Customer overview
CRRC Tangshan Locomotive & Rolling Stock Co., Ltd., a core subsidiary of CRRC Corporation Limited, was founded in 1881. Born during the late-Qing Self-Strengthening (Yangwu) Movement alongside the construction of China’s first railway—the Tangxu Railway—it is regarded as the cradle of China’s rail transit industry, the entrepreneurial origin of China’s railways, and the starting point of CRRC. China’s first steam locomotive, the “China Rocket,” the first imperial passenger coach, the “Luanyu” coach, and China’s first 350 km/h high-speed EMU trainset were all produced here. Today, the company is primarily engaged in the R&D, manufacturing, overhaul and maintenance, and services of rail transit equipment, as well as diversified businesses in digital industrialization, new materials, smart energy, electromechanical systems, and environmental protection.
As enterprise digital transformation deepens—especially with central state-owned enterprises (central SOEs) becoming the primary arena—the mandate to build world-class companies has made advanced digital capabilities a critical driver of high-quality development. CRRC Tangshan must address a range of IT management challenges, including pronounced system heterogeneity, ensuring data consistency, upgrading budget control and management, improving supply-chain collaboration efficiency, strengthening digital-intelligence support for internal operations, and high system operating costs.
To accelerate the resolution of the above issues, CRRC Tangshan aims to leverage a middle-platform (middle-office) approach. Building on its existing traditional, specialized systems, it will break down integration barriers and provide users with a seamless, user-friendly front-office application experience. By enhancing capabilities for the datafication of business and the operationalization of data, the company seeks to transform its internal operating model and evolve its business, management, and commercial models—boosting the competitiveness of its products and services and achieving a stronger competitive edge. Through digitalization, it will improve management efficiency, thereby supporting the implementation of a service-oriented manufacturing model and extending the enterprise value chain.
Business Challenges
Numerous systems with fragmented data; business processes still need to be integrated end-to-end.
As CRRC Tangshan’s business expanded, starting in 2009 it successively implemented more than a dozen information systems—including ERP, MES (manufacturing execution), logistics, master data management (MDM), and PLM. However, most of these systems remain fragmented and standalone, operating independently with their own data standards. Standards are not unified, data quality lacks governance, and severe information silos have emerged. Users must operate across multiple platforms, with complex handoffs and low efficiency. As a result, business integration requires constant point-to-point system interfacing at very high cost. These issues severely affect operations, hinder business development, and interfere with data analysis, seriously impacting management decision-making.
Upgrade budget management and establish a granular management framework.
The legacy budget system relied on numerous forms with inconsistent content and heavy personalization, making compilation and reporting complex. Workflows were relatively cumbersome, with significant time spent on communication during review and rollback cycles. With the rapid expansion of core businesses, execution deviations emerged across and within business segments, creating management gaps. There is an urgent need to strengthen standardized financial controls through a budget management system and enhance financial risk prevention. To meet CRRC Tangshan Company’s goals of elevating the strategic value of finance and achieving more granular operational control, it is essential to gain real-time visibility into profit and cost profiles and use budget management to provide valuable guidance and feedback for business operations—establishing a management framework that “traces value to its source and focuses on business fundamentals.”
Inefficient procurement–supplier collaboration; lacking ecosystem connectivity.
In the large equipment industry, procurement processes are complex and involve numerous suppliers, making unified management difficult. Tendering and bidding must be handled online, and transmitting process/technical documents to suppliers requires dedicated channels. The aim is to phase out bulky paper-based tender documents and accurately capture core suppliers’ bid information and process/technical documentation.
Numerous typical business scenarios; high system operating costs.
Many applications have been developed to support daily internal management, using different programming languages, deployed on different servers, and managed by different administrators—resulting in high downstream management costs, difficult operations and maintenance (O&M), and multiple entry points that hurt user experience. A stable, scalable, enterprise-grade IT application service platform is needed. Employee-related services should be prioritized (from high to low) and, following a mobile-first principle, gradually consolidated onto the platform for unified development and O&M.
