time on the mobile phone, and at the same time solved the common mobile terminal compatibility problems of self-developed APP in the past.
"What we didn't expect at all was that in the absence of vigorous promotion and publicity, the business department would be more proactive to try this new tool, and slowly through word of mouth, more and more business departments began to use low code, and now a wave of low code has been formed for all employees." Zhang Wenbo, project manager of DingTalk in the management service department of FAW-Volkswagen Co., Ltd., said.
From the organization, business to the whole industry chain
Progress is still happening.
Cui Guangming said that in the digital process of FAW-Volkswagen, the first step is to first digitize the business from the bottom up and based on demand, and the second step is to achieve horizontal access on the basis of business digitization to achieve the digital integration of the company's whole chain; the third part is to open up the whole process of the upstream and downstream industrial chain; the fourth step is to provide low-code capabilities to the upstream and downstream industrial chains to promote the whole industry chain to carry out greater digital special actions.
At present, FAW-Volkswagen has completed the first two steps and is exploring the third step, and has made great progress.
There are often various constructions in the factory, involving many third-party manufacturers who install equipment and build new production lines, and FAW needs to frequently communicate and manage with them on a daily basis. Through DingTalk, these third-party manufacturers can provide information for online approval at the beginning of the factory, and any problems during construction can be raised and feedback through DingTalk. On the mobile phone, FAW-Volkswagen staff can see the construction situation at all times.
Next, FAW-Volkswagen Management Service Department is also trying to link more upstream and downstream partners to make every link in the industrial chain more transparent and efficient. Looking back, people may not be able to believe that the original DingTalk was just an office software known for "punching cards".
Today's DingTalk has changed from a simple application that provides attendance, OA, and IM to a new productivity tool that goes deep into business digitalization. In the past few years, DingTalk has run out of several major industry tracks such as education, government affairs, medical care, manufacturing, retail, and the Internet, of which manufacturing has become the third largest industry battlefield of DingTalk. More than half of the specialized new small giant enterprises announced by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology use DingTalk.
This is not unrelated to the layout of DingTalk. In 2020, Alibaba proposed the cloud nail integration strategy, DingTalk and Alibaba Cloud fully integrated, and integrated all relevant forces of the group to ensure that the "cloud nail integration" strategy is fully implemented. In 2021, DingTalk proposed the "two digitizations" (organizational digitization and business digitalization) strategy to help enterprises and organizations achieve full-link digitalization.
At the 2022 DingTalk conference, DingTalk made a further explanation of the current digital path of enterprises and their own value - let progress happen.
After achieving efficient collaboration within the enterprise, DingTalk takes a step forward, penetrates the organizational gap, makes the communication and daily management between enterprises, upstream and downstream become more efficient, and goes deeper into the core business links, through data frequency, to achieve cost reduction and efficiency for thousands of industries.
At the past press conference, Ye Jun, president of DingTalk, said that any enterprise needs to combine digital technology from the two dimensions of organization and business, and activate everyone's creativity with the help of new productivity tools such as DingTalk.
At FAW-Volkswagen, this has become a reality.