Feishu Projects: Moving Beyond "Douyin" Towards "Made in China 2025"

On two assembly lines, worker A can produce 10 products per hour, and worker B can produce 8 products per hour. Question: How can we produce 40 products with maximum efficiency?

Don't laugh. This is the first question in the opening class of the "Operation Management" course for MBA students at the Guanghua School of Management, Peking University.

Next, let's make the problem a bit more complicated. There are 1,000 employees in the factory, 40 different application production lines. Each production line has 5 suppliers and 15 process nodes. You have 10 flagship products with a demand of D1 = 12,000 sets per period; 20 second - tier products with a demand of D2 = 8,000 sets per period; 10 third - tier products with a demand of D2 = 2,000 sets per period. The transportation cost is S = 40 yuan per set, and there are 5 packaging methods.

Is it getting a bit interesting?

Don't be in a hurry. Next, the company's scale expands to 100,000 people. On the premise that the number of products, suppliers, and nodes doubles exponentially, factors such as customers, procurement, legal affairs, finance, risk control, compliance, marketing, public relations, HR, as well as personnel turnover and the cost of training new employees are included in the calculation. Please note the correlation coefficients between each node.

After finishing all the calculations, congratulations! You've just started learning operation management. In the next class, we'll talk about market analysis and competitor analysis. Please preview in advance, classmates.

Yes, in 2025, these operation management problems that seem astronomically complex are actually just a fraction of the real - world difficulty.

As of the end of last year, BYD had 969,000 employees globally, Foxconn had 900,000, Huawei had 208,000, Alibaba had 194,000, and ByteDance had 120,000.

Within large and medium - sized enterprises, any product or project needs to go through many complex processes such as decision - making, procurement, bidding, approval, design, production/R & D, testing, transportation/distribution, sales, and review. Moreover, it often involves a large number of collaborative businesses among multiple departments and roles.

With many process nodes, difficult department coordination, large business volume, and rapid team expansion... All these have brought a huge number of "communication blind spots" inside and outside the project, making decision - makers face extremely high project complexity. It's difficult to accurately control the progress and deal with internal and external uncertainties and risks.

This is not a unique problem faced by a single company. It's a common pain point that has troubled all enterprises for a long time. It's also a problem that must be solved after "Made in China 2025" steps onto the global stage.

In this context, the call for efficient collaboration and intelligent decision - making in the advanced industrial industry is becoming clearer. Is there a tool that can truly penetrate into the business logic, break down communication barriers, and even reconstruct the management paradigm of complex projects?

Not long ago, on September 10th, an event about "efficiency improvement" was held in Shenzhen. At the event, Feishu Project launched a series of new products, trying to discuss with all enterprises how to make project management clearer and simpler in the new era. At the same time, Feishu also presented its own solutions. It not only comprehensively upgraded the platform's capabilities but also launched an industry solution for vehicle R & D management, entering the "vehicle manufacturing management" field.

You know, the automobile has always held the position of the "pearl on the crown" in industrial manufacturing. Its precision, complexity, personnel scheduling, and the difficulty of coordinating the industrial chain are not on the same level as ordinary industrial production.

The Ford automobile manufacturing assembly line in 1913 can be regarded as the originator of Western operation management theory and has been a learning model for industrial manufacturing for a century.

Pity that in 2025, the times have changed, the organizational management form has changed, the complexity of project management has exploded exponentially, and the industry has undergone earth - shaking changes.

"The essence of vehicle manufacturing is the management of complexity."

"The essence of vehicle manufacturing is the management of complexity." As early as at the Feishu Unlimited Conference in 2024, Li Bin, the chairman and CEO of NIO, once said so.

All along, vehicle R & D has been one of the scenarios with the longest process, the highest complexity, and the greatest management difficulty in industrial manufacturing. In the current era when automobiles are moving towards electrification and intelligence, the number of lines of code in a smart car can even reach hundreds of millions.

In the past decade, according to data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, as of 2024, the penetration rate of L2 - level assisted driving functions in new cars of China's intelligent connected vehicles has rapidly increased to over 50%, ranking first in the world. The automobile export volume has increased significantly. In 2023, with an export volume of 4.91 million vehicles, China became the world's largest automobile exporter for the first time. The industry has also given birth to a large number of well - known new energy brands such as BYD, NIO, XPeng, and Li Auto.

