In this episode, we invite Kong Min, VP of SUNMI Technology, to share how SUNMI uses DingTalk Docs and Knowledge Base to boost collaboration efficiency across ten scenarios, including weekly and monthly reports, process standards, incident reviews, meeting management, recruitment and interviews, and department training.🌟 Related industries: Internet/IT, hardware infrastructure services, IoT, manufacturing
🧀 Live replay
🧀 About SUNMI Technology
SUNMI is an IoT technology company built around the core value of “Altruism.” SUNMI is headquartered at KIC in Yangpu, Shanghai. Within China, it has three branch offices in Beijing, Shenzhen, and Hangzhou. Internationally, it operates 11 branch offices and 8 subsidiaries across locations such as Taipei, France, the United States, Russia, Dubai, India, Poland, and Japan. We are dedicated to providing rich, high-quality smart IoT devices and integrated “edge + cloud” services for commercial sectors, partnering with our ecosystem to build a connected commercial world and ultimately realize Commerce 4.0.
🧀 About the Cheese Officer
Hello everyone, I’m Kong Min, VP of SUNMI Technology. I currently lead Quality and Security, with primary responsibilities for testing, quality management, and security management. Previously, I led SUNMI’s OS, cloud platform, portal group, value-added services, merchant app templates, solutions, software products, and IT systems. I also participated in the company’s culture upgrade initiatives. For online collaboration and knowledge management, I’m both a user and an internal advocate and practitioner. I believe:
- Online collaboration makes team communication more efficient, accurate, and aligned.
- Knowledge management gives a team a shared brain, common memory, and shared understanding, reducing information gaps.
- When everyone has the same information, conclusions tend to converge, making it easier to reach consensus.
- Most incidents can be resolved through structured knowledge, and prevented through post-incident reviews.
- Most teams struggle with seamless end-to-end alignment because of information gaps.
🧀 Philosophy: SUNMI’s knowledge management philosophy
- Technology is the core productivity of a tech company, and knowledge is the foundation of technical accumulation.
- Beyond products, brand, channels, and services, the core moat of a ToB business also includes industry knowledge and scenario complexity. Long-term accumulation of industry knowledge creates a significant advantage.
- Consolidate fragmented information into blocks, because fragments get lost.
- Make implicit information explicit, because misalignment kills synergy.
- Make information easy to edit so it stays fresh, otherwise it decays.
- At the same time, make all edits traceable and auditable.
- Capture historical information so it can be summarized, because reviews drive progress.
- Let information flow, because the more people see it, the more value it creates.
- In a multi-device, multi-screen era, information must stay simple. Signal-to-noise ratio matters: use text for text, and tables only for two-dimensional content.
- Knowledge lives in the organization. Individuals can grow, but knowledge must remain.
🧀 Value: What problems does DingTalk Docs solve?
We naturally transitioned from using DingTalk for company-wide communication to using DingWork. We shifted from editing the first Word or Excel file shared in a group chat to directly creating online documents.
Pain points and challenges
In the past, we faced the following problems
Meetings were held, discussions were had, but nothing followed. Everyone waited for everyone else. Starting a proposal was always the hardest part.One person worked while others waited. Splitting work made it hard to merge later.Knowledge and experience stayed inside people’s heads. When someone left, the earth kept turning, but the impact was real.Handovers required dedicated time, mostly spent organizing documents.After 9 years of growth, features piled up and the team rotated several times. Some designs lacked complete documentation, others became outdated, systems needed rebuilding, but new hires didn’t dare to touch them.We had to create dedicated PowerPoint decks just to report, share, or discuss.Practice sharing: Knowledge Base overview
Teambition + Thoughts
We adopted Teambition in 2015, when SUNMI was still called “Woyou Information.”Starting in January 2022, we decided to move from Thoughts to DingTalk Knowledge Base…
🧀 Practice sharing: Business scenarios
Scenario 1: Weekly, monthly, and annual reports, and the reporting culture
Covers overtime daily reports, R&D weekly reports, and the SUNMI quality and security weekly/monthly reports.- Established the SUNMI quality weekly report standard.
- Upgraded it to the SUNMI Quality and Security Weekly Report.
- Established the Quality and Security Department weekly report standard.
- Each week, we drive the quality-related teams across the R&D Center, Operations Center, and Sales & Service Center to jointly write and publish the SUNMI Quality Weekly Report, producing 50 issues of the SUNMI Quality and Security Weekly Report per year.
- Department annual reports.
Scenario 2: Meeting management
Covers daily meetings (DingTalk Docs + Quick Meeting), R&D Center management meetings, and ShowDay.- ShowDay is a SUNMI tradition held once each quarter, designed to showcase the latest deliverables and outcomes from each product, project, and domain so everyone can see and celebrate each other’s work.
- Relaunched ShowDay and created a ShowDay standard so the event can be hosted on a rotating basis.
Scenario 3: Process standards
DingTalk Docs hosts the standard for process standards, viewed by 31 readers.Test case standards and reviews
Built test case standards and reviews from scratch, completed two rounds of review for all business testing teams, and recorded 10 review minutes. We captured issues identified during reviews, required rectification and re-review, established test case standards, dimensions, classifications, and ITR source requirements, set up a rating model, and expanded the test case base to nearly 50,000 entries.Test standard formation
Built a test standard output process, especially for externally customized projects. Reached consensus and put it into practice.ROM R&D and release process
Identified gaps in the SPM role and built a new end-to-end ROM management standard. SPD and SPM are now organized to deliver the correct version. Rebuilt the ROM release standard:- First attempted to carry the process on a customized PLM.
- When that hit roadblocks, redesigned the swim-lane process diagram using financial ROM resource packages and reached design consensus.
