Breaking the traditional thinking, RPA becomes a new driving force for Dongfeng Nissan's transformation

With the advent of the digital age, the wave of digital transformation of enterprises has long been unstoppable. When the traditional automobile industry faces the dual challenges of work efficiency linkage and digital transformation, how can it embrace digital transformation in the right way? Dongfeng Nissan provides us with a new reference.

Dongfeng Nissan is an important passenger car business unit of Dongfeng Motor Corporation. It has 19,000 employees and is committed to providing consumers with high-quality products with the most advanced humanized technologies. It is currently one of the few automobile companies in China with a full value chain.

In November 2019, Dongfeng Nissan Information Committee released the "Digital Transformation Strategy" and established a company-level Digital Transformation Office, hoping to promote the digital transformation of the entire value chain through data-driven and empowerment. Using UiPath RPA to drive internal transformation is one of the best options.

Learn from experience and choose UiPath RPA

As a joint venture of a state-owned enterprise, Dongfeng Nissan has put forward new requirements for the development of work efficiency linkage, such as breaking through the original work mode and process, empowering employees and improving efficiency. In addition, the introduction of more efficient collaboration tools has also become a rigid demand. Therefore, it is imperative to use digital tools to improve the efficiency of all employees.

Dongfeng Nissan began to deploy RPA in early 2020. The company's deployment of RPA was influenced to a certain extent by its parent company Nissan Motor. Nissan Motor has deployed UiPath RPA since 2017 and now has rich experience in the use of RPA. Therefore, Dongfeng Nissan fully absorbed the experience of its parent company when introducing RPA tools, and avoided potential problems of Nissan's introduction from three aspects:

• A dedicated CoE team was formed at the company level, and team roles were clearly defined.

• Establish a standard system before full introduction.

• Empowered by technology, we promote an independent business development model.

Among them, Dongfeng Nissan's specially established digital innovation center CoE played a key role in RPA deployment.

The CoE is equipped with physical office space and equipment, and is composed of core transformation talents from the Digital Transformation Office, IT department and business department. They are mainly responsible for enabling businesses to master RPA skills, responsible for the automation of complex cross-domain scenarios, and the accumulation and promotion of common components and knowledge bases. Their working methods are characterized by agility and flatness. It is worth emphasizing that the core transformation talents of the business department are trained and output by the RPA series of workshops. After joining the CoE, they continue to practice transformation through the guidance and support of professionals, consolidate their own skills, ensure the completion of the project, and finally feed back to the CoE team to become a solid human resource guarantee. Under the empowerment of CoE, Dongfeng Nissan's business self-development rate is as high as 87.11%.

Of course, in order to better promote the application of RPA, Dongfeng Nissan also implemented a project pilot. The company took the manufacturing field as the entry point to ensure that there is both top-down promotion from the leadership of the manufacturing field and bottom-up enthusiasm for technical learning from department employees.

Based on the overall perspective of the department, select the best development object; before automation, actively promote process standardization and optimization; set up specific windows to effectively control project progress; these three points are the key factors for the success of the pilot.

Stimulate employees' potential and create new value for the company

At present, Dongfeng Nissan has introduced RPA into eight fields, with a total of 400 people trained in RPA. 126 RPA processes have been successfully launched, saving 13,221 hours each year, with significant results.

After the deployment, some business personnel have greatly changed their listening to customers:

• RPA is no longer just a process automation tool, but also a way of thinking that organizes and standardizes work.

• The awareness of using tools to solve problems and improve efficiency is far more important than how many tools you master. Tools can be learned, but awareness is difficult to cultivate. The RPA development journey has broadened our perspectives and laid the foundation for cultivating this tool-based awareness.

• For employees, mastering certain RPA development-related knowledge and completing the development of an RPA project is a great sense of accomplishment. Mastering a new tool to improve work efficiency will be applied in the future.

It can be seen that independent development not only solves the problem of work efficiency of the business itself, but also greatly helps to improve business logical thinking and independent digital applications.

Looking to the future, RPA will continue to develop

Currently, Dongfeng Nissan has introduced RPA in eight major areas of the entire value chain, including R&D, manufacturing, marketing, finance, and human resources, and has adopted a model that enables independent business development. While further cultivating potential employees, it will combine deeper research with AI, OCR, NLP and other technologies to explore cross-domain automation topics and achieve CoE's ultra-automation goals.

Ms. Chai Yicui, CoE Director of Dongfeng Nissan, said, "UiPath RPA is very suitable for business personnel. For business personnel who understand the most business pain points, the emergence of RPA can enable them to improve their skills and thus improve business efficiency more conveniently and quickly. Since RPA is a process-based automation tool, its application has also driven the reconstruction of business processes to a certain extent. Without standardization, there is no process optimization."

The current application of RPA in Dongfeng Nissan is mainly focused on data collection and automated output. In combination with the latest development of the company, Dongfeng Nissan hopes to combine RPA with autonomous analysis tools in the future to empower more business areas. At the same time, Dongfeng Nissan will also increase the construction of RPA technology to create more business value for the company and provide stronger new support for the company's digital transformation.

About Dongfeng Nissan

Dongfeng Nissan Passenger Vehicle Company of Dongfeng Motor Corporation (hereinafter referred to as Dongfeng Nissan) was established on June 16, 2003. It is an important passenger vehicle business unit of Dongfeng Motor Group Co., Ltd., engaged in the research and development, procurement, manufacturing, sales and service of NISSAN brand passenger vehicles. It is one of the few automobile companies in China with a full value chain.

Dongfeng Nissan consists of business units including the corporate headquarters, Huadu Factory, Xiangyang Factory, Zhengzhou Factory, Dalian Factory, Changzhou Factory, Wuhan Factory, engine factory and technical center, with 19,000 employees.

About UiPath

UiPath's vision is to enable the Totally Automated EnterpriseTM, where businesses use automation to unlock their greatest potential. UiPath's end-to-end automation platform combines Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solutions with a full suite of capabilities to help all organizations rapidly scale digital business operations.