Today's vehicle R & D needs to take into account traditional powertrain components such as engines and gearboxes, and also invest in emerging intelligent fields such as in - vehicle infotainment systems, sensors, and AI - assisted driving. The complexity has increased sharply. Just the breakdown of secondary projects for a single vehicle model has tens of thousands of tasks and thousands of deliverables, requiring a large amount of coordination and cooperation between internal engineers and external suppliers.

Traditional process management solutions are becoming increasingly difficult to adapt to the development of the smart car industry.

"After the release of the Feishu Project IPD product solution last year, many automobile manufacturers that are already using Feishu Project management software came to us, wondering if they could also use Feishu Project to manage their vehicle R & D." At the Feishu Project new product launch on September 10th, Wang Chen, the product leader of Feishu Project's solution, introduced.

Feishu Project launches a vehicle R & D solution

IPD (Integrated Product Development) is the abbreviation of integrated product development. It is one of the most advanced management systems for the manufacturing industry suitable for long R & D cycles and complex processes so far. It is committed to helping enterprises improve productivity and quickly respond to market changes. Representative application enterprises include Huawei, IBM, Li Auto, Boeing, etc.

Customers coming to us on their own initiative shows that this "pain point" is really painful.

"Vehicle manufacturing is a complex and grand project... All the peers here deeply understand that we've stepped into too many pitfalls in the past - broken demand transmission, out - of - control project progress, and chaotic cross - departmental collaboration. These problems are not unique to a single automobile manufacturer but are common pain points in the entire automobile industry." At the Feishu Project launch event, Zhang Lei, the process IT leader of Avita Technology, sighed like this.

In today's era when smart cars have increasingly complex requirements for intelligence, comfort, energy - saving, efficiency, design, and interaction, vehicle R & D is no longer a linear process from A to B but a three - dimensional network covering R & D, production, quality inspection, and the supply chain. The management of vehicle R & D also requires an integrated platform capable of intelligent evolution.

In the extremely competitive smart car field, the iteration of requirements and processes is faster than one can imagine. For a large number of players in the smart car industry, a suitable management platform must be flexible enough to meet the needs of rapid construction, modification, transparency, and traceability. At the same time, it should allow users to achieve self - developed development through standardized interfaces to ensure the smooth flow of information.

According to Zhang Lei, the process IT leader of Avita Technology, since July 2024, Avita has started in - depth cooperation with Feishu Project in the field of IPD vehicle R & D.

On the one hand, Avita, in cooperation with Feishu Project, has moved the entire process from the original VOC of users to product delivery to Feishu Project, "vertically" integrating the entire vehicle R & D chain. On the other hand, through the open platform built by Feishu Project, Avita has incorporated more than 10 professional tools such as development tools, design tools, and AI tools into the system for "horizontal alignment".

From a single screw on the production line and a drawing in the "template library" to a list of nearly 1,500 key deliverables, templates, responsible persons, and node associations when starting a new project... Everything is comprehensively managed to ensure that "the process can be monitored, and the results can be expected".

At the same time, thanks to the flexible process configuration and open platform capabilities of Feishu Project, Avita has built a multi - layer project plan management system exclusive to Avita on the Feishu Project platform, achieving global management, real - time linkage, and "drilling down to the bottom" from the top - level design.

The average PXD analysis time has been reduced by 90%, the approval process for vehicle deliverables has been improved by 30%, the average time for software function breakdown has been reduced by 70%, and the time for aligning project function lists has been reduced by 50% - this is the "report card" that Avita and Feishu have presented after one year of cooperation.

In other vertical fields of the smart car track, such as intelligent driving software, Feishu Project also plays a role.

According to Fan Xiaojun, the senior R & D director of Momenta, who revealed at the launch event, in the past year, the number of vehicle models Momenta has cooperated with has increased several times. As of April this year, Momenta has cooperated in mass - producing more than 130 vehicle models in total, and the number of installed solutions has exceeded 400,000. The R & D pressure at the front line has soared. The team not only has to develop multiple projects in parallel but also has to introduce a large number of complex standards and requirements into the R & D process. Therefore, Momenta has been looking for a management platform to optimize project management and achieve SPA (standardization, process - orientation, automation) of the R & D system.

