CTO Fang Liu of Zhonghe Group: Scientific and Technological Path of To B—Efficiency Is not the Only Destination

2022-04-17 18:19:08

Scientific and technological factors represent a vital strategic direction of enterprise development, and efficient, uniform technology and services influence the future of an enterprise.

At the press conference on brand upgrading of Zhonghe Group themed on “New Connection Win the Future” held on April 17, 2021, CTO Dr. Fang Liu delivered an inspiring speech titled “Scientific and Technological Path of To B.” The following is the transcript of his speech at the press conference.

High-tech Strength Underpinning Statistics

Good morning! I’m Fang Liu, CTO of Zhonghe Group. Welcome to our brand launch event held in Haikou, Hainan.

Just now, our CEO Yu Qingquan introduced the development history of our company and unveiled the new brand Zhonghe Group. Next, I will explain to you how we provide services for our customers from a technical perspective.

First, I have two sets of statistics to show to you.

Up to now, we have served 36,000+ enterprises cumulatively. More than eight million enterprises have benefited from our services. And we serve 1.4 million users every month.

In the meantime, we have provided services for over 700 listed companies. Our clients come from such sectors as the Internet, education, real estate and catering with their employee size ranging from a few employees to tens of thousands of employees. By the way, these statistics are increasing rapidly.

The second set of statistics has something to do with time, which is 3.6 seconds and 2.6 seconds.

3.6s: This figure means it merely takes us 3.6 seconds to finish our services from the minute a user submits a social security form. In comparison, it takes workers a few minutes or even scores of minutes to finish the process.

2.6s: It refers to the average payroll payment time. More than 99.9 percent of salary is paid in two minutes. Traditionally, it might take hours or even days before HR pays the salary after users submit a payroll payment request. In the case of reimbursements, you will not be able to receive your reimbursements the minute your reimbursement application is approved by administrative and financial staff. In general, reimbursements are paid by HR.

The above statistics demonstrate our overall service quality. We think employee experience will be a highlight of HR software in the future.

These two sets of statistics are merely a tip of the iceberg. Why is that? This is because social security and remuneration are basically invisible in our everyday life. It appears that social security fees are deducted from our salary every month and that we could withdraw it from our accounts at a certain stage. As to remuneration, your salary is transferred to your payroll card with a salary sheet. The whole process is more complicated than it seems to be. That’s why I say it is just a tip of the iceberg.

While boosting efficiency, technology also improves and guarantees your experience.

–CTO Fang Liu of Zhonghe Group

In fact, as we all know, social security is a very complicated business. Why did I say so? Most cities in China practice different procedures and policies for social security. Now that we work on social security and remuneration in 130 cities, it means we have to deal with over 100 social security, housing provident funds and personal income tax systems, not to mention the fact that many cities have different document requirements. We all know the system of five mandatory insurance plans and housing provident funds. But there is more to it than meets the eye. Some cities have trade union fees, whereas others offer long-term care insurance.

For HR, the period from March to July is like a nightmare. Once the contribution base of social security is adjusted, then the proportion of the contribution base needs to be adjusted accordingly. That means the amount of social security contributions during this period has to be recalculated. In some cities, social security, housing provident funds and health insurance are adjusted in July, August and September respectively. In the course of payment, we have to work together with Alipay, WeChat, banks like China Everbright Bank and China Merchants Bank and third-party payment companies. It can be quite a challenge to finish the whole process in 2.6 seconds. In our company, scores of systems work simultaneously. For example, risk control, real name verification and logs have to be completed in 2.6 seconds.

To secure the above achievements, more than 100 engineers launched systems over 6,000 times last year. That is to say, every engineer launched one system on a weekly basis on average. How did we manage to launch systems so swiftly? We have designed a set of flexible technical structures for Zhonghe Group. To be more specific, the system is divided into around 20 modules, each of which is handled by three to eight people. It is like special operations forces deployed in the modern military domain. With this flexible structure, we are able to develop systems swiftly. For instance, the first version of our outsourcing and dispatching system is finished in one and a half months from product design to the final launch. Then we could develop these systems very fast, because most modules can be used repeatedly.

Underlying Design of Stable and Accurate Services

Apart from efforts to improve the extendibility, flexibility and R&D efficiency of systems I mentioned earlier, another core issue of To B services is the stability and accuracy of services. When you select a supplier, price is not the only factor that matters. Instead, you also need to consider reputations and brands. In order to enhance the quality of a system, we need to work on the recruitment and training of our staff, and, more importantly, we have to develop a set of sound procedures, which we believe comprise early, medium and later phases.

One of the core requirements of To B services is to ensure accurate and stable services.