- Next, plan to carry it on iTools and upgrade to RMP in the future.
TR reviews
Built TR review test deliverables standards from scratch.Scenario 4: Quality management
Incident reviews
Built a DingTalk Knowledge Base and captured hundreds of ITR analysis and review reports.Quality management
Quality Month campaign: tackling bugs together. The captain signed the quality reward and penalty system. Also covers themed deep-dive series and customer journey analysis.Scenario 5: Industry knowledge and terminology
Covers a domain/company terminology encyclopedia, a Chinese-English glossary, and domain technology primers.Scenario 6: Global collaboration
Covers overseas team co-creation and DingTalk Docs translation test reports.- DingTalk Docs auto-translation is excellent. Translations are accurate, formatting stays intact, and content goes global instantly.
🧀 Practice sharing: Functional scenarios
Scenario 7: Recruitment, interviews, and probation
Covers recruitment planning, the campus recruitment funnel, interview notes, recruitment materials, and a probation report template.Scenario 8: Department management and training
Covers public department responsibilities, colleague birthday wishes, and transparent department testing schedules — the foundation of trust and collaboration under functional division of labor.R&D training sessions
- This year, we participated in 21 R&D training sessions.
- Maintained a training materials directory.
Scenario 9: Pandemic-period management
- Set up an issue handling group, tracked device availability, and reassigned testing tasks based on devices on hand.
- Task assistance and resource allocation within the team.
- The department fully adopted the new work practices for the pandemic: online morning meetings, on-camera group photos, and individual weekly reports.
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Knowing that long-term remote work meant more eating and less moving, with potential health risks, we tried new ways to encourage team members to exercise at home:
- DingTalk group exercise
- Exercise tracking spreadsheet
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During the lockdown, we learned that 12 colleagues staying at the office faced multiple challenges: insufficient daily supplies, heavy work pressure, irregular routines, anxiety, and family complaints. We mobilized the R&D management team to help resolve these issues:
- Requested the admin team to prepare supplies.
- Adjusted assignments to balance workload.
- Applied for an on-site stay allowance.
- After restrictions were lifted, we tracked infection and return-to-work data.
Scenario 10: Putting culture into practice and co-creating culture upgrades
Orange Light initiative in action
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Tracked the Orange Light initiative participation data by department.
Name Group Calls made Calls connected Need help Medium/high need Kong Min Quality and Security 80 50 23 8 Fei Xiangming App Testing 220 164 58 18 Fang Lingling Quality Platform 80 57 23 21 Chang Xiaolu Android Testing 123 70 23 8 Total Quality and Security 503 341 127 55 - Made over 80 calls and connected with nearly 50 elderly residents.
- Made over 80 calls and connected with nearly 50 elderly residents.
- Most residents needed vegetables and fruit; they had chicken, duck, and eggs in the fridge.
- Elderly residents living alone eat slowly, so vegetables can spoil before being finished.
- Some elderly with chronic conditions needed medication: for diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, sleeping pills, painkillers (aspirin), milk, yogurt.
- The government care packages alone weren’t enough; residents organized group buys. Elderly residents who couldn’t shop online were better served in neighborhoods where they could order vegetable packages from the local committee.
- Some were frightened by COVID-positive neighbors and hadn’t gone out since lockdown began. They were working through it.
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Hearing how some elderly people’s lives were severely disrupted was deeply saddening. We can’t judge their situation by the standards of younger, healthier people. Altruism requires empathy: stepping into the shoes of elderly residents who live alone to understand their difficulties.
- They lack food, medicine, special necessities, and care.
- Some neighborhood committees took special care of seniors living alone, delivering double portions of food and checking in regularly.
- Some elderly moved in with their sons or daughters, told us they weren’t at home, thanked us for our care, and asked us not to worry.
- The elderly were all very gracious. As soon as they heard “volunteer,” their tone warmed up immediately. They said everyone was working hard during the pandemic, that they could manage on their own and didn’t want to ask for much, that they didn’t want to trouble the street office, the neighborhood committee, or others, and that they would get through this. They thanked us repeatedly. Sometimes they said “you’re welcome” ten times and still wouldn’t let us hang up.
- In recent days, three elderly COVID-positive patients around the age of 90 passed away despite emergency treatment. A “let it spread” policy really doesn’t work for the elderly.
- Invited all colleagues across the three centers related to quality and security to a live event for the pre-release of new terms in the Six Cultivations.
Culture upgrade
- Joined the company’s 9th anniversary celebration and participated in sharing how the Six Cultivations were implemented in the quality domain.
🧀 Practice sharing: Key takeaways
Document-driven working method
- Online documents are not just for collaboration. They are also a way to drive things forward.
- In the IT industry and modern office work, over 90% of output is text and images, almost all of which can live in a document.
- Once a discussion ends, write it down. Start a document, define the outline, drop it into the group chat, and pull people in to fill it out. The proposal is off to a strong start.
🧀 Looking ahead
- Knowledge Base portal, Knowledge Base activity, Interaction
- Knowledge Base contribution points and rankings to encourage more colleagues to create.
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Use AI dictation to free people from the I/O bottleneck of taking notes, letting thinking soar.
- Quick Meeting already has dictation, but beyond accuracy issues, it’s currently word-for-word, lacking summarization, distillation, and structure.
- It’s not simple dictation; it’s high-quality note-taking.
- One day, all these knowledge documents could feed into AI like ChatGPT or MidJourney, building on existing knowledge to help answer questions and automatically generate new content.
👋 Join SUNMI
🧀 Template sharing
Everything good becomes more meaningful when shared. The templates below are provided by SUNMI Technology.