As the leader of the education industry, only by following the digital trend can the New Oriental keep the leading position. The appearance of online education platform and the application of AI make the New Oriental well developed in China.

Online education

The New Oriental was established in 1993 and at first its business model was an offline teaching and became the leader in the education industry. However, with the development of technology and the market impacted by Internet+, the online education appeared and has gradually evolved into a boom in China whose market size is expanding rapidly. Traditional education model can not make the New Oriental continue to develop. Besides, most competitors appear, such as the Universal IELTS, the Netease, the Tencent, etc. In 2008, 282 overseas educational institutions entered China and online education financing reached $197 million in 2013 (iReaserch, 2014). So how does the New Oriental transform to stand out from so many competitors to become 1st education stock in China?

Source: Imedia data center (2020)

Minhong Yu, the CEO of New Oriental said that in order to keep the position as leader in the education industry after business model transformation, the New Oriental should develop the business online learning, meanwhile, it should use the internet thinking to upgrade traditional offline education. Eventually achieve the O2O business model in education field (Zhang, 2018).

The New Oriental pays more attention on its online education platform which develops better compared to other platforms . The online education platform was settled in 2005 which was one of the first online education website in China (About us, 2020). In 2011, the construction of K-LMS learning management system means that the New Oriental fully transformed into online education field. LMS system improves resource allocation capacity, which could update appropriate teaching resources in time. This brings a good experience to customers. The resources also could be security stocked in the cloud. In 2013, it built a new education cloud platform which gathers various high-quality teaching resources of different courses to offer a variety of teaching plans. In 2015, the platform has been expanded to the TV and mobile side, which broke the traditional online learning. Students could learn online wherever they want and the geographical limitations are addressed.This platform takes advantage to improve teaching efficiency and online real-time monitoring also ensures that students are focused on their studies.

Until today, more than 10 million customers used it, which takes the largest market share in online education area (iiMedia Reaserch, 2020). Also, the excellent reputation of the New Oriental’s offline education development has attracted a large number of customers for its online education. Interactive online teaching also attracts students across the country. Therefore, the joint development of online and offline has improved the profits of the New Oriental. The following diagram is the New Oriental online education market size compared to other big companies in China, which develops very well.

Source: Soochow securities research institute

Recurrent AI ＆ CRM

So, how does the New Oriental maintain good relationships with so many customers? The New Oriental makes a co operations with recurrent AI, which could check the service quality of employees when they make a phone call with customers. Compared to manual inspections in the past, this reduces the labor costs and almost all calls could be detected. The efficiency could be improved, which most problems could be found by recurrent AI system and do not cost much time. This could better standardize employees behavior to maintain customers loyalty and attract customers. The good corporate image could be built. “We are very willing to deploy AI technology into business processes to improve productivity,” said Wu Mingzhu, director of online customer service at New Oriental (CHINADAILY, 2019).

Source: Recurrent AI (about us)

Sharing Economy

In China, high quality education resources cannot be well distributed. However, with the development of technology, the sharing economy could apply in online education field and solve this problem. In 2018, the New Oriental published a new goal which was to build an open platform to lead strategic transformation and share the high quality educational resources to the public. The leader of the New Oriental said that “ In the era of sharing economy, we hope that more people could gain good educational resources in a more efficient and cheaper way to make shared future, concerted action and common development in education field(Wangyi, 2019).” However, it was still not achieved today, and maybe in the future it could achieve.Most learning resources are not free now, but the New Oriental begin to launch of online lessons to attract students, which cost only 1 yuan.

It is a bit difficult for applying shared economy to online education since core teaching resources represent business success. Maybe for the New Oriental which only share some common resources in the future. However, this also could help some poor students to support their study and no matter where they are they could study online.

The following video could make you to have a well understand of the New Oriental:

References

Adi Binnun. (2019). Focus on China: Interview with NewOriental. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/MlxeNMSHuA4

CHINADAILY. (2019). New Oriental Online × Cyclic Intelligence. Retrieved from https://tech.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201910/21/WS5dad4a57a31099ab995e6c68.html

iiMedia Reaserch. (2020). Research Report on China Online Education Industry from 2019 to 2020. Retrieved from https://www.iimedia.cn/c400/68955.html

iReaserch. (2014). Research Report on China Online Education Industry. Retrieved from https://www.iresearch.com.cn/Detail/report?id=2174&isfree=0

Recurrent AI. (2020).About us. Retrieved from https://www.rcrai.com/

The New Oriental. (2020). About us. Retrieved from https://www.koolearn.com/about/

Wangyi fiancial. (2019). Sharing economy promotes balanced development of education. Retrieved from https://money.163.com/19/0329/16/EBEV4REK002580S6.html

Zhang, R. (2018). Yu Minhong: from ordinary people to become the elite. Zhong Guan Cun

Nowadays, with the rapid and continuous development of technology and big data, digital business has penetrated into different work fields and it also brings more convenience when people work. Furthermore, the value brought by digital business makes enterprise management more efficient, especially in the human resource management area which is an important part in enterprises. The changing labor markets field led to the human resource management must adopt digital technology to meet the enormous business requirements.

