SAP, Lenovo and Intel helped Jide transform from a traditional manufacturing company to a data-driven manufacturing company with boosted throughput, incremental sales and higher customer and employee satisfaction.

Jide is a Chinese-based leading manufacturer of high-quality domestic appliances such as washing machines and refrigerators. It also provides original equipment manufacturing (OEM) services for well-known domestic and international brands including Siemens, SHARP, and Xiaomi. Founded in 1980, the company has gradually developed into a modern enterprise and has become one of the fastest-growing home domestic appliance brands in China.

As the whole world is going through a digital transformation, traditional manufacturing companies face challenges that force them to adopt new ways of doing business-or risk going out of business. In a recent interview with Jin Huifeng (Ethan Jin), Group DT Director at Jide, we had an engaging conversation about Jide’s transformation journey, the decisions they’ve made and the benefits Jide has seen adopting new technology from SAP, Intel, and Lenovo.

Here are some key learnings from Jide:

Become a data-driven manufacturer company with automatic end to end processes

In the past, Jide’s processes such as production, sales, operation, and customer data were not integrated with each other. And a lot of the processes were highly manual, from production planning and scheduling to bill of materials to inventory. This limited Jide’s ability to expand its production and achieve its long-term growth goals. To help solve these challenges, the company decided to apply an advanced, data-driven approach to manufacturing management. The aim was to deploy leading-edge, computer-controlled molding machines, connected to and controlled by SAP business systems, with real-time insights into operational performance enabled by SAP HANA and its Manufacturing Execution software Jide also chose Lenovo ThinkAgile HX and ThinkSystem solutions powered by Intel as the foundation for its SAP system. The strong combination rapidly transformed the new IT infrastructure for maximum performance and availability with great stability.

Benefits/New opportunities

The new data-driven manufacturing model brought Jide new opportunities:

• Achieve higher throughput largely through reduced downtime and operational costs.
• Standardize and streamline the production and approval process.
• Develop its own well received sub-brand “Xiao Ji”, targeting Gen Z.
• Shift to customer-centric manufacturing approach. With data insights, Jide’s product design and production are based on customer needs. By doing this, the company has seen great improvement in sales, customer experience and customer satisfaction.
• Achieve higher employee satisfaction. A digital dashboard helps Jide to show production data in real time. Production line workers can see the workload they have completed in real time. At the end of the day, they know how much they are getting paid each day, which motivates their employees. In Mr. Jin’s mind, data is not only a way to motivate employees, but also, it helps to shape corporate value in long term.

These outcomes are possible because of the real-time analytics enabled by SAP HANA (which SAP S/4HANA runs on). SAP partnered with Intel to optimize for the Intel Xeon Scalable Processors, running on Lenovo. This allowed Mr. Jin to deliver the results he needed to transform Jide.

“SAP’s business system helps Jide with business expansion and growth, but this also requires strong support from hardware with high performance and availability. Intel Xeon Scalable processor in Lenovo ThinkSystem provides 24/7 load balancing to keep our data-driven manufacturing process running smoothly.”  Mr. Jin said.

One afterthought: during the interview, Mr. Jin mentioned an interesting finding: in the past, Chinese consumers prefer to choose big international brands, but the situation has changed in the past years. Nowadays consumers, especially the younger generation, consider the purpose of the brand when choosing products. Does the brand care about sustainability and whether the products are made environmentally friendly? etc. This has changed the way Jide designs and makes its products, as well as how they engage with their customers.

Click here to watch the full interview

Read detailed customer case study