The outline of the 14th Five-Year Plan puts forward the development goal to “embrace the digital era, unlock the potential of big data, build China’s strength in cyberspace, accelerate the development of a digital economy, a digital society, and a digital government, and transform the pattern of production, lifestyle, and governance models through digital transformation”. Digital transformation has formed a consensus in all walks of life.

The construction industry has seen rapid digital transformation amid multiple factors such as market, policy and technology. As one of the Fortune Global 500 enterprises, China Railway 11th Bureau Group Corporation Limited (“China Railway 11th Bureau”) actively embraces new technologies, explores the application of new technologies such as AI, big data, IoT and cloud computing in the construction industry, and makes use of digital technology to facilitate all-round reform and innovation of enterprise management mode, inject fresh impetus enterprise development and create new strengths for digital competition. Meanwhile, the intelligent process robot scheme jointly introduced by China Railway 11th Bureau, Huawei Cloud and iSoftStone has been applied to the financial intelligence scenario of the Group, which greatly improved the efficiency and service capability and set a good example for the digital practice of the Group. 

 “Digital Employees” effectively solve the dilemma of enterprise development 

As a leading enterprise in the construction industry, China Railway 11th Bureau Group has 11 wholly-owned subsidiaries, and its scale is increasing year by year. However, it is also plagued by difficulties in employment, and appointment, severe aging, as well as insufficient manpower in many businesses amid the development of the new economy, new business forms and new models. Especially in the sharing center, the increasing workload year by year makes inventory management and timeliness management more difficult. It is urgent to solve the manpower issues and use emerging technologies to handle time-consuming tasks featuring standardized operation and high repeatability, so as to save labor costs and alleviate personnel shortage. 

Facing the digital transformation demands of China Railway 11th Bureau, iSoftStone, upholding the transformation concept of business digitalization and management digitalization, deeply explored the business pain points of the company and took enterprise business operation and maintenance automation as a breakthrough point. Based on Cloud Native of Huawei Cloud and AI technology base and combined with its own business foundation and service capability, iSoftStone first applied the super-automation technology to the group accounting field to enhance quick response in the process of contract document identification, voucher preparation and settlement processing, thus greatly improving the efficiency and quality of office process, liberating limited human resources from mechanical and repetitive affairs to a great extent, reconstructing employees’ work experience and value creation, and improving the Group’s work efficiency and serviceability. 

The application of digital employees speeds up the intelligent replacement of some posts and fundamentally solves the urgent needs of China Railway 11th Bureau. This in-depth cooperation was not only a beneficial attempt for the coordinated development of “intelligent construction” and “building industrialization” in the construction industry, but also an effective exploration of the digital transformation practice of the construction industry.

Promote the digital development of the construction industry 

Digital economy has become an important direction of China’s future development. The in-depth development of digitalization and intelligence will provide basic capability support for the development mode, development quality and growth momentum of the construction industry, and lead the deep changes in the industry. 

As a pioneer in AI + RPA practice and a Huawei Cloud AI and Huawei RPA core partner, iSoftStone, based on the industry characteristics and its own service strengths, continuously explores scenario applications in different industries through joint innovation, effectively realizing the comprehensive and large-scale integration of digital labor and enterprise business. Besides, iSoftStone works with partners to create multiple digital tools and solutions including inspection assistant, report assistant, marketing assistant, HR salary assistant, intelligent reimbursement, education assistant and testing assistant in the business fields such as taxation, manpower, administration, operation and maintenance, to help customers build digital labor. Meanwhile, iSoftStone will also cooperate with Huawei Cloud to expand the application of digital employees and enhance digital transformation, to make it an industry benchmark for digital transformation in the construction industry. 

Digital technology has a profound impact on the production process and business model of enterprises, and constantly accelerates their digital transformation. In the future, iSoftStone will continue to uphold the mission of enhancing customer value with digital technology, work with industry partners to continue to deepen the integration and application of RPA and AI, so as to create a new driving force and engine for the digital development of enterprises and help the construction of digital economy.