Zhongtong Bus ERP Project Experience 1

frozenviolet

Zhongtong Bus ERP Project Experience 1 [Copy link]

Shandong Zhongtong Bus Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Zhongtong Bus") is a standardized listed company controlled by China National Highway Vehicle Machinery Corporation, a direct subsidiary of the Ministry of Transport. It is a backbone enterprise designated by the state to produce buses. It currently has total assets of nearly 700 million yuan and an annual production capacity of 4,000 buses of various types. The product categories are divided into large, medium and light buses, with more than 40 types of long-distance highway buses and urban buses of high, medium and ordinary grades. The products are sold to more than 20 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions in China. It is one of the most competitive manufacturers of domestic bus brands and one of the 16 key products supported and developed by Shandong Province. The company has a provincial scientific research institution "Shandong Bus Engineering Technology Research Center".
In order to enable "Zhongtong Bus" to maintain its advantages in the fierce market competition, the company's decision-making level decided to adopt modern management ideas to manage the enterprise; strengthen financial management as the core, take cost management as the breakthrough, and introduce the world's most advanced ERP system to comprehensively manage the enterprise.
1. System planning
The corporate benefits of "Zhongtong Bus" are at the forefront of its peers, but the company's information construction has always been relatively backward. At the end of 1998, except for the production department, sales company, finance department, business management department, and personnel department, which had achieved computer networking and applied management information systems (including financial accounting systems and sales information systems), other departments were basically managed manually. With the increasingly fierce market competition, the company gradually realized that this backward management had become a bottleneck for the further development of the company, and it was imperative to introduce advanced enterprise management software and models.
In 1999, the company was determined to establish an enterprise integrated information system and introduce ERP to strengthen enterprise resource management. A 15-member leadership team headed by the general manager and participated by major leaders was established, a chief engineer group headed by the chief engineer, an office of 6 people, and a research group of 36 people for each subsystem. Expert service teams were hired to help the company solve various technical problems that occurred during the implementation process. In order to ensure the smooth implementation of the ERP system, the company's leaders regarded this work as an important work content second only to production tasks in 1999-2000, and carried out a general mobilization for implementation.
In the initial stage of project implementation, a comprehensive investigation and analysis of the company's existing systems was conducted. During the investigation, several training sessions were held on ERP application knowledge, purpose, and objectives. The staff were organized to jointly analyze the system's workflow, identify the "bottleneck" links that affect the company's development, put forward requirements for the new system, and formulate the ERP system construction and application goals:
Construction goal: Establish the company's resource system to achieve strict and scientific management, reduce costs, and improve the company's market competitiveness.
Application goal: The application of ERP runs through the production and operation process of all the company's leading products, involving all the production management departments and workshops of the company. With the support of the ERP system, the company will generate overall benefits.
From the height of the company's survival and the needs of market competition, the company's leaders are determined to apply ERP's advanced ideas and technical means, make full use of information technology to transform traditional enterprises, and enable "Zhongtong Company" to continue to maintain its advantages in the fierce market competition. In 1999 and 2000, the company's leadership determined the working principle of "strengthening financial management as the core, cost management as the breakthrough, ERP management as the means, and demanding benefits from management", and took ERP as the key management element to fully express the company's leadership's determination to implement ERP.
2. Software selection
In order to ensure that the ERP software is suitable for the characteristics of the company's own management, the company organized human resources to do a lot of work. We conducted a survey of the enterprise to gain a preliminary understanding of the enterprise's business and the needs of each department, and then prepared a targeted survey report, raising many problems in the enterprise's management. Then, we conducted training on the ERP system management concept for the entire enterprise's senior leaders and business department managers. Through the training, managers have a correct understanding and expectation of the ERP system, and realize that the importance of ERP to enterprise management transformation is inseparable from the strong support of senior leaders. After a detailed demand survey, the company selected the standard and quantitative indicator system for the ERP system. When setting the indicator system, not only the degree of software demand satisfaction was considered, but also factors such as the software's scalability and the development strength of the software manufacturer were considered.
In order to reduce the development cost, shorten the development cycle, reduce the development risk, and improve the development quality during the development and implementation of each subsystem software in ERP, the company determined to select mature system application software, and on this basis completed the project implementation strategy of the localized development of the system. We inspected the ERP software of many companies in Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing, and finally selected ERP3.0 of Beijing Hejia Software Technology Co., Ltd. as the technical support system for the company's resource management.
3. Personnel training
Training is an important aspect and ideological basis for ERP implementation. Good training is one of the key factors for the success or failure of ERP implementation. Without mastering ERP knowledge and principles, it is impossible to propose various requirements of the company for ERP. If the requirements cannot be proposed or are not proposed well, the ERP construction will be ineffective.
Since the early stage of the project, we have trained the leaders at all levels, department heads and various business personnel in the aspects of ERP and its unit technical knowledge and application capabilities in batches and in accordance with the content needs of the project implementation. Among them, there are more than 20 formal and large-scale training courses, 958 people, and the total class hours have reached 6,487 hours (an average of 6.7 hours per person). The training organized by the department itself or temporarily organized by the project working group is held at any time according to the needs. The most important thing is that the application personnel actively participate and combine the self-practice of the application, which forms a wide range of support and demand for the successful application of the software. The company leaders have formulated assessment management methods to promote the smooth development of training, and combined the training assessment application with the job skills and business quality requirements in the system, thereby fundamentally ensuring the establishment and benign operation of the training mechanism. The training has improved employees' ERP knowledge level, and the improvement in knowledge level has enabled enterprises to make more reasonable demands on ERP projects based on their own requirements, promoting the improvement of application development and the popularization of applications.