中小制造企业如何推进数字化转型:嵌入性自主视角的案例研究

How to Promote the Digital Transformation of Small&Medium Manufacturing Enterprises?An Embedded Autonomous Process Model

在数字经济与实体经济深度融合的新背景下,基础薄弱、能力不足的中小制造企业,如何协调内外部资源推进数字化转型,成为学界和业界关注的焦点。对此,研究围绕宁波澳玛特冲压机床股份有限公司的数字化转型实践,系统剖析其推进数字化转型的阶段举措,并提炼出一个嵌入自主的过程模型。研究发现:(1)中小制造企业需把握嵌入与自主的双轮驱动,逐步突破资源识别、利用和创新的瓶颈,以实现数据可视、高效互联和智能运维的数字化转型阶段性目标;(2)企业应当推动“结构嵌入—关系嵌入—双元嵌入”的逐步跃升,嵌入外部关系网络,构建资源获取体系;(3)企业在嵌入中需充分发挥主观能动性,不断实现“集成式要素自主—重构式流程自主—自洽式系统自主”,以自主能力支撑数字化转型的推进。

Nowadays the digital transformation has gradually become the focus of enterprise development.How to coordinate internal and external resources to promote digital transformation for small and medium manufacturing enterprises with weak foundation and insufficient capacity has become a crucial problem to be solved urgently for academics and industry.However,most of the existing researches on the process of digital transformation focus on the large enterprises with relatively adequate resources,which is difficult to adapt to the transformation and upgrading of small and medium enterprises.Researches on the digital transformation of small and medium manufacturing enterprises regard it as an ideal path to obtain the specific resources and capabilities required by the transformation through the opening of organizational boundaries,such as embedding in the external service ecosystem or taking advantage of external digital platform service providers to deal with the obstacles of resource shortage,this may lead to the dilemma of loss of autonomy.The existing researches know little about this,which makes it difficult to effectively answer the research question of"how to promote the digital transformation of small and medium manufacturing enterprises".Based on single-case study,this research takes the Aomate as the subject,deconstructs and discusses the process mechanism of its digital transformation from the perspective of"embeddedness-autonomy",and extracts the embedded autonomous process model.It finds that:(1)Small and medium manufacturing enterprises should adhere to the"double-wheel drive"of embeddness and autonomy,and gradually break through the bottleneck of resource identification,resource utilization and resource innovation,so as to achieve the phased goals of data visualization,efficient interconnection and intelligent operation and maintenance.(2)Enterprises should promote the gradual transition of"structural embeddedness-relational embeddedness-dual embeddedness",embed the external network,and build the resource acquisition system.(3)Enterprises should give full play to their subjective initiative in embedding,focus on improving their own autonomous ability and absorptive ability,and constantly realize"integrated element autonomy-reconstructive process autonomy-self-consistent system autonomy",so as to support the promotion of digital transformation with autonomous capabilities.The embedded autonomy model of promoting digital transformation of small and medium manufacturing enterprises is identified,which contributes to the research on the process of digital transformation of small and medium manufacturing enterprises.Based on the analysis of the challenges and practical data of enterprise digital transformation,this paper points out that the digital transformation of small and medium manufacturing enterprises needs to go through three stages:data visualization,efficient interconnection and intelligent operation and maintenance,which makes the complicated digital transformation problems relatively clear.(2)The connection between external embeddedness and internal autonomy research is established,and the applicable scope of embeddedness theory is enriched.The embeddedness theory is propagated to the field of enterprise digital development,the evolution mechanism of digital transformation of small and medium manufacturing enterprises is discussed,and the process model of embedded autonomy is constructed.Further,this research identifies the embedded autonomy model of small and medium manufacturing enterprises to promote digital transformation,which enriches the research on the process of digital transformation of small and medium manufacturing enterprises.Based on the analysis of the challenges and practical data of enterprise digital transformation,this research points out that the digital transformation of small and medium manufacturing enterprises needs to go through three stages:data visualization,efficient interconnection and intelligent operation and maintenance,which makes the complicated digital transformation problems relatively clear.In addition,this research establishes the connection between external embeddedness and internal autonomy research,and extends the applicable scope of embeddedness theory.And the embedding theory is propagated to the field of enterprise digital development,discusses the evolution mechanism of the digital transformation of small and medium manufacturing enterprises,then builds the process model of embedded autonomy.Finally,the research suggests that small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises should pay attention to the following two aspects in the process of promoting digital transformation:First,Enterprises should make it clear that there are different goals in each stage of digital transformation,and take structure,relationship and binary embeddedness as the starting point to meet the resource needs in different transformation stages.Second,Enterprises should pay attention to the cultivation of their own ability,starting from digital technology,digital ability,strategic logic and other aspects to support digital development.