Richard Yan: YIZUMI Strives to Be a World-Class Enterprise

20 years, it is long enough for one to bring out its best. But it is the good time for a company to fight for its goal.

2022 was a special year for YIZUMI, and it marked its 20th anniversary since its inception in 2002. Over the past two decades, the company has been focusing on improving its technical strength, streamlining the quality management process, and continually benchmarking against the advanced machinery companies worldwide to promote its transition from simply a machinery manufacturer to a turnkey solution supplier.

In 2023, YIZUMI starts a new journey and a new mission as it begins a new 20 years. What new highlights and strategies will YIZUMI bring in the coming future?

At YIZUMI CONNECT 2023 in April, Mr. Richard Yan, the Chairman and CEO of YIZUMI, said, "In the past 20 years, YIZUMI is just a Chinese company, which sees the world from the perspective of Chinese market. But the next YIZUMI will be a global company and see the world from a global perspective. YIZUMI strives to grow bigger and stronger to be a world-class brand in the machinery manufacturing industry."

Highlights from Mr. Richard Yan's speech at YIZUMI CONNECT 2023

Driven by industrial sentiment,

Let the world see YIZUMI

Most partners of YIZUMI have been in the machinery manufacturing industry for around 30 years. As veterans in the industry, they have deep feelings for their careers. They try to make excellent products and let the world see them. This is also the original intention of YIZUMI.

For this, YIZUMI advances itself from "products, operations and globalization" to drive its continuous growth. After 20 years of hard working, YIZUMI has now become a company that develops in all fields of molding and casting equipment, including injection molding machines, die casting machines, rubber injection machines, high-speed packaging machines and robotic automation system, and its business covers more than 70 countries and regions.

"Exporting and doing business abroad only represent a company's market share and scale is bigger, but it does not mean that the company is outstanding. In the future, we will continue to learn from those excellent companies and break through to make YIZUMI a world-class brand in our field." Mr. Richard Yan emphasized, "We must always be enterprising and set clear development goals to promote the implementation of organizational structure, and grow together with our employees."

And now, when dealing with the unpredictable international economic situation, company leaders must plan ahead. When the environment changes, they should adjust the company's expansion speed and direction in time. YIZUMI used to make three-year strategic planning, and it has been adjusted to a five-year cycle since 2021 and has introduced a new strategic planning then.

In the future, YIZUMI will adhere to the direction of its strategic planning, and go forward to its goals of ranking in the top five globally for injection molding machines and top three globally for die-casting machines. Meanwhile, YIZUMI will compete with the top machinery manufacturers from Japan and Germany in the global market to expand its global market share and reach the global medium to high-tier customers.

Mr. Richard Yan explained: "Five-year strategic planning is very important to YIZUMI. We analyze and extract market insights and differences to make our own strategic planning based on a certain template and compared with industry benchmarks. It will guide us to our goals gradually and firmly."

In recent years, there have been more and more uncertain factors in the domestic and overseas markets, and the market competition has become more intense. However, scientific planning and management have enabled YIZUMI to have a richer ability to deal with these uncertainties.

"Strategic planning is all about selection and trade-offs. The one that can help you to achieve your goals more quickly and effectively is a good strategy." Mr. Richard Yan emphasized that the most difficult thing for a strategy is to execute, not to formulate. The effective implementation of strategies involves reforms to the organization, process and talent structure. And these reforms need to be supported by corporate culture.

Shaping innovation mechanisms,

To drive the future development of YIZUMI

Driven by the deep feelings for the industry, YIZUMI has a forward direction and a clear strategic plan, but how to keep the company moving forward and operating efficiently? Mr. Richard Yan believes that the pursuit of all-round improvement and strategic layout will be essential factors to drive the future development of YIZUMI. And we need a good mechanism and scientific management system to fulfill these objectives.

In the machinery manufacturing industry, technical experts used to be the main force and play an important role in the processes of product definition and design, which are likely to result in products with good technical performance, but might be hard to produce or sell. YIZUMI also has learnt from such experience.

We need to reform our R&D process to get closer to customers' requirements. To this end, YIZUMI has benchmarked against Huawei, drawing on its transformation of product development process to conduct comprehensive and complete process management of the product life cycle. Meanwhile, the three main business process systems of R&D, production and sales are closely integrated to enhance their coordination of the whole process.

