Traditional ERP Is Obsolete? Cost-Conscious Pharmaceutical Enterprises Turn to Composable EBC

In the summer of 2018, the overseas low-code sector witnessed two major financing rounds: OutSystems secured a $360 million investment from KKR and Goldman Sachs, achieving a valuation of over $1 billion and becoming a newly minted unicorn; meanwhile, Siemens acquired another low-code vendor, Mendix, for $700 million. These industry giants demonstrated their strong confidence and high regard for the low-code market through substantial financial commitments.

Shifting focus back to China, Kingdee Software, a globally renowned cloud services brand, has officially launched its Cangqiong low-code development platform, which is designed for distributed, cloud-native architectures. This platform, developed over three years with an R&D investment of 5 billion yuan, is built on the KDDM (Kingdee Dynamic Domain Model). It enables the effortless development of all applications—from front-end to back-end and from desktop to mobile—through drag-and-drop design and flexible configuration of properties and events.

Over the past five years, Kingdee Cloud·Cosmos has undergone rapid iteration and upgrades. As an industry-leading composable enterprise PaaS platform, it serves as the digital foundation for implementing EBC (Enterprise Business Capability). Based on this platform, Kingdee Software has developed three suites of SaaS products tailored to different enterprise scales: Kingdee Cloud·Galaxy for large and ultra-large enterprises; Kingdee Cloud·Starry Sky for medium-sized enterprises; and Kingdee Cloud·Star for small businesses.

According to the report “Market Share: All Software Markets, Worldwide, 2022” released by Gartner, a leading international consulting firm, Kingdee Cloud·Cosmic claimed the top spot in China’s high-productivity aPaaS market with a 24.2% market share, securing the No. 1 position in China for three consecutive years and ranking among the top ten globally in aPaaS market share.

Pharmaceutical companies are a major service entity for low-code solutions in the healthcare industry. Kingdee Cloud Cosmic has established relevant deployments across various segments of the pharmaceutical value chain, including pharmaceutical manufacturing, distribution, and drug retail.

Wu Xuejun, General Manager of Kingdee China’s Consumer Industry DivisionTaking pharmaceutical retail as an example, this article introduces the value of low-code applications.

With the implementation of policies such as the “Two-Invoice System,” zero markup on drug sales, and the separation of prescribing from dispensing, an increasing share of prescriptions and medication purchases has shifted to out-of-hospital channels, driving year-on-year growth in pharmaceutical sales at the terminal market. However, the annual growth rate of pharmaceutical sales is showing signs of slowing due to factors including centralized national procurement, strengthened medical insurance oversight, the promotion of medical consortia, and the enforcement of key monitored drug lists. Meanwhile, online pharmacies are competing with brick-and-mortar pharmacies for market share, leveraging advantages such as brand differentiation and distinct user demographics.

In the face of fierce competition, large chain pharmacies have significant competitive advantages.High performance growth can be sustained through self-operated businesses and acquisitions. However, the company still faces operational risks stemming from a relatively simplistic profit model. Therefore, driven by both internal and external factors such as drug regulatory requirements and corporate operational needs, leveraging digital technologies to achieve refined management for cost reduction and efficiency enhancement has become an inevitable choice for pharmaceutical retail manufacturers.

During actual corporate visits, Wu Xuejun also observed that,"As business volumes rebound rapidly, significant disparities have emerged in the system architecture capabilities of many enterprises. Among them, companies leveraging digital tools such as low-code platforms often demonstrate faster and more effective responses to massive, elastic business demands.""How to rapidly apply low-code solutions within their own business operations has also become the primary focus of recent interactions between enterprises and Kingdee."

Kingdee Software has always believed that the value of low-code platforms lies not only in building software applications through drag-and-drop interfaces, but should be integrated into enterprise management logic and processes to support digital transformation and become a foundation for “composable”EBC(Enterprise Business Capability) System.

EBCConcepts by International Authoritative Consulting FirmsGartnerAt2019It was formally proposed in [Year] to deconstruct all application scenarios within enterprise operations and management into discrete digital building blocks, which are then assembled into new applications based on business needs arising from changes in the external environment.

“Pharmaceutical companies have now shifted from the past emphasis onERP(Enterprise Resource Planning), shifting toward a greater emphasis on resilience against uncertaintyEBC.” Wu Xuejun explained that, compared with traditionalERP，EBCEvolved from “resource planning” to “business capabilities,” from “operational management” to “industrial chain ecosystem,” from “process-driven” to “data-driven,” from “suite products” to “composable applications,” and from “monolithic architecture” to “cloud-native architecture.”

