“Internet + Manufacturing” is an important issue in the transformation of all traditional manufacturing industries. Germany proposed Industry 4.0. The United States then proposed advanced manufacturing, taking advanced manufacturing as a national strategy, and China proposed "Made in China 2025," all of which shows that if manufacturing cannot be Internet-enabled, there is no way out.
Recently, Haier was once again written into the case library by Harvard Business School, and was well received by Harvard teachers and students. In fact, this shows that Haier's exploration represents a direction, that is, the path of transformation to the Internet that all the big companies in the world are looking for. Specific to “Internet + Manufacturing”, Haier’s exploration is a connected factory, but it is not a transformation of a factory, especially it cannot be simply understood as “machine substitution”, nor is it a smart factory, but an ecological system. The whole process of the whole system of the enterprise must be subverted.
Specifically, this kind of subversion focuses on three aspects: the first is the subversion of the enterprise, that is, the enterprise subverts from the traditional pyramid-type bureaucracy to the platform organization; the second is the subversion of the customer concept. It is from the customer to the user to meet the individual needs of the user; the third is the subversion of the employee, from the original employer and performer to the entrepreneur and partner. This subversion is summed up by Haier's three-way: "enterprise platformization, user personalization, employee creation."
These changes are not what companies want to change, but the Internet must make you change. Because the traditional era is a unilateral market, as long as the product is made, someone buys it, and the product is sold out and the payment is over. The Internet era is a bilateral market. It is not the customer who pays for the product, but the user traffic. This requires the company to break the traditional bureaucracy and become a platform-based enterprise.
Therefore, enterprises that adapt to the Internet era must do two things: decentralization and de-intermediation. Decentralization is the leadership of the enterprise, the superior is not the center, but the user-centered; de-intermediation is to remove the "middle layer" and remove the departments that specialize in evaluating employees. After this change, there are currently only three types of people in Haier: platform owners, small micro-masters and makers. The platform owner is to provide platform resources for entrepreneurs, the small micro-master is the entrepreneurial team, and the former employees should be transformed into makers.
When it comes to user personalization, we must first change the concept that customers and users are different. There is a saying in the traditional era that "payment is the end of sales." The customer pays the company and then has nothing to do with the company. But in the Internet age, payment should be the beginning of sales, users not only buy things, but also participate in front-end design. To do this, the factory must become a connected factory to meet the individual needs of users.
Therefore, the factory must first become a black light factory. Haier now has four factories that can turn into black light factories, no lights, no heating equipment, and no one at all. After the social individualized needs are met, what is needed is virtual design, coupled with intelligent manufacturing, when the workshop does not need to be manually imported.
Now that there are a lot of user personalization requirements, the process of designing and manufacturing the customized products can be sent to the user's mobile phone. The user is completely “visualized”, which is also the “transparent factory” Haier is doing. Nowadays, the amount of personalization is still small. When there are 100,000 users who propose 100,000 requirements, what we have to do is not to be able to make 100,000 different products, but to use the interaction of the user circle and interact to achieve a comparison. The centralized model, even if it is a new product, does not matter.
Germany's measurement of Industry 4.0 is a "two-dimensional strategy": the horizontal axis is the enterprise value, which is how much the financial statement can be improved; the vertical axis is the value of the full value chain, benefiting from upstream to downstream. Haier's “two-dimensional strategy” for exploring connected factories is slightly different. The horizontal axis is also enterprise value, but the vertical axis should be the value of user customization. In other words, the biggest feature of the connected factory is that it must bring greater user value, and only in this way can bring greater value to the enterprise.
The current global Internet development trend is like the affirmation, negation, and negation of negation in philosophy. The small industrial workshops at the beginning of the industrial revolution were produced and sold. Later it became a large production, and production and sales were separated. However, the Internet era has returned to self-production and sales, that is, after the user's needs come, the factory can be manufactured immediately.
Some people say that connected factories may subvert e-commerce. But this is not the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal should be that American Jeremy Rifkin wrote in The Zero Marginal Cost Society: In the future, Internet development will bring about a synergistic sharing economy. Everyone is a producer, such as a 3D printer, I am both a producer and a consumer. For example, at home, solar power is used to transfer electricity to the power grid. I am both a producer and a consumer.
Economics tells us that there is no value without exchange. But when the Internet develops to the later stage, this theory will be subverted. By that time, what people are pursuing will be shared value.