The focus of human resource management is on the scientific allocation, training and management of human resources, which plays an important role in ensuring the sustainable development of enterprises (Li, 2019).By the application of digital technology, it is possible to optimize the shortcomings of traditional human resource management and effectively regulate the entire system. It is to ensure the fairness and justice of human resource management..

The technology of big data

The technology of big data brings benefits to human resource management. Firstly, it makes the data of human resource planning more scientific and accuracy. As for traditional human resource planning, managers common use trend analysis method, ratio analysis method and regression analysis method, which could use hundreds of data to analysis (Hang, 2019). However, when applying big data technology, managers could base on the long-term employee turnover trends and macro development data analysis of industry standard to make plans. It reduces the complexity of data collection and effectively guarantees the quality of work.

Secondly, the technology of big data also creates an effective way for enterprises to recruit employees. Today, most enterprises recruit online by using the cloud computing technology to analysis the talents who are the current stage of the industry needs and set the threshold. Then, using the technology of big data to filter out applicants who not meet the mandatory criteria. This make the talent recruitment more targeted and could save the time and cost. For example, in Europe, NHS and organizations of health fields using the NHS digital platform named NHS Jobs to recruit. This platform saving around £10000000 for government, however, it costs only £2000000 per year. Now, it becomes the biggest recruitment platform in Europe and almost 500 organizations to join it (Thompson, 2015).

The technology of artificial intelligence (AI)

In the background of digital business, it is necessary for enterprises to apply artificial intelligence (AI). IBM is one of the first human resource departments to apply AI. Tom Stachura, who is the vice president of IBM, he thought that “AI is an accelerator – it allows us the ability to ingest a variety of data and provide context to a decision maker or employee or business leader. It allows us to deliver the right intelligence in the moment and achieve personalization at scale.” (Guenole & Feinzig, 2018).

As for the performance assessment part, which is the basic part in human resource management, some non-quantitative indicators of assessment are mostly scored by reviewers traditionally. So, the objectivity is inefficient. However, when apply the AI technology, the assessment could analysis employees performance according to a large number of cases scientifically and reasonably. This could improve the objective authenticity of performance assessment and employees performance can be comprehensively analyzed. Therefore, the motivation and loyalty of employees to the company could be improved.

About the future

In the future, with the development of digital technology in human resource management area, which lead to the human resource field needs more technical talents. In order to suit this environment, HR must equip with professional ability, comprehensive practical ability and digital ability. Soft skills such as creativity, adaptability, collaboration and time management enable HR to navigate new information and make effective decisions.They also need to have a higher sensitivity of the changing industry so that they could training of other staves timely. This may indicate that potential of HR is important rather than experience (Hogg, 2019). So, it may be more difficult in people’s career path. They should have all aspects of social development, and so do I.

Although AI is developed rapidly in human resource area, it could not completely instead of HR in the future. HR is a position that contains emotion to communicate with people. There are many factors that need to be taken into account and it is still take a long time to digitize these factors. AI could only solve some basic work, but emotional communication is difficult to measure.  However, it is undeniable that the basic work of HR will be replaced by digital human resource management system in the future. People may under the great competitive pressure in human resource area since the enterprises are lack of high-tech talents, but most people just stay at the basic level. So we must improve ourselves ability to suit the digital environment in the future.

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References

Hang, S. (2019). Human resources change brought by the digital economy. Business News

Hogg, P. (2019). Artificial intelligence: HR friend or foe?. Strategic HR Review.

Guenole, N., & Feinzig, S. (2018). The Business Case for AI in HR. With Insights and Tips on Getting Started. Armonk: IBM Smarter Workforce Institute, IBM Corporation.[Google Scholar].

Li, P.(2019). Thoughts about the promotion effect of information technology on human resource management. China Management Informationization

Thompson, M. (2015). NHS jobs: Using digital platforms to transform recruitment across the english & welsh national health service. University of Cambridge, Judge Business School.