“"Composable" EBC rests on two premises: first, modular building blocks are sufficiently abundant to meet 60%–80% of an enterprise’s basic business needs; second, new capability modules can be custom-designed to address users’ uncertain or evolving requirements.

This is precisely where Kingdee Software holds its competitive advantage. Over the course of 30 years serving enterprise clients, Kingdee has conducted extensive exploration in the realm of “composability.” At the core of this effort is Kingdee Cloud·Cosmic, a composable enterprise-grade PaaS platform that serves as the unified digital foundation for all of Kingdee’s SaaS offerings and represents an integrated suite of technical capability platforms.

Kingdee Cloud·Cangqiong has built a technological capability platform, an application capability platform, a data capability platform, and an open capability platform across different technical dimensions, to achieveMore Reliable, More Agile, Smarter, and More Opencorporate service objectives.

In terms of reliability, the Kingdee Cloud·Cosmic platform provides enterprise-grade distributed databases, cloud-native technologies, and distributed computing capabilities, supporting high concurrency and intensive computational workloads to continuously enhance internal operational efficiency.

Meanwhile, in response to the platform's security issues, consideringEBCMany of the system’s business operations run on public clouds, involving numerous participants. Kingdee Cloud·Cosmic has established a comprehensive security framework and obtained numerous third-party security certifications to ensure the security of its role as the foundational infrastructure for enterprise digitalization, based on the principle that “only when the foundation is secure can the applications built upon it be better protected.”

Meanwhile,Kingdee Cloud•Cosmic platform also supports technological openness to build a win-win ecosystem.Kingdee Cloud·Cosmos can provide70Multiple standard connectors, and develop standardAPIInterfaces are provided for invocation by other business systems, with unified orchestration and distribution implemented on a single platform. The advantage of composable integration lies in its ability to deliver truly valuable, tailored solutions—not generic ones—to non-technical customers.

In terms of agility,Kingdee Cloud·Cosmic Platform, with its proprietaryKDDMBased on the dynamic domain model, Kingdee30Years of accumulated experience in enterprise application development and customer service have formed an application capability library, enabling the creation of an application capability building and assembly platform for enterprises. This platform helps businesses support business construction and assembly across various scenarios through capabilities such as low-code development, workflow management, and integration.

KDDMis cloud-native,AICorporate Dynamics of Advanced Technology R&DModeling Framework and Methodology.Unlike traditional low-code development platforms, KDDM comes with a vast array of pre-built enterprise business capability components, resolving the compatibility challenge between standardized products and personalized customization. This enables SaaS software to achieve personalized customization for multi-tenancy in the cloud. Furthermore, KDDM implements model-based management of enterprise data and business processes, allowing enterprises to conduct secondary development on these models to more effectively accumulate and leverage their IT assets.

Kingdee Cloud·Cangqiong'sSmarterThis is embodied in the Data and Intelligence Capability Platform, which underpins enterprise data intelligence services. The platform enables the construction and assembly of data and analytics capabilities, featuring automation and composability. It empowers enterprises to build and assemble their data and intelligent analytics capabilities, thereby rapidly responding to dynamic, flexible, and personalized business analytics demands.

The data capability platform can process vast amounts of data generated during business operations, includingOCRIdentification,IOTData collection, external data acquisition, and more to establish a data lake, enabling data assembly, archiving, viewing, and traceability, thereby empowering enterprises with precise decision-making and insights.

Over the past 30 years since its establishment, Kingdee, as a leading provider of digital management solutions in China, has delivered management products and services to more than 7.4 million enterprises and government organizations.

Stepping back from individual companies to view the industry as a whole, the low-code market landscape is highly fragmented, with numerous participants and varying product quality. So, how should we evaluate the platform capabilities of a low-code product? Wu Xuejun introduced,From the perspective of enterprise clients, amidst complex business systems, enterprises are more inclined to choose low-code platforms that offer stronger synergy with upstream and downstream players in the industry chain, more comprehensive coverage of business management, and broader reach across marketing channels.“This places high demands on low-code vendors in terms of their full-scenario service capabilities, the maturity of their security systems, the construction of business layering models, and their ecosystem-building resources.”

Wu Xuejun mentioned:“Currently, low-code platforms are predominantly emphasized as technical tools, with their value confined to improving the productivity of code developers and failing to deliver efficacy for business operations itself. Kingdee Software, however, envisions that ‘building composable enterprise business capabilities through low-code to help enterprises achieve autonomous, controllable, and high-quality business development’ will become the mainstream approach in the future.”