Solutions
To put unified management into practice at CRRC Tangshan and drive its transition from traditional manufacturing to digital operations, the company is building two digital management platforms—a service-oriented front office and a business-oriented middle office—and has designed the overall application architecture as follows:
The overall plan mainly comprises 14 business clouds, including a Corporate Administration Cloud, HR Cloud, Employee Services Cloud, Enterprise Performance Cloud, Warehousing Cloud, Production Collaboration Cloud, Indirect (Non‑production) Procurement Cloud, Collaboration Cloud, After‑sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Intelligent Collaboration Cloud, Equipment Cloud, and an enterprise‑wide Budget Management Platform.
Build the Kingdee Cloud Cosmic Business Middle Platform to bridge process gaps.
Leveraging the Kingdee Cloud Cosmic system—and accommodating the enterprise’s characteristics of multi-organization structures, multiple heterogeneous systems, and diverse business lines—the company will build a company-wide employee portal and a role-based unified workspace with a single point of entry. A unified indirect (non‑production) procurement platform will connect procurement with the ERP and the contract management platform to eliminate process disconnects. A supplier onboarding/qualification platform will remove supplier master data gaps between the master data management (MDM) platform and the ERP system, and bridge communication gaps between planners and suppliers. Based on the Cosmic platform, an IT service management platform will be established that is user service–centric, process‑oriented, and supports full lifecycle management. In addition, dozens of custom modules for specialized business scenarios will be developed to comprehensively enhance service capabilities and service quality.
The unified portal, as the single entry point to our heterogeneous systems, has made it much easier to operate across different systems. Previously, we had multiple systems, multiple entry points, and multiple links—completing a single task meant hunting for links and entering passwords, which was very inconvenient. Now we have a unified information publishing/receiving module, a unified system entry, a unified entry point for initiating business processes, a unified application platform, and a unified workflow platform, which has greatly improved operational efficiency,” said Mr. Deng from the Governance and Control Center.
Through middle-office connectivity, the unified system enables major management modules to be tightly integrated and collaborate efficiently, avoiding issues such as inconsistent data sources, duplicate entry, and purely offline management. With a unified process management platform, we can accelerate business innovation and support continuous management improvement at low cost.
Closed-Loop Budget Management: Plan Before, Control During, Analyze After.
Through budget formulation, the plans and targets of all business activities are quantified in a concrete, systematic way to form the annual budget management plan. Through budget analysis, the results of budget execution and the causes of variances are fed back, and corresponding solutions are developed to enable timely budget optimization. By instituting budget adjustment workflows, budget change activities are standardized so that budget management both adheres to clear rules and maintains a consistent framework. In this way, budgeting, supervision and control, analysis, adjustment, and evaluation are integrated into a closed loop that can evolve alongside the company’s budget management practices, ultimately establishing a comprehensive budget management system.
With the go-live of comprehensive budgeting, CRRC Tangshan has digitalized its enterprise-wide budgeting system. Horizontally, it tightly links corporate strategy, planning, and budget preparation to achieve seamless business–finance integration, enabling processing and monitoring of key business activities and optimizing the allocation of financial, physical, and human resources. Vertically, budgeting now cascades in a data-driven manner from the company level to subordinate budget units, improving performance management efficiency. Ultimately, this delivers a budget management system that “traces value to its source and focuses on business fundamentals.
Integrate procurement processes end-to-end; bring suppliers into compliance.
By establishing the indirect (non‑production materials) procurement module and integrating it with the ERP, contract management platform, and master data management (MDM) platform, procurement requests, sourcing method applications, and tendering processes are consolidated, with data synchronized to the MDM, contract management, and supplier platforms. By periodically publishing sourcing projects on the supplier portal, suppliers are encouraged to participate in sourcing. Leveraging the supplier management module, the reasons, categories, and organizations for onboarding each supplier are specified and the onboarding process is controlled. The company has also built its own marketplace platform to help suppliers list standard tools, general accessories, consumables, and auxiliary materials for direct purchase, shortening procurement cycles via the marketplace.