"There is much professional knowledge and expertise in each main business process. Especially through the Integrated Product Development (IPD) process, companies can find out their own inadequacies, such as: strategic market insights, also called as strategic marketing with a fashionable word." Mr. Richard Yan explained, "In the past, 'marketing' means to catch the trend, producing what was popular at the time, which lacks of thorough and medium to long-term market insights."

However, the capability of market insights is actually related to product development. Many great companies and products originate from the guidance of market insights on product research and development. For example: Apple Inc., which can dig deep to the future needs and define its products earlier than its rivals.

For this, Mr. Richard Yan said, "YIZUMI has become the first company in the injection molding machine industry to successfully introduce the IPD model five years ago. And this allows us to get rid of the original way to develop products and start exploring the true Leads To Cash (LTC) process."

In 2022, YIZUMI has worked together with the former supply chain team of Huawei to upgrade the supply chain process by introducing the Integrated Supply Chain (ISC) reform, ensuring that we can be more effectively to meet the market demand. At the same time, we introduce the new CRM system as well. Meanwhile, We have built a continuous improvement team (CIT) to promote the consecutive optimization of the above-mentioned process systems.

"Standardized" Operation,

Contribute to YIZUMI’s global expansion

Substantial investment and capital are the essentials of the machinery manufacturing industry. And the machine industry is also an important pillar of the national economy. At present, YIZUMI has taken a leading position in the Chinese market. But to be a future ready company, we need to redefine the market and customers, and update product and technologies synchronously to open up new market.

"Globalization is an inevitable trend. When a company grows to a certain extent, restricting itself to a Chinese company will definitely constrain its perception and development. We need to adjust our mindset to regard ourselves as a multinational company headquartered in China." Mr. Richard Yan believes that there is still gap to catch up with European technologies and industry benchmarks, especially for the machinery manufacturing industry. We must connect with advanced technologies and make a good balance between product quality and production quantity.

Germany and India are the two most important overseas markets of YIZUMI. At the end of 2017, YIZUMI established a R&D (Research & Development) center in Aachen, Germany. It has its unique mission to act as the YIZUMI innovation engine and drive the upgrading of technologies and products.

In order to further meet requirements of local customers in Germany for equipment performance, quality and service, technical service centers in Nuremberg and Lippstadt have been successively established by YIZUMI, which are mainly responsible for the sales and service of products in Germany. During the business process, the demands from mid and high-end markets have been increased. It further enhances technology innovation of YIZUMI, thereby accelerating the pace of integration with the market and technology in Germany.

India is another very important market for YIZUMI. In 2022, YIZUMI invested more than 100 million RMB to build a new factory in Gujarat, India. The factory adopts digital lean manufacturing concept and employs the same manufacturing process standard and product quality standard as in the HQ in China. Basing on local market situation, YIZUMI India optimizes some of their process in order to deliver quality product and service to local Indian customers in a swift way.

"Product and process standardization is of utmost importance in global operation. Unavoidably, we will encounter different problems and requirements when we try to build our machines and sell our products in different overseas markets, with a high degree of standardization. We can avoid high cost when we try to fit into the situations." Mr. Richard Yan said.

Meanwhile, the infrastructure of YIZUMI in China can support basically a yearly turnover of RMB 7 billion. In the future, YIZUMI will invest more in strategic overseas market. We will strengthen our technical support and service capability to create more value for our global customers.

Notes:

Integrated Product Development (IPD) is a framework to help management and active project teams reach innovation goals. Originating in government systems, IPD is a management theory that promotes simultaneous integration of multi-disciplinary teams and concurrent engineering.

Integrated Supply Chain (ISC) management is an approach to supply chain management that focuses on the optimization of resources and processes throughout the entire production process. It leverages technology and data-driven insights to help companies make decisions that reduce costs, increase efficiency, and improve customer satisfaction.

Lead to Cash (LTC) is an integrated business process that combines multiple SAP solutions with artificial intelligence (AI) and experience management models. Put simply, it essentially spans your entire business process chain from initial customer contact to the final order completion stage with service delivery.