"Anta Sports"(a competitor of Nike in China) Corporate University shares it's experience in building a digital business school in the past 1.5 year

Anta Sports Corporate University participated in the Excellence Digital Business School Competition in the TOP Corporate University Digital Business School selection hosted by China Europe International Business School Digital Publishing. The head of Anta Corporate University shared their experience of how to build an excellent digital business school through an online platform. This talk is made on mid-June 2020. The theme is "Vision leads to an international dream and we learn to strengthen our company into an Iron Army."

Part I, Strategic Connection & Undertaking

His sharing is divided into 6 parts, and starts from the first part "strategic connection & undertaking". The establishment of Anta Corporate University is not long ago, only traced back to January 2019. It was actually established when the company began to internationalize in 2019. Thus, this is a university born for a quick growing of the enterprise, and it also carried out a lot of innovations on the shoulders of giants for the sake of further development.

This following picture allows us to see that today's Anta is no longer the one that everyone knows yesterday. It was starting in 1991 in Jinjiang, Fujian Province, China as an OEM for international sports shoe brands. With the addition of Amor Sports China and its brands (Anta officially completed the acquisition of Amor Sports China operations in early 2019), Anta is now a completely new international company composed of a stunning brand group arrangement. Anta's subordinate brands today include: FILA, SOLOMON, ARCTERYX, Wilson, Peak, Performance, SUUNTO, ATOMTIC, DESCENTE and so on. From a private enterprise in south east China to a multinational companies, Anta is now a company listed on Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The annual report of 2019 states it’s main business sales amounted to RMB 33.928 billion, including Anta brand 17.45 billion yuan, FILA brand 14.77 billion yuan, and all other brands 1.708 billion yuan. Products include apparel 21.398 billion yuan, footwear 11.410 billion yuan, and accessories 1.120 billion yuan.

On such a broader platform, Anta still insists on its single-focus, multi-brand and omni-channel development strategy, with the omni-channel is a concept that evolves every day. Everyone in this very competitive retail market knows that in addition to offline to online, online has already moved from Taobao to WeChat store, moreover there are now video streaming of selling goods, keeping innovating every day. Therefore, sticking to the above company growing strategy requires a lot of talents.

In Anta's talent development landscape, we are also developing from the initial stage of borrowing talents to buying talents and to developing talents. To this day, we are already teaching according to market needs and talents gaps, and training talents according to various conditions, from version 1.0 to version 4.0. Therefore, in the face of changes, how to cultivate talents is the challenge we are really facing.

Therefore, facing the Anta Sports Corporate University are all the talent supply issues related to international strategic movement:

• How to cultivate a team of managers who can lead an international team to win the battle of globalization ?
• How to continue the market competitiveness of professional talents in the process of internationalization?
• How can we quickly improve the professionalism of local employees?
• How to allow employees from mergers and acquisitions to better integrate into the Chinese local culture, and don't forget the traditional training method of mass replication?
• How to cater to the individual needs of the new generation of young employees?

Therefore, based on the above various visions, Anta University has launched its own vision of the corporate university: 'Anta’s practical experience is based on the integration of Chinese and Western management wisdom. Through the online and offline learning and development platforms, it cultivates professional employees and an international leadership team. To become a first-class enterprise university in China, and to promote the development of enterprises to become the industry leader. " The University slogan is "to be the cradle of cultivating the Anta Iron Army".

Part II, System Design

How to make a good system design, to achieve a good balance between content and platform, use and learning? This page shows two-wheel, four-force, three-platform learning ecosystem, which is used by Anta Corporate University to develop learning while being able to continuously shape the curriculum.

The two wheels are actually "leadership" and "core competence". The four forces are the "commodity power", "brand power", "supply chain power", and "retail power" that we see. In fact, it is a professional birth that needs to be done based on our needs from the front line. The engine in the middle is an online learning platform, a training management platform, and a trinity digital online platform for knowledge management. As an engine, it drives our core competence and leadership to be coaxially transferred, and then drives the development of our professional strength. This is our eco-sphere.

At the same time, we have accurately classified the talents we need to train. According to different types of talents, we implement different training, so that we can achieve a real talent supply chain and can always meet the needs of different levels of talent supply.

For example, the cultivation of young talents. What we actually use is called selection and supplemented by training. The biggest feature is that we pass a series of high-intensity, various dimensions of assessment, we are called PK, also known as horse racing. We let truly excellent and potential people grow up. Of course, in this process, we have a training process, so such a young talent is very characteristic of Anta, that is, we can train and find the batch of young talents who can win the battle.

For the cultivation of professional talents, what we have implemented is from practice to practice. The most important thing is that as a leader in the industry, we have in many fields, our talents can already get enough nutrition from the inheritance of internal experience, and maintain our leading position in these subdivisions. So in this part we use inheritance, supplemented by high-end external learning.

For cadres and talents, what we actually combine is the combination of training and warfare, highlighting the special qualities. According to these four dimensions of Anta's unique leadership model, we will combine learning and training in all projects to truly cultivate a cadre who has the characteristics of Anta, can win the battle, can set an example, and can lead the team with a pattern to lead future development.

We only give an example here for professional talents. We will say that the entire curriculum system is a linkage between CEIBS Digital Publishing and us, and three-dimensional empowering our employees. You can see people at different levels will be supplemented with different category characteristics. Here we use CEIBS as an example. At different levels, we are all growing up one layer at a time. We can go from the CEIBS micro-classes to the highest level CEIBS EMBA course. The most important thing is that under this model, we the management cadres of the entire group will have the same tools with common language.

