In the automotive industry, when new technological changes are coming, the history of reluctance to change jobs and change the industry has brought challenges to the development of enterprises-especially companies such as Denso.
"Initially, when I wanted to leave the IT company and come to Denso, I was strongly opposed by family and friends." One day in mid-October, recalling the scene when I joined this world-renowned component supplier around 2017, Cheng Kegang Zhi, Minister of Denso's MaaS Development Department, said that his face had a subtle smile on his face. "In Japan, changing industries is very rare."
In the rapidly developing era of the mobile Internet, Japan seemed to be a little conservative at one time.
When you check out at a Tokyo street mall, you can tell at a glance which are local Japanese and which are tourists from China. In front of the cash register with Alipay and WeChat's payment QR code, the Chinese took out their mobile phones; the Japanese took their wallets-they rarely even used credit cards, but instead took out banknotes from their wallets, silently Count it and place it neatly in the checkout tray. "Paying with a mobile phone doesn't seem to be very secure, and we don't have this habit yet," a Japanese lady told Yiou Automobile.
In the cars coming and going on the street, it seems that you can hardly see the "rapid invasion" of Internet technology. In most cars, there is no "big screen" that the Chinese love, which makes the cockpit look a lot simpler.
In 2012, writer Nobuo Ikeda published the book "The Twenty Years Lost", which interprets Japan's development from the perspective of the current situation, history, and economics. He believes that Japan has stagnated in the past 20 years. And "lifetime employment" and "lack of creative destruction" made Japan miss the most prosperous period of the Internet era. In the list of the world's top ten Internet companies, China is almost equal to the United States. If the list is extended to 30, only Japan's Yahoo Japan can barely make the shortlist.
In the automotive industry, when new technological changes come, the history of unwillingness to change jobs and change the industry has brought challenges to the development of enterprises-especially companies such as Denso.
Compared with auto companies like Toyota and Honda, Denso is not well-known, but it is the "elephant" of the auto industry.
This spare parts company born out of the Toyota system has gone through 70 years. It has more than 200 affiliated companies and more than 170,000 employees in more than 30 countries and regions around the world. It is ranked 230th in the Fortune Global 500 in 2019. Annual sales exceed $ 48 billion.
At the time of the transformation of electrified, intelligent, network-connected, and shared technologies, Denso is trying to respond quickly. Inside Denso, the "new four modernizations" are regarded as "after the car replaced the carriage, another one hundred years. With the development of these four areas, Denso hopes to increase sales to 7 trillion yen (current exchange rate is about 62 billion U.S. dollars) by 2025 through the development of these four areas, with a profit margin of 10%.
Hiring talents from the IT industry, such as Cheng Chengji, is just one aspect of the response. From the innovation of internal organizational structure to the acceleration of product landing, Denso is actively promoting a series of changes.
In the week at the end of October 2019, EIO came to Tokyo, Japan, to understand the Japanese parts supplier's thinking about transformation.
Between Palo Alto and San Jose, Santa Clara County, south of San Francisco, California, USA, there is a valley about 50 kilometers long and about 16 kilometers wide, which is called "Silicon Valley" because of the advanced semiconductor industry. In recent decades, Silicon Valley has risen rapidly, which has gathered countless high-tech industries, including countless autonomous driving companies, and new car companies such as Tesla and Weilai.
Silicon Valley has become the world's first high-tech zone, and the high-tech zone it created has become an important form of high-tech research and development, known as the "Silicon Valley Model."
In the era of travel-as-a-service, as software and IT become more and more important, the past production and development models are no longer sufficient for the automotive industry. To grow fast in the new era, you need to break the traditional path. DENSO is trying to create a "Silicon Valley Model" within the company. The "agile development" led by Cheng Ganggang is the best example.
Denso's "Agile Development Lab" is located here in a small 4-storey building on a narrow street in Chiyoda, Tokyo. It does not look like an office at all, and the layout is too simple. But here, Cheng forced to take his team with customers at all times, and sparks came into being.
"Many start-ups are constantly innovating. In the past, it was Silicon Valley, but now it is Shenzhen. Their ideas are faster, and they listen to customers' ideas as they do-this is a more important challenge for component companies. He said when explaining the role of agile development, "Through our thinking and internalization, we develop new technologies ourselves. In this regard, we compete with flexible start-ups."
In April 2017, when the agile development laboratory was established, there were only two people. Two months later, the first development team was prepared. Today, this team has a size of 100 people. What this team needs to do is drive software innovation for a 170,000 company. The challenge is not small, but Chengqi is very confident.
