Most companies discover that management practices that work on a smaller scale no longer work when the company grows substantially. This is also true for the product development process. As Huawei grew, the firm experienced problems in terms of higher product failure rates, longer development cycles and increased R&D costs. It then turned to the consulting services of IBM to upgrade its product development processes to a larger scale. The integrated product development (IPD) system implemented at Huawei was copied from IBM’s practices. IPD’s central idea is that companies must expand cross-functional teams to perform product development and use standard processes and templates to guide those development activities. IBM promoted the IPD system by providing consulting services to other firms. However, most of them failed during implementation, and only a few of them actually benefited from the IPD system; Huawei was one of them. The IPD transformation completely changed Huawei’s product developing system and helped the company overcome its problems in developing products on a larger scale. The IPD transformation was a turning point for Huawei in becoming a world-class company. This chapter explains how the IPD system helped Huawei solve its management problems and why Huawei was successful in IPD transformation when many other companies were not.

Management transformation in the financial management area has contributed significantly to the competitiveness of Huawei. Four Standardizations was the first large-scale financial management transformation project implemented in the company from 1998 to 2007. In 2007, Huawei started a more ambitious Integrated Financial Services project with assistance from IBM consultants, which lasted until 2014. This chapter documents the background, motivation, activities and impacts of these two financial management transformation projects and discusses Huawei’s experience in successfully implementing management transformation in the financial area. It also highlights that Huawei’s employee ownership and financial management strategy with its own characteristics determine the focus of the financial management transformation projects.

This chapter documents how Huawei transformed its supply chain management over the past two decades. We argue that Huawei’s supply chain management transformation can be divided into two stages: the establishment of an integrative supply chain from 1999 to 2003 and the establishment of a global supply chain from 2005 to the present. In the integrative supply chain management transformation project, IBM consultants helped Huawei identify problems in its operational processes, IT system and organizational structure. Subsequently, Huawei addressed these problems through process reengineering, an integrated IT system, and organizational change management, respectively. In the global supply chain management transformation phase, Huawei first promoted the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system in overseas subsidiaries and representative offices by tailoring the system to local laws, regulations and customer requirements and then made efforts to build an integrated global supply chain network.