The software industry is driven by technology, but its major feature is actually the service industry. However, there is a huge challenge in how to build a service industry into a professional one, because software serves people, and it is inevitable to consider the diversity and variability of organizations.
In the heating information industry, the heating regulations are one policy for each city, and the enterprise management is different from each other. It neither implements the nationwide standardization like banks, telecommunications, electricity and other industries, nor is it completely market-oriented like some other industries. The heating industry is a special industry, Even the "hot" products sold are a feeling of following "The cost and price of walking products are not well defined due to different building energy conservation standards and heat transfer between households. In this case, most heating enterprises still rely on regional monopoly operation, adopt traditional management mode, and struggle to explore and stagger in the ever-changing information wave.
From the macro environment, the whole country is changing from extensive to refined on the whole, whether active or passive. Because the dividends of reform and opening up, WTO, population and US dollars are gradually coming to an end, we all need to learn to live a prudent life for many years to come, and software and informatization are a powerful measure for heating enterprises to reduce staff and increase efficiency.
Heating informatization is a quite professional road. In addition to professional knowledge, it also involves management, software, data, training, maintenance, network, security and other work. In the past, many heating enterprises found a small team or recruited several people to carry out internal development. As time goes by, they will gradually lose the ability to continue upgrading and iteration. Modern society pays attention to division of labor, and teams that can provide products and services higher than the industry level in a specific field will win. The development of the software industry is not driven by the relationship and capital factors, but completely depends on the full exploitation of internal human resources and value. As a software enterprise focusing on the informatization of heating industry, Toll Ease Software always believes that specialization is the key to our survival and development.
The past decade has witnessed the rapid development of heating informatization. The growing informatization demand of the heating industry has pushed us forward. In particular, some advanced domestic heating enterprises have strong demands for high-end personalized needs, which has brought great challenges and pressure to our service work. How to flexibly respond to these changes in demand through organizational adjustment is something we have been thinking about during our growth, and specialization is one of the ways we are actively exploring.
Throughout the country, there are few software manufacturers in the field of heating informatization, and even the degree of specialization is generally low. One is project manufacturers, which regard the customer needs of the heating industry as customized projects. On the one hand, they charge expensive development costs, and on the other hand, they provide unstable products and services; The second type is tool enterprises, which only provide low-end standardized tool products to the heating industry, and do not support the high-end personalized needs of customers, which seriously restricts the future expansion; The third type is the local R&D team, which mainly solves the specific needs of a heating area, and achieves repairs and supplements for another year with localized services. In the course of development in recent years, we have also experienced many difficulties:
1. Ten years ago, when the software product was just released and launched online, it was very unstable. During the busy business season, it was necessary to manually monitor the performance problems in the background and manually kill the database query process, so as to ensure that the server would not be down;
2. In recent years, with the proliferation of cases of replacing the old charging system, project team members have stayed up all night to help customers migrate historical data, in order to keep as many historical business records as possible;
3. In the past two years, there were three times of blackmail virus on the customer's site. The whole team worked all night to restore all servers and the front end machine system of bank collection, and even paid the hacker expensive fees to restore data once, which can be said to be a bloody lesson;
4. The busy season of the heating industry is too obvious. Every September and October, the colleagues of the R&D Department and the Project Department are busy. Some colleagues have not taken a holiday for the National Day for several years, and everyone has arranged a vacation or marriage in the first half of the year as far as possible;
5. In the busy heating season, the heating enterprises eagerly expect the project manager to speed up the progress. In fact, most of the heating enterprises do not worry about informatization at the beginning, but crash when they need to go online later;
6. Heating enterprises generally lack experience in informatization, lack scientific understanding of the whole process of informatization, and repeated changes in demand lead to difficulties in implementation.
Ten years ago, Toll Ease Software was a purely customized development and management model. Eight years ago, it was divided into two departments, namely, R&D and implementation. Six years ago, it set up a special after-sales service team. Today, it has set up an operation and maintenance team, a testing team, and even a special data migration team. A few years before the company was founded, we mainly served some small and medium-sized heating enterprises, and the product functions barely met customer needs, basically learning from customers; In recent years, our goal is to cooperate with the leading enterprises in the heating industry. We realize that only with advanced companies can we lead the industry trend in technology and business. These leading enterprises in China have basically experienced multiple rounds of informatization construction waves and accumulated too much experience and lessons. Therefore, they have more wisdom in the new round of informatization construction, which has greatly benefited toll software.