"We create strength through software development. I think we are not inferior to Huawei or Tencent, because Denso's strengths are not just production lines, but also cars. When we find customer needs, we return to the office, further analyze, determine the plan and then go Realize this idea. "
Considering commercial privacy, Chengqi can not specifically explain how to serve customers, but he divided the general service into three parts: based on technical surveys in the automotive industry, software development and design, and customer To tap the potential needs of the company, provide new services, and develop new business models.
"In the R & D phase, we will absorb customers and business units as the entire product control unit. This composition system is the same as the general startup system. The person who is ultimately responsible for the product is the project leader. He directs all technical personnel. To create new results, we now have 15 teams like this, and basically develop a new project in one to three months. "Cheng said," But we are not only boring ourselves, we are also working with some big V in the software industry. Collaborate-Microsoft, for example, and great figures in the agile development community all participate as team consultants. "
In this process, if the customer is not satisfied, Denso's team will ask the reason and improve it. "If the customer is still not satisfied, we will continue to confirm and repeat the process. This is an important practice. What we need to provide is Find what customers want. "
02 2030 policy
Shortly after Cheng forced Gangzhi joined and led agile development, in October 2017, Denso President Ma Haoji announced the "long-term policy for 2030", which aims to conform to the trend of the times and face R & D and products with a more car-oriented perspective. And actively absorb knowledge and experience that were not available in the past.
At the Tokyo Motor Show on October 24, Arima re-examined the challenge between two years. During this period, Denso conducted many cooperations.
In the field of electrification, in April this year, Denso and Aisin Seiki established a joint venture company, BluE Nexus, which produces electric vehicle drive modules. In May 2020, an "Electric Development Center" will be established and integrated with Toyota's Hirose Plant to carry out one-stop production from advanced development, testing, and verification of electric products to mass production. Denso plans to invest 180 billion yen in three years from 2018 to 2020 to strengthen electrification. In addition, Denso will simultaneously launch multiple types of power vehicles such as internal combustion engines, HEV hybrids, PHEV plug-in hybrids, BEV pure electric, and FCEV hydrogen energy.
In the field of autonomous driving, at the end of 2018, Denso and three other component companies under the Toyota Group jointly established a new company, J-QuAD DYNAMICS, to develop integrated control software for autonomous driving, vehicle motion control and other related functions. In June 2020, Denso will establish a complete system in the Haneda Airport area that can achieve the test run from autonomous driving to the verification experiment. In terms of key components, including semiconductors, sensors, ECUs, and motors, about 570 billion yen (37 billion yuan) has been invested in the past three years.
In terms of technical talents, Haoji Arima said: "By 2025, Denso will have more than 12,000 software talents worldwide, led by India and Vietnam, making use of global bases, and accelerating large-scale software development with a 24-hour system. "
At the Tokyo Motor Show, Denso displayed a series of products that "materialized" the path to 2030.
In the three core areas of autonomous driving, connected driving, and electric vehicles, Denso showcased a number of important components and solutions.
In this exhibition, Denso took pains to visualize the future car life and how Denso products will be applied to future cars.
In the exhibition area, a "DENSO URBAN MOVES" model car attracted the most attention. It shows how people and cars interact in the three scenarios of travel, business, and daily life. Denso is How to use cloud services to connect vehicles with various services.
A video demonstration on the scene showed such a scenario: On a future smart car with Denso technology applied, when you are going to watch a movie, after choosing a route, the vehicle will automatically drive to a movie theater. You can also The duration of the movie chooses a variety of services such as car washing, refueling, and parking. In the future, people's lives will become more efficient after the continuous improvement of technology.
In terms of autonomous driving, DENSO showed two types of L1 / L2 autopilot sensors: monocular / binocular camera and millimeter wave radar. In order to reflect the excellent night vision ability of the monocular camera, in a virtual exhibition area, the booth simulates the situation of the night road surface, and even in the dark of 1Lux-the human eye can not see clearly, the camera can clearly identify Pedestrians or vehicles.
In terms of electrification, Denso also exhibited products such as electric drive systems, BMU battery detection units, and inverters that greatly improved efficiency. Among them, Denso's BMU products have been installed on more than 13 million electric vehicles such as Toyota and Honda, with a market share of more than 35%.
In the past, Denso has been at the forefront of the automobile manufacturing industry with continuous innovation and superb craftsmanship; now that technological changes are coming, it has also realized its shortcomings. A considerable number of people believe that the automobile industry lacks the Internet gene and may not be a winner in the new era; but those players who know the automobile industry best are trying to complete a quick turn.