—CTO Fang Liu of Zhonghe Group

Early phase: You need to work on design and automation tests. By saying design, I mean you have to figure out the risks of a system and draw up backup plans. You need to prepare Plan B a lot of times. When a problem emerges, we have to work out how to resolve the problem and take Plan B. We are now running hundreds of thousands of automation cases every day. These cases result from years of hard work and are regarded as one of our barriers.

Medium phase: During the launch of a system, we need to develop sound systems and procedures. Before launching a system, relevant teams will be notified. We always launch core systems at 3:00-6:00 in the morning. At the same time, we choose gray release for these systems and then gradually switch to traffic, so as to control the influence of problems.

Later phase: During this phase, we would focus on data analysis and monitoring and established tiered alert mechanisms. We would use group messaging, send short messages or notify our engineers over the phone. If no one answers the phone, we would call up all emergency contacts in the middle of the night. For this reason, we expect you to show more sympathy for our engineers, their job is not easy at all.

We could support business development rapidly thanks to the aforesaid flexible system structures, and tiny but efficient development teams. We have developed two key SaaS platforms and other SaaS platforms.

101HR provides one-stop services for standard workers and dispatched workers in social security, remuneration, personal income tax and commercial insurance. Hiwork is a platform that offers new economy practitioners payroll payment and tax returns. In the meantime, we have a range of SaaS service platforms like 51 Tonglu.

To provide better services, we have developed over 40 patents, including a great variety of core patents like RPA and UKey Management. We then use these patents to develop better products and substantively improve our efficiency.

Moreover, we attach great importance to information security. We have passed the evaluation of level-III tiered national information security protection initiated by the Ministry of Public Security. What is the evaluation? Tiered protection evaluation is China’s most authoritative information security evaluation. Level-III tiered protection is the highest level of tiered protection for non-banking institutions. Also, we have been certified by the ISO27001 information security management system and the ISO27018 protection of personally identifiable information (PII) which are the two most authoritative certification in the world.

We have developed UKey management facilities independently to boost the efficiency of social security and other business. HR uses UKey to handle their business, and our UKey management facilities have made their job much easier. By using UKey to manage social security, we have realized procedure-based, online and auditable UKey management. In this way, the operating efficiency is improved and UKey is well-preserved. In addition, as we can now keep a complete record of the use of UKey, the reliability of business handling has been bolstered significantly as well.

In the meantime, we have developed the technology of robotic process automation (RPA). If you are an investor, then you might know that RPA is an “it” technology. Many companies are using this technology to seek financing. We began to explore RPA-related technology in as early as 2017. When a user logs in and submits the information of employees, the system could automatically add new social security accounts and take a screenshot of the result. It is a very swift and reliable process.

The Best Experience + Ubiquitous Connection

If a To B enterprise aspires to develop rapidly, it must first remain open and make good use of resources from other enterprises, while focusing on core business. Our company has purchased services from dozens of other enterprises. In the meantime, we make our own capacity available to our counterparts and align our systems with other companies’ systems. According to relevant research and reports, every medium and large enterprise in the US has dozens of HR software on average. But, in the future, they will only hold two to three HR software, as most functions will be integrated.

HR SaaS has to be more open, so that different systems can be better integrated, and HR and employees could enjoy better user experience.

— CTO Fang Liu of Zhonghe Group

In terms of HR software, the integration of different systems is bound to be boosted, so that HR and employees could enjoy a better user experience. They will not handle different matters in different places. For instance, payroll payment is often realized via an application programming interface (API), which is a highly real-time and convenient process. With the sandbox, a wide range of documents and special personnel support we offer, it generally takes two working days to finish the process.

In the future, HR SaaS will highlight employee experience. At present, China’s enterprises are working swiftly towards information-enabled development. Dingtalk, WeCom and Feishu are now used by more than 20 million domestic enterprises. We will integrate our services into these tools.

Today’s medium and large enterprises use large HR software like SAP as their office tools. We have completed certain SAP integration. Following SAP integration, once an employee fills in his information after he assumes office, it will be automatically pushed to our system and we could complete relevant services, making the job of HR much easier. What’s more, HR may just need to confirm the information, without taking any other steps. This is how you get results the minute you submit the information.

As head of technical development, I’ve been thinking how to create greater value through technology. Technology boosts the operating efficiency of enterprises and that of customers through Internet-based, automatic and intelligent approaches, and, more importantly, improves user experience. Technology makes it easier and more convenient for users to handle their business and allows us to offer more reliable services.

Technology enables definitive support.

That brings me to the end of my speech. Thank you again for attending today’s event. We have established more connections. And we will work together to create a more promising future. Thank you!