My experience the last several months?or so is not on the macroeconomic level. We are working with Siemens AG, so the example may be useful. They tend to get involved in actual project implementation because they looked at their customers in three major categories. First, those projects that at least partially funded perhaps directly by government grants. Second, joint venture enterprises are a major market segment because they begin with an existing base of a local enterprise in China, but introduce a Western kind of management approach and methodology that has certain demands. Third, theres the major end user market, primarily enterprises funded totally out of their own pocketbooks and are making money. There are many such purely domestic enterprises that have fairly good profit and return characteristics, primarily in Shanghai and eastern China.?

Westerners will find that because of local reporting requirements no foreign system that's brought in is going to be able to meet exactly whats required locally. Instead, we are using an iterative process rather than trying to answer IT needs directly. State-owned enterprises generally have had relatively little success in installing MIS systems and structures that had major impact. A lot of that had to do with the type of rapid change that Mr. Wang alluded to. Essentially when people would go into the design process, they would design for existing processes, but there was no thinking about what the future might be. They built no flexibility in the system theyd do something that would need to be ripped out a year later.?

Our experience in most major situations, at least where the foreign party has majority control, has been not to build for the mass of potential users. We essentially aim at a higher tier and higher class. So we have adopted pretty much lock, stock and barrel certain major Western standards and principals. We import reporting packages and systems, but adapt them for whats required statutory-wise in China. We have found we do not need to mix architectural designs. This is the direction that the MIS design architects in the country are taking. They basically are no longer trying to mix models, but instead theyre using the Western model.?

The reason goes back to this issue of standardization. Domestically, we are unable to come up with a coherent set of consistent standards. In China, the production related ERP and MRP systems are basically kept pretty much as they are in the West.?

By conforming with international practices and standards we go forward, enhancing the speed with which we deploy systems brought in from abroad.