Product Innovation and Quality Control Create Hikvision Accomplishment
Based on the latest 2013 survey on worldwide major professional security buyers by a&s, Chinese products are ready to prove their worth with improved quality and service. Hikvision, a total solutions provider in video surveillance, headquartered in China, is starting to gain global recognition amongst worldwide buyers to shape the new image of Chinese manufacturing.
Product Innovation and quality control has laid the foundation for Hikvision’s accomplishment. In the recent world market report for CCTV and video surveillance equipment from IMS research (an IHS company), Hikvision was ranked as the number one supplier under the category of “CCTV and Video Surveillance Equipment”, with 8-percent market share in 2012. In the category of “Security Cameras”, Hikvision was also ranked third with a 9.7-percent world market share, while maintaining first place in “DVR suppliers” for four consecutive years in 2012.
Hikvision’s first auto-focus camera module was launched in early 2000 and marked a major milestone for the company. Thereafter, Hikvision has gradually transformed into a total solutions provider in video surveillance, said Yangzhong Hu, President of Hikvision Digital Technology. “Hikvision’s sales revenue in surveillance cameras has also started to double and even triple since then.”
Positioning itself in the middle- to high-end market sectors, Keen Yao, International Marketing Director said “As a worldwide provider of video surveillance products and solutions, Hikvision’s main competitiveness are product innovation and quality control, which support Hikvision in providing quality products plus reasonable prices. Both factors also allow the company to achieve good gross margin continuously since its establishment.”
@3: Product Innovation
To optimize new product development, as well as maintain product innovation and technological leadership, Hikvision employs a matrix management structure for its R&D department, which allows it to succeed in cross-department project cooperation between its resource teams and product teams. Hikvision resource team is divided by several key technologies – hardware, image processing, video/audio codec, compression, networking, streaming media, FPGA applications, video data storage, embedded applications, software structure, and others. At Hikvision, a specialized project team, composed from groups of resource teams for technical input and the corresponding product teams, is usually formed to develop a new product.
Hikvision process control has also achieved international standards. Since 2009, the company has introduced Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), a process improvement training and certification program and service administered and marketed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University, to greatly improve its process management of product research and development.
Besides, Hikvision also follows the innovated “integrated supply chain” concept for market-oriented product development. Hikvision invites suppliers (manufacturing partners) and clients for joint product evaluation and collaboration, and asks their suggestions on how to make the products meet international standards and how to optimize the structure/system, ensuring Hikvision’s products meet the real market demand.
@3: Quality Control
At Hikvision, the quality control is a complete system from R&D design, manufacturing to service, to provide further assurance for customers — Design Quality Assurance (DQA) and Manufacturing Quality Assurance (MQA). DQA is under the R&D product testing department mainly for product reliability verification. Hikvision has around 350 engineers on the R&D team, which accounts for over 15 percent of the team, who are responsible for product testing. The product testing group is in charge of software tests, hardware tests, and reliability tests, which all play an important role in product development and guaranteeing product quality.
MQA is divided into four categories: raw materials quality control, productive process, tests, and outgoing quality control. It is achieved by Hikvision’s state-of-the-art production facilities, manufacturing equipment, and resources. As an example of this point, Hikvision introduced Siemens’ fully-automatic SMT equipment for production lines, ensuring world-class technical capability and purchased a SAP system from Germany to avoid any problems in materials preparation cycles which may lead to downtime of the production line.
Apart from delivering products with the highest reliability through various tests, Hikvision also has strict compliance to international safety and emission standards. All Hikvision products are certified by UL/CUL, CE, FCC, Australian C-tick, RoHS, WEEE, etc.
@3: Shaping the Future
Hikvision has successfully transformed to become a trustworthy and quality-guaranteed solutions provider. With 12 regional branch offices in other parts of the world to offer customers in-depth local services, Hikvision has shaped the new image of Chinese manufacturers and the company’s future development in the global market can be highly anticipated.