Part III, Knowledge Management

In knowledge management, we adopt the strategy of the middle force, that is, the artillery can quickly support the front line. Everyone can see that we are divided into front line, middle force and back office, and in this we put the core part that can be modularized on the middle force. You can see the analysis of our modules, and put those common parts in the background, so that we can form a quick response according to the front-line artillery requirements.

Our middle force has modules of leadership, professionalism, business skills, general skills and cultural skills. The reason why we cut them into these modules and make them into some pieces of knowledge, because we can easily consolidate, because we have different brands, they can extract different modules at will, and then combine the internal and external needs to push forward. And in the middle of the implementation process, at the front line, you can certainly achieve a simple, one-in-one model.

Just mentioned the five modules in middle force, in fact, the core of our knowledge management principle is "Let excellent people train better people", "No matter what principle, each needs to be marked with Anta's practical characteristics"; "No matter what tool "If you use it, you need to innovate and then feed back." These principles make the content into a fierce bubble, and the problem can be solved once it reaches the front line. In the implementation, we need a large number of part-time internal trainers and experts to participate, so Anta Corporate University has also established a comprehensive incentive system to support our original content. In Anta, the internal trainer is called "Anta Teacher", then if the developed course is adopted by the top mangement level, we will become called "Anta Famous Teacher", the course exceeds a certain level, this class will also become "Anta Famous Class". At the annual Teachers' Day and annual meeting, the executive directors will award outstanding internal trainers. Under such an internal sharing culture, the support system of the corporate university will play a huge role in the past year.

Part IV, Digital Operations

Anta Corporate University respects the independent learning of individuals. The university team operates the online learning APP as an online store, adhering to the concept of "my platform, my store", from the perspective of the students, insight into their needs, attracting them to learn actively as users.

In the course of operation, in fact, we are clinging to the two principles of "content is king, innovative operation". For example, if the content is king, we will select the explosive items (online classes, discussion topics and etc.), and the content will extremely test the vision of product managers. Anta Corporate University will cooperate with CEIBS Digital Publishing in depth, from the three-minute business school lighthouse plan to the business management master series, and it will be fully integrated into the platform. Therefore, many features of the digital comprehensive course are in line with Anta's learning habits.

Innovative operation refers to the 8-step method of the e-commerce model. The 8-step method of the e-commerce model is actually from the user portrait analysis to the content planning and planning of the purchase combination, as well as the use of advertising space arrangement display, event planning, promotion and drainage, To attract the corresponding users to read, and timely data analysis of sales and profits to adjust the next operation strategy. The whole team is running in small steps, struggling like a brave sales team to reach the standard.

After a year and a half of accumulation, most employees have formed a good habit of opening the APP to learn every day. The number of users is more than 10,000, and the monthly activity is more than 85%, and each month of learning reaches 5 hours per person. These results It also promotes the enthusiasm of the technical promotion of the training team, and will continue to do the explosion, let the learning form a benign closed loop.

Part V. Application of Digital Technology

We have attempted digital learning in the following four areas. Personalized trials, echelon special projects, panoramic views of leadership, virtual classrooms, we have launched Anta's prescriptions one by one. Establish a model of IDP, which is linked to all management software, that is, many learning behaviors and references have been linked to automatically feedback. This is an electronic learning and IDP that is highly embedded in the middle of management.

The leap echelon talent project in cooperation with CEIBS Digital Publishing is guided and coordinated by online course instructors, practice seminars are mixed and cultivated, talents are placed in real management scenarios, and there is an opportunity to put CEIBS management methods into practice, and students participate with questions after discussion, taking the answers and then practicing and repeating, a good management behavior was formed.

What we call the panoramic training of leadership actually uses the pre- and post-test methods to directly measure the manager's behavior improvement effect. In the use of the process, we will use online community operations, micro-learning, online training and offline tutoring, and even combine management theater to test our diversified learning. At the same time, all the dimensions of learning will have data. We will determine the unity of knowledge and action in the entire management center, and in all behavior improvement systems, we can track such a panoramic training.

Part VI Review of Learning Achievements

With the online courses and the popularization and application of online learning methods, we have implemented remote classrooms very quickly, and you can see that our results reached 500,000 individual watchings for 3,000 online classes in half a year.

In terms of leadership, the 360 evaluation shows that the results of the evaluation of 2500 managers across the group have increased by 10% compared with last year. The reserve ratio of senior cadres of the group has been increased for 31%, and the talent pool for international management has also increased.

In terms of professionalism, we launched the use of a model of three job capabilities, covering 744 people throughout the year with a satisfaction of 9.5, and found that the performance of the trainees was 15% higher than that of the non-trainees.

In the training of management trainees, our 395 management trainees created 30 action learning topics, and the 30 Olympic stars selected through our horse racing PK method will become the management echelon as the key training, the entire group efficiency a year-on-year increase of 47%.

The most important thing in the construction of the entire learning culture is that the birth of the university has touched the big gear of the Anta learning organization. The one-year training of the whole group can cover 100,000 person-times, and the learning duration is 370,000 hours, an increase from the same period last year. Three times, and the participation of the online platform is as high as 86%, the total learning time is 290,000 hours, 38 hours per capita. This fully proves that the atmosphere of learning organizations is being formed.

In the age of VUCA, when this black swan appeared frequently, it was the foundation of an organization that every employee could become a lifelong learner. And through the continuous reconstruction of thinking by the trainees, our company can make breakthroughs in the strength of the cluster, respond quickly, and continue to create our high growth. Therefore, making lifelong learning the mission of every employee is also the mission of Anta Corporate University. The slogan of the university encourages everyone: There is always a way to the mountain full of books, never stop.