The integration of heterogeneous systems has reduced the frequency of switching between applications and made progress easier to manage, achieving end-to-end procurement process integration. With the middle office as the initiation point for indirect (non-production) procurement, once a transaction is completed the middle office now automatically synchronizes data to the heterogeneous systems, improving procurement efficiency. Meanwhile, the customized catalog marketplace enables requesting departments to complete purchases quickly via a Taobao-style shopping experience, providing direct interoperability between requesters, product catalogs/procedures, and the SRM system. We have unified the supplier onboarding/qualification platform and seamlessly connected ecosystem partners. By establishing a supplier portal, we have expanded our supplier pool—attracting more suppliers into the company’s supply chain while ensuring the quality of those onboarded. Ultimately, we standardized four procurement models: qualification-based tendering, catalog marketplace purchasing, CRRC e-Procurement (Zhongchegou), and case-by-case one-time sourcing.
Develop multi-scenario business applications and build an aggregated business services middle office.
Based on the Kingdee Cloud Cosmic technology foundation, the company has built 14 business clouds—including the Security & Protection Cloud, Energy & Equipment Cloud, R&D Technology Cloud, Shared Services Cloud, Party–Mass Services Cloud, Functional Office Cloud, Marketing Cloud, O&M Services Cloud, Quality Cloud, and After‑sales Service Cloud—optimizing over 100 business processes and gradually achieving integrated management across people, finance, materials, production, supply, and products.
By developing applications on the Kingdee Cloud Cosmic technology foundation, we have significantly reduced development and O&M costs and improved application efficiency. Fully leveraging the Cosmic platform, we integrate business, processes, data-driven capabilities, and services to build an integrated operations-and-maintenance service platform that connects internal teams, customers, and ecosystem partners. Through data services, we enhance service quality and response speed. This establishes a unified digital operations system that comprehensively improves business operating efficiency and delivers a better customer experience.
Project Value
Since 2019, CRRC Tangshan Locomotive & Rolling Stock Co., Ltd. has merged its Integrated Management Department and Strategic Management Department to establish an Operations Management & Control Center, aiming for deep integration of IT and business management. Guided by the “One Business, Three Integrations, One Brand” digital transformation strategy—One Business: evolving from a manufacturer to a service-oriented manufacturer; Three Integrations: embedding green, intelligent, and humanistic concepts; One Brand: building the “Digital-Intelligent Tangche” corporate brand.
In 2020, the company introduced the next‑generation Kingdee Cloud Cosmic platform. Adopting a bimodal IT model, it built innovative applications such as Safety Dual‑Prevention, visitor pre‑registration, personal workspace, and rapid‑deploy HR apps. Leveraging existing ERP, MES, logistics, MDM, and PLM systems, it has built a new Cosmic‑based business capability platform, connecting suppliers for technical document collaboration and building out an innovative application middle office based on a microservices architecture. The focus is on establishing digital capabilities across the full value chain, effective product data management across the value chain, enterprise‑wide digital operations and decision‑making capabilities, and company‑wide digital work collaboration. This includes SaaS built natively on Cosmic—such as Finance Cloud, Supplier Collaboration Cloud, comprehensive budgeting, Treasury Cloud, and CloudHub (Yunzhijia)—as well as a digital operations and control platform.
The Value of Digital Transformation
Customer Experience Platform
Completed development of the CRM on both web and mobile. By building more than a dozen foundational data repositories, the CRM was designed to enable standardized, end-to-end collection of marketing data and automated sales data reporting, thereby improving marketing efficiency.
Ecosystem Platform
Within one year of go-live, we connected with 3,000+ suppliers and completed 2,000 procurement contracts, enabling supplier onboarding, performance evaluation, tendering, bidding, and marketplace-based procurement management.
Information Systems Platform
Connecting 10,000+ employees, we rebuilt the portal to enable centralized processing of the Group’s business operations, centralized information publishing and presentation, efficient collaboration, and anytime access to information and applications. A unified application center streamlines operations, fully leveraging the powerful configurability of Kingdee Cloud Cosmic to integrate Cosmic applications and third-party systems into a single application entry point.
Data Analytics Platform
Institutionalized management, proceduralized policies, and standardized processes: over 200 workflows deliver vertical control and horizontal collaboration, integrated with BI for data analysis and visualization.
Internet of Things (IoT) Platform
Integrates with the ERP system (supply chain and finance), the contract management platform, the MES (manufacturing execution) platform, the MDM (master data management) platform, the PLM technical documentation platform, and 10+ other IT systems—effectively linking and coordinating the company’s various business environments.