Managing rapid international growth
With a constant groth of staff overseas, cross cultural management is now high on the agenda of Chinese high-tech firm Huawei Technologies. In many ways, Huawei epitomises the drive for growth that characterises China’s expanding economy and technological advances.
Huawei is among China’s most internationalised companies. In addition to a strong market presence in China, Huawei serves 22 of the world's top 50 telecommunication operators including British Telecom, Brasil Telecom, and other national carriers.
Huawei has joint ventures with Siemens and 3com and partnerships with companies such as Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Intel, Texas Instruments and Motorola. Huawei has deployed its technical solutions for the telecom industry in more than 90 countries, including Germany, UK, France, Russia and Brazil.
“Few other Chinese companies have experience in being so open to new markets and establishing a presence globally,” says Mr. Xing Xianjie, the Director of Business Process Management. He continues:
“We need to adapt to be a truly global corporation. Among our initiatives is to set up a strategic management system that helps us efficiently deal with culture shock and localisation of our services.”
However, this is no easy task, but Huawei has. Since established in 1988, Huawei has been teaming up with world-leading companies, to incorporate international best practices. IBM has contributed to their integrated product development and supply chain, PwC to their financial management system and the Hay Group on human resources. Spreading learning and best practices throughout such a vast operation across the globe certainly demands good management systems and practices.
Assessing cross cultural performance.
DNV recently carried out an assessment to evaluate the maturity levels of Huawei's risk management system. The assessment criteria were two standardised frameworks for enterprise risk management (COSO ERM, AS NZS 4360), requirements from British Telecom (a major customer of Huawei’s) as well as Huawei's internal risk management requirements.
Human Resources (HR) functions are part of the assessment, as it incorporates employee turnover rates and employee satisfaction indexes from various geographic areas. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the HR function in overseas operations and gives valuable input regarding cross culture management.
Carefully designed processes. In Huawei’s line of business, its quality of processes is paramount to ensure streamlining consistent production quality of products and software. “We are constantly reviewing our processes in order to deliver the best value to our customers. We have built a responsive and flexible organization that focuses on our cusotmer's needs through providing continued innovation and customized solutions,” says Mr. Xing Xianjie, emphasising some of Huawei’s core values.
The past four years, Gallup has singled out Huawei as the Chinese company with highest customer satisfaction, showing that attention to detail pays off.
Since 1996 DNV has certified Huawei’s management systems, first to the quality standard ISO 9001 and then to environmental standards and the information security standard BS 7799 as well as standards particular to the ICT industry.
“We chose DNV for its worldwide reputation, and have since learned to appreciate the way DNV communicates and shares knowledge in the certification process. The comments, output and reports we recieve helps us shape our organisation. We now have a risk-based management that ties in well with our company-wide enterprise risk management strategy.”
8,000 patents.
With half its staff of 35,000 working with research and development (R&D) and more than 1% of its revenue invested in R&D, Huawei is committed to create new technologies and has registered a record breaking 8,000 patents in China.