According to Fan Xiaojun, currently, Momenta has 200 - 300 processes deposited in Feishu Project, covering the main line, mass - production projects, and various segmented scenarios. The low - code or even no - code capabilities of Feishu Project enable enterprises to quickly build and adjust processes, greatly reducing the threshold for process digitization.

For example, in the development process of an intelligent assisted driving system, "road testing" is a crucial and special link. Although simulation testing can provide partial verification, actual road testing is still a necessary means to evaluate user experience and system reliability. However, as the number of Momenta's vehicle models increases and the version iteration speeds up, the traditional road - testing method requires a safety officer and a road - testing operator to accompany the vehicle, which requires a large amount of resource input and has limited efficiency, putting great pressure on the development process.

To solve this problem, Momenta has built a complete road - testing management system based on Feishu Project, covering the entire process from test plan formulation, test case design to actual execution. Now, the testing team can remotely formulate test plans and synchronize them to the large screen in the vehicle. The safety officer can perform operations according to the graphic instructions. When a problem is found, they can press a button on the vehicle to record voice. The system automatically uploads the voice and vehicle data to the cloud and generates a detailed problem list and test report containing information such as version, route, and test case.

"Previously, a road - testing operator had to accompany the vehicle in person. Now, one person can supervise the testing of 10 vehicles at the same time, and the efficiency has directly increased by 10 times. The entire road - testing link has become more traceable, automated, and complete." Fan Xiaojun said.

In fact, the core idea of the cases shared by the developers of Avita and Momenta is the same - the so - called "management of complexity" essentially aims to make the process transparent and decision - making simple. Any project management platform that fails to achieve this cannot effectively promote projects.

"From the front line of battle" to "breaking through the circle three times"

According to data from the "2025 White Paper on the Digital Transformation of Chinese Enterprises' R & D" by EqualOcean, in the current software project management scenario of the Chinese SaaS market, Feishu Project has a market share of 37%, becoming the well - deserved leader in this segmented field.

Therefore, although the vehicle R & D solution is the most - watched new product at this Feishu Project launch, in fact, for most enterprise decision - makers, the three - layer product design architecture first announced by Feishu Project - or rather, the design concept of its project management platform - is more worthy of "learning from".

The architecture diagram first announced by Feishu Project

Which elements should be abstracted and extracted? How to divide the infrastructure and core capabilities, and product applications? How to ensure the configurability and flexibility of the system without reducing the operational efficiency due to over - stacking and bloating? How to maximize the transparency and visibility of the system while keeping the risks under control? How to adapt to the rapid development and rapid changes of the team and processes?

It's a well - known industry fact that the predecessor of Feishu Project was a project management tool within Douyin in 2018.

In 2017, the R & D of the Douyin APP had just started. Later, as we all know, in 2018, this young and trendy short - video platform quickly became popular. During the Spring Festival, Douyin's DAU soared from 20 million to 60 million. The product, functions, traffic, and the team all had explosive growth - at the same time, there were also a large number of external competitors fighting fiercely.

To quickly seize the market, the version iteration speed of Douyin was shortened from once a month to once every two weeks, and it was split into two lines (A and B) for iteration internally.

At this time, Douyin not only faced the pressure of a huge expansion of national - level traffic but also saw its team size soar to thousands of people in a very short time. The information dissemination, organizational efficiency, and the collaboration, division of labor, and contradictions after splitting into two teams (A and B) were like "changing the engine while flying the plane".

In October 2018, within Douyin, a project management tool was officially developed and rushed into the front line of the soaring traffic of Douyin from scratch.

Was it useful? Yes, it was. Soon after, the Huoshan Video team next to Douyin "came here admiringly" and also used this tool. Then, various teams began to follow suit one after another.

By the second half of 2020, it had replaced a large number of fragmented project management tools within ByteDance and became a unified project management platform. In the same year, Feishu