"Specialization" is the theme word for the development of Toll EasySoft in 2018, representing the company's efforts towards specialization from top to bottom. Encouraging individuals to do so in their own fields and forming concentration means having creativity. Among them, the establishment of the operation and maintenance department is a landmark event of the company's professional division of labor. It provides the company and customers with security assurance from the basic operation and maintenance work, and has carried out a lot of work in operating systems, network security, virus protection, and data backup. Before the business peak came in 2018, it comprehensively inspected all heating enterprise customers in service, And implemented the off-site backup strategy. The establishment of the test team also promoted and improved the core test cases, and carried out a comprehensive performance test on key large-scale projects, making the system of Toll Ease software perform well in performance, among which Datong Thermo paid more than 20000 daily fees for smooth operation.
The year 2018 will come to an end in a twinkling of an eye. Generally speaking, "specialization" is equivalent to a slogan. There are many quantitative changes and few qualitative changes. We also need to implement the three words of "specialization" in every work link bit by bit.
1、 The market work is professional. In view of the increasingly strong customer demand in the heating industry, we need to accurately position the groups our products and services target. As we all know, big customers need high-end personalized services, and we need an independent service team to support them; Small customers want to simply copy the advanced management methods of other peers, so that the products are simple and stable, and they don't want to pay too high personalized service costs. Therefore, at least for these two types of customers, we need to have corresponding teams and services.
2、 Our product solutions are specialized. Our products are incubated in the continuous demand of customers. In essence, solving customers' problems is the foundation of our company's survival. However, in the actual work process, the passive response to customer needs will lead to the repeated consumption of resources by the entire company's design, research and development, testing, implementation, training, operation and maintenance, after-sales and other departments, which will eventually lead to a situation where everyone is tired of dealing with. After more than ten years of contact with the heating industry, we can say that we have the experience and ability to do some proactive product work. We have so many trusted customers, so our products can actually carry out demand research, design and R&D first, and take our products to customers for verification. The functions produced in this way will be more systematic It is presented to customers in a comprehensive and high-quality way. It is no longer the same as the previous customers who accompanied us to improve the functions repeatedly in actual projects. This can save the repeated costs of many problems and save the satisfaction of many customers.
3、 Professional project management. The company has been guided by products and services for many years since its establishment. Internal management emphasizes product function and quality, and customer service emphasizes personal service, which ultimately weakens the project management link. However, with the increasing scale and complexity of the project, the potential business and schedule risks of the project are also increasing during the implementation process. Therefore, the next step of project process management should be further specialized, establish a project assessment and bonus system, and improve the project milestone and key task tracking management system.
4、 Professional after-sales service, outstanding software comes from perfect after-sales service. With the development of the company and the increase of customers, the importance of after-sales service is becoming higher and higher. At present, the after-sales personnel have a good attitude towards customers and the ability to solve problems passively. The main problem is the lack of overall planning and management measures. It includes actively improving and maintaining customer information, systematically sorting out and summarizing customer problems, organizing and planning the training of special after-sales talents, and not yet taking a substantive step towards professional customer life cycle management and service.
5、 The specialization of R&D requires the technical director to fully promote technical iteration, hidden danger elimination, design decoupling, and technical management, improve the stability, scalability, and maintainability of product technology, and eliminate the repeated consumption caused by technical problems. Increase technical training for new and old people, and comprehensively improve the ability of technicians.
To sum up, we need to achieve specialization in marketing pre-sales, product planning, demand analysis, data migration, design and development, installation and deployment, security operation and maintenance, on-site training, project management, after-sales service, so as to make the collaboration and process between organizations clearer. In the company's open and transparent environment, we can seek market survival opportunities through efficient collaboration among teams.
In the field of informatization in the heating industry, there are shallow informatization practices and applications everywhere. The software lacks sustainable iteration and improvement, consultation and personalized solutions during project implementation, and perfect and timely after-sales services after the software is launched. We are also faced with difficulties in these areas, and we have not been able to improve for many years. Although all the members of the company are doing their best and their morale is high, the final effect is still far from the ideal state, so we should constantly reflect on where we can continue to improve, and specialization is always on the way!
