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Mr. Li Jinliang, Chief Information Office, Foton Lovol Heavy Industry Co. Ltd
Tell us something about Foton Lovol.
Li Jinliang: Foton Lovol started in 1998 and we cover three different sectors: wheel loaders and excavators, tractors and harvesters (70% of the market), vehicles (agricultural tricycles, electric tricycles, four-wheel vehicles and gasoline tricycles). We have 15,000 staff, assets reaching Rmb10 billion (US$1.57 billion) and sales from last year achieved Rmb16 billion (US$2.52 billion).
Our Foton Lovol brand has an estimated value of Rmb14.3 billion (US$2.25 billion) and the company is ranked 64th among China's 500 most valuable brands. Our company is a national-level high-tech company and we have a high-tech R&D sector.
How important is R&D and PLM implementation in your company?
Li Jinliang: After the founding of our company, we have paid close attention to our R&D system development and establishment. Now, we have R&D systems covering three countries and six locations. In China we have four R&D centres: Weifang in Shandong province, Tianjin, Qingdao and Zhuchen. We also have two R&D technology centres overseas, the first being in Italy and the other in Japan. We have set up our business system and need to have a coordinated system PLM network so that we have a globally unified R&D system.
We started using PLM software as early as 2003, when we started using Siemens PLM's Teamcenter software. We are now under the support and guidance of consultants from Siemens PLM Software and our PLM planning, to have a globally unified R&D centre in place.
Currently we are implementing our phase three project in Italy, Europe. In Japan, we are currently doing the planning for follow-up implementation. So we have set up our database for our global R&D centre, 60 G of information and 2 T. We currently have data for 4,000 models of vehicles and 1,200 users.
After we implemented our PLM system solutions, we have seen the following benefits: a unified, standard system, all the R&D centres use a unified model and process, data sharing (through data sharing, we have shortened our R&D cycle by 30% and reduce our R&D costs by 40+%). Our company has always attached great importance to PLM, which is why we set up the system for PLM implementation and made an enormous investment in R&D. Every year we make use of 4% of our sales revenue for R&D. Durng the implementation we knew it was very important to use a good product, and to use a very skilful and qualified team to implement it. A common issue for all IT-related businesses is the importance for the participation of all business units.
We have a dedicated team with rich experience to push the IT work so that the implementation produces good quality and good quantity.
How would you describe the current state of Foton Lovol here in China, compared to other markets?
Li Jinliang: We have had 14 years of history since the founding in 1998; we have a long road ahead and plenty of room for improvement in product R&D and globalisation. There's a big gap between our product technology and those of European companies, that's why we have set up our R&D centre in Italy and Europe.
We really need to upgrade our management level and need to set up a lot of things in order to do that. We have actually made great efforts in this area. We have also invited experts in the industry with vast experience to work with us and we have used various methods in IT, or by using PLM, to upgrade our management level. We have made great investments for this purpose. Our objective is to become the world's main enterprise in this sector by 2020.