Small companies can also have big innovations: the story behind Zhejiang Mobile's "dedicated through train"

1. Introduction

The wave of "mass entrepreneurship and innovation" has come, which is both an opportunity and a challenge. For many companies in cities and counties, resources and manpower may be the main constraints for big innovations, but Taizhou Mobile tells everyone with its own story that as long as you have enough creativity and the right methods, small companies can also have big innovations.

2. The journey of innovation begins

As government and enterprise dedicated lines account for an increasing proportion of mobile business, their importance is also increasing, but the corresponding provisioning model remains at a rough level. At this time, the leadership proposed the idea of ​​product standardization, requiring that government and enterprise services can be operated and provisioned as efficiently as a production line, so the Network Department took on this task and started our innovation journey.

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3. Design features with the customer at the center

How can we be truly customer-centric? We need to have empathy, consider issues from the perspective of end customers, and discover their pain points, difficulties, and expectations.

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Since we want to improve the process of opening the government-enterprise dedicated line:

• First, we need to identify the roles involved in the entire process, including account managers, front-line construction personnel, back-end administrators, and auditors. The core goal of our process improvement is to change and innovate the working environment of the above four roles.
• Secondly, understand and analyze the current backend system to see how well it supports the workflow, whether each link has been connected in place, and what deficiencies still exist.
• ***, think of yourself as the above role, draw a complete user journey map, list the role's pain points, and provide solutions with a designer's mindset.

System architecture diagram

Looking back at our entire innovation process, we identified the following requirements during the function design process:

• The PC and WeChat sides need to be developed simultaneously to meet the usage requirements of each role.
• By improving the system support capabilities, the manual process can be reduced as much as possible.
• Strengthen the connection and feedback capabilities of each link to ensure smooth and transparent information between the front and back ends.

Therefore, we proposed the “Dedicated Through Line” solution for the government-enterprise dedicated line opening scenario, a smart support platform connected to the existing support platform, covering the entire process of opening, activation and delivery of government-enterprise dedicated lines.

4. Use the crowd-business model to build a team

In terms of team building, it is not the case that simply gathering experts who are deeply involved in the opening of government-enterprise dedicated lines will enable smooth innovation. What is more needed now is the crowd-business model. Because T-shaped talents with broad knowledge and strong professional knowledge are in urgent need, the simplest way is to form a team - WeQ, which means "crowd business".

Our team members include front-line government and enterprise administrators, market system support personnel, personnel with front-end and back-end software development experience, etc., and are composed of experts from different professional departments, so that our team can fully grasp the needs of the front line,

For example:

When we designed the maintenance function, the original idea was that the backend administrator would pass the point information to the front-line construction personnel through the mobile phone. This improved the original process to a certain extent, but there was no fundamental change to the actual process. So someone proposed to scan the barcode, identify the device serial number, and connect with the private network system, directly realizing the function of remotely searching for point information without the need for an intranet, and also reducing the workload of one role. This different voice can make the entire innovative product shine.

5. Stand on the shoulders of giants

We have achieved certain results in the initial product development and promotion in county and city companies. However, there are still many shortcomings in the product itself. The main reason is that according to the current capabilities of the team, it is difficult to make new breakthroughs. In order to further improve, we actively participate in various innovation competitions, listen to the advice of relevant experts, and continuously improve and iterate the product. Finally, we were shortlisted for the group's independent development competition.

The theme of this development competition is artificial intelligence, which can be said to be in line with the current trend, but it is a big challenge for us, and we dare not even think about it in the early stage of product design. Our team has tackled the problem in the direction of artificial intelligence, and has received strong support from the "Jiutian" platform within China Mobile. As a result, our products are like wings, and intelligent solution design, engineering scheduling, business auditing, these functions that can only be achieved through AI and big data technology came into being. After obtaining preliminary results, the functions were also connected with the development department of the provincial company and promoted throughout the province.

Intelligent solution design function

Intelligent engineering scheduling PC interface diagram

Intelligent business audit

VI. Conclusion

In short, in the case of a shortage of resources and manpower in the early stage, we should focus on creating small and beautiful products. Get things done first, and then we can move to a higher level platform, obtain more resources, do things well, and then make adjustments and iterations in the later stage to make the product continue to be optimized.