Motoring

Corporate classroom

By DING QINGFEN (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-06-04 06:53

Motorola University, likely the most well-known corporate university in China, was founded out of a need to stay competitive in the high pressure market of high technology.

Established in 1993, the university is now the largest Motorola has in the Asia-Pacific region.

The purpose of the university is to help Motorola China realize its local development strategy through training programs, according to Jenny Yan, director of Motorola University China.

"A corporate university is a catalyst, stimulating the enterprise to keep going forward. The university would be useless if there was no persuasive corporate strategy behind it," Yan tells China Business Weekly.

Motorola University China began operations a year after the company started a large manufacturing plant in Tianjin. It soon found it that had urgent need of skilled staff to work at the facility.

Motorola's first investment in China, the Tianjin factory remains one of its biggest global manufacturing centers, with some 10,000 employees.

The sprawling complex makes products ranging from pagers to cellphones and semiconductors, two-way radios, telecommunications components, batteries and automotive electronic systems.

With such a wide range of technical expertise needed, training and staff development soon became critical - and the Motorola University China was born. Some of the university's training programs are held at the Tianjin plant, while others are at its company headquarters.

In 1994, the company set out a strategic plan for Motorola China, as the company had the nation's top mobile phone market share and the country was playing an increasingly important role in its global development blueprint.

The plan was "to localize the management in China as soon as possible," says Li Yuanming, principal of the university's Asia-Pacific Leadership and Management Institute.

Before 1994, management was "all from overseas", he says.

"So the employment cost was too high and they could not know the China market better than local people," says Li.

The corporate university offers programs for different levels of management at what it terms academies, ranging from emerging to developing and finally advanced leadership training.

Before courses began, Motorola did extensive research and analysis to determine what techniques and skills the three levels require.

Motorola University has since trained several thousand local managers, which now account for "84 percent of our management in Motorola China", Li says.

The programs continue to evolve. "Our research and development (R&D) people update courses in line with our changing strategy," he adds.

The company makes significant investment to update its training services, says Yan, who declines to release exact spending figures, noting only that "R&D capability in training is the key to keeping a corporate university alive".

By 1998, Motorola found it difficult to maintain its top position in China as more mobile phone makers arrived with innovative products and marketing initiatives.

To help meet the rising challenge, the university started its "fulfillment distribution program" in 2005 that aims to help Motorola gain competitiveness by keeping operating costs at a minimum, says Li.

Motorola joins selected partners in major cities that are responsible for distributing its products using what it calls "promoters" - sales agents - in secondary and third-tier cities, instead of relying on direct sales agents as it did before 2005.

"The new solution helps us spend much less on logistics and increase efficiency. What we now do is train promoters in how they can increase sales," says Li.

Several thousand promoters have since been trained at the university.

Six sigma

Motorola developed the noted "six sigma" methodology in 1986, a paradigm the company uses for finding defects and improving quality.

The tool has been taught, refined and used for more than 18 years in the company's training programs and processes, including in R&D, manufacturing, employment, service and marketing.

"It has helped save more than $17 billion (from 1986 to 2004) within our own organization," says Yan.

"We can get a return of $84 on each dollar we spend" on training in the method, she notes.

Other companies that use the six sigma method include Dupont, Federal Express, General Motors, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Kodak, NBC and Polaroid.

The university also began reaching out beyond its own workers in 2002 to its suppliers and partners with six sigma-related training programs.

"The training programs for our suppliers or sales agents can help them grow stronger together with Motorola in either quality or in marketing, enhancing our brand image and sales revenue," says Yan.

As director of Motorola University Asia operations since 2006, Yan well knows the challenges a corporate university faces in China when communicating the latest company developments to suppliers and clients.

"China's telecommunications industry is one of the most dynamically evolving sectors. So whatever players are in the industry are very smart and learning fast," she says.

"They are working strenuously to gain a better position. This makes it more challenging for us to communicate with our partners in the sector or even educate them," she says.

"To win their trust, we must learn harder and faster to get the knowledge of what is happening around the market out to them, and we have to continuously sharpen our advantages in training programs."

(China Daily 06/02/2007 page5)