PRESS RELEASE: Recently, the 4th International Engineering Informatization Management Forum, with the theme of “Digital Empowerment in Global Business Management System”, was held in Nanjing, China. Representatives from government agencies such as the Department of Commerce of Jiangsu Province, local and foreign industry-leading enterprises gathered together to explore management ideas, strategic layout, and practical experience of “digitalization” in the industry.

During the experience sharing session of digital application in global business management, Jiang Yongzhong, Vice President of ZTE, shared ZTE’s practical experience in the digital transformation of global service engineering project management.

In the current era, the wave of digitalization is sweeping the world, and the digital and intelligent transformation of the international engineering industry is unstoppable. Digital transformation has become the only way for engineering enterprises to conduct scientific management, reduce costs, increase efficiency, and improve their core competitiveness. In the midst of the digital era, facing the uncertainties of the internationalization process of global engineering projects and the pain points of long project processes, high business complexity, and great difficulty in data integration, ZTE has continuously promoted digital innovation and has developed its own digital delivery platform called iEPMS (Intelligent Engineering Project Management System), which features “Data & Computing Dual-drive”, “Real-time Perception”, “Intelligent Decision-making”, “Outward Extension”, “Smart Collaboration”, and “Multiparty Win-win”. This platform covers the entire end-to-end processes of contracts, supply chain, procurement, engineering, services, and finance, and is the first in the industry to realize the automation, intelligence, and digitalization of network deployment and engineering project management.

Steadily Promote Digital Transformation

The digital transformation of ZTE’s global service is not achieved overnight. It is based on continuous exploration and breakthroughs in specific situations, as well as sustained innovation and development of project efficiency improvement tools. The aim is to gradually realize the storage and circulation of information and business from offline to online, and from online to real-time, in order to build a digital delivery system for collaborative and win-win situations among customers, partners, and ZTE. Early in 2013, ZTE started to develop the single-architecture EPMS V1.0 engineering project management system based on .Net framework. In 2018, the company started the microservice transformation and reconstruction processes based on cloud-native architecture, and gradually evolved from V1.0 to V2.0 and V2.1 versions by incorporating technologies such as big data and AI. By the end of 2022, the system had completed the microservice transformation of all modules and entered the V3.0 phase.

On February 27, 2023, ZTE global service migrated more than 13,000 ongoing projects to the V3.0 microservice version of iEPMS, which means iEPMS has entered its cloud-native phase. In terms of “green development”, it effectively reduced R&D costs and helps ZTE achieve its “dual carbon”strategy goals. In terms of “stability mechanisms”, downtime duration and the average number of monthly faults in the R&D are greatly reduced. In terms of “fast and efficient”, the implementation of various technical means, such as globally unified domain names, CDN acceleration, and distributed deployment, has made the system more efficient, empowering online, intelligent, remote, and mobile operations, maximizing user experience. In terms of “independent and controllability”, all technology stacks are based on mainstream, open-source self-developed technologies, and will be more autonomous and secure in the future product evolution.

Continuously Building Key Capabilities

Focusing on the key iEPMS capabilities, ZTE is committed to working with partners to achieve intelligent and efficient operations and help customers achieve visual and collaborative management through its digital capabilities and scientific decision-making to support successful project delivery.

The schedule management capability can achieve multi-level integrated collaborative management from contract milestones, project milestones, project master plans to detailed site plans, and automatically issue work tasks. Collection of progress data from various business nodes in real time through touchpoint tools, implementing efficient management of project schedule, meeting customers’ requirements for intuitive visualization and efficient interpretation.

The cost management capability can implement automatic synchronization of project estimates, online preparation and filing management of budgets, automatic generation of cost ledgers in accordance with the progress of task activities, and real-time online management and control of project delivery costs.

The quality management capability can improve the engineering service quality management and control capabilities and help partners save costs through collaboration between the cloud quality management platform and mobile operation terminals, together with AI quality inspection and AI approval.

The material management capability can be coordinated with ZTE’s WMS system to achieve automatic material requistioning and traceability of material object management flow, ensuring compliance and strengthening internal control.

Regarding future digital capability building, Jiang Yongzhong said, “Internally, ZTE will continue to promote the transformation of delivery mode, and is committed to the ultimate improvement of internal efficiency. Externally, ZTE will continue to uphold the “win-win” cooperation concept, and build an intelligent, collaborative, agile, and efficient ecological chain with customers and partners. By building digital tools and visualized dashboards, ZTE will support sharing and interaction of project data that customers are focused on, intelligentize and automate on-site operations of partners, improve user experience, and jointly create new digital and intelligent values. “