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Nina Zhang’s journey from lean to leadership
Scaling operational excellence through The Unipart Way and digital innovation
Get in touchThe transformation of global supply chains requires leaders who can master complexity, adapt systems for scale, and build lasting capability.
At Unipart, Nina Zhang, Digital, Process & Capability Manager, exemplifies this powerful leadership. Her career is rooted in lean engineering, and has seen her successfully executing incredible initiatives within the dynamic, large-scale, and challenging operational environments in China.
From her early role as an Assistant Lean Engineer, Nina learned how to design solutions that work across massive logistics footprints. Her journey is a deliberate progression in moving from tactical process improvement to strategically managing the digital and human capabilities of the organization.
We spoke to Nina, to find out more about her career path, and explore how Unipart’s continuous improvement culture has supported her growth, and how her team’s innovative, China-based digital solutions are delivering measurable efficiency gains and robust confidence for Unipart’s partners.
Nina’s journey
You started as an Assistant Lean Engineer and are now the Digital, Process & Capability Manager. Can you walk us through your career journey?
“If I were to distill the logic of my journey, it’s been a progression from tactical problem-solving to strategic capability building. Every step has been meaningful, every step built on the previous one.
I joined Unipart as an Assistant Lean Engineer and quickly learned the fundamentals of process waste and, most importantly, how to engage with frontline teams to deliver improvements.
After proving my ability to execute, I was promoted to Lean Engineer. In this role, I shifted from supporting projects to leading them. I was responsible for larger, cross-functional initiatives aimed at optimizing entire value streams.
The pivotal transition came when I moved into a Process Capability Lead role. I was tasked with standardizing our improvement methodology across the department and training a team of internal practitioners. It was during this time that I recognized the limitations of purely Lean tools and started integrating digital solutions – like scanning verification and workflow automation – to scale our impact.
This directly led to my current position as Digital, Process & Capability Manager. Now, we’re not just optimizing existing processes, our mission is threefold: to digitize our core processes, to build the digital literacy and process capability of our people, and to ensure our technology investments deliver tangible operational value.”
The Unipart Way as a foundation
Nina’s narrative clearly shows that her career was a strategic progression from fixing processes to building capabilities. This growth was fundamentally supported by Unipart’s underlying philosophy, The Unipart Way.
And, it raises the question of how the established principles of process improvement provided the necessary framework for her team to successfully embrace complex new digital technologies?
“The Unipart Way’ philosophy of continuous improvement, was absolutely fundamental to our digital work. For example, the emphasis on standardization first has provided the digital programming team with a stable foundation. When implementing digital solutions, we also adopted a new work model, standardizing every step from requirements gathering, development, testing, delivery, and maintenance. This offers a number of benefits:
- From the customer’s perspective: A standardized sorting methodology helps increase customer trust and ultimately helps deliver the products they need accurately and on time, improving customer satisfaction.
- From the digital team’s perspective: Adopting a unified development model facilitates collaboration among teams, improves development efficiency and quality, and is also very beneficial for future expansion and integration as the market changes.
- From the company’s perspective: The leadership team can clearly understand project status, improving project controllability. A unified digital platform breaks down information barriers, strengthening departmental collaboration. Also, best practices are standardized and embedded into the system, forming unique digital assets, enabling knowledge inheritance and sustainable development.
Adopting The Unipart Way standardization and continuous improvement methodology gives us the confidence to deconstruct more complex digital requirements or challenges.”
The necessity of digital scale
The power of standardisation is evident, creating a robust, reliable foundation for digital development. However, with some transformations, the sheer scale or complexity of a client project dictates that off-the-shelf, standard methods aren’t enough.
We asked Nina to talk about a specific operational challenge that necessitated a custom-built digital response.
“An example of this was when we were tasked with delivering lean transformation for a premium automotive customer in a huge warehouse which had 14 chambers and was over 60,000㎡. How to effectively monitor and manage the inbound and outbound operation was the biggest challenge the leadership team faced. We could see the potential to use data and digital tools to address this challenge.
We quickly implemented two digital tools:
- Digital Control Board – This captures all operations of each task completion data, and allows visualization of the real-time progress and status of each task. If any are off-target, the status will alert leaders to quickly respond. The control board also generates daily performance reports for continuous improvement.
- Digital Outbound Pull System – This includes two concepts: First, lean small batch flow, separating daily workload into small batches by route, based on the customer’s delivery time target. It then pulls and calculates each batch and each steps’ planned completion time. Secondly, Takt concept utilizes workload, Takt time and cycle time to calculate the resources required. This method digitalizes the two concepts in one platform, and helps us to visualize each route, each step planned and actual completion time. Any delay will alert leaders to coordinate a quick response and ensure the delivery is on-time.
Through these two methods, for customers, we make the operational status transparent, manage and control the overall progress, and respond to any anomalies in a timely manner. Internally, these methods help us to effectively increase productivity and ensure on-time delivery of customer orders.
This project is a great example of how digital tools have helped us revolutionise and improve our operations management at Unipart to deliver an exceptional customer experience.”
A philosophy of problem solving
This application of digital tools to solve a customer challenge demonstrates how essential digital tools are for scaling management and control.
Yet, with a dedicated development team, the temptation might be to build a custom solution for every new request. Nina is keen to emphasize that their focus remains on solving the core business problem, not simply deploying the newest technology.
We asked about her team’s guiding principle when approaching a new client challenge.
“Our core philosophy is that we are problem-solvers first, and technologists second. We see technology as a means to an end, not the end itself.
Our process always begins with a deep discovery phase focused on three key questions.
- First, we work to fully understand the ‘why’ behind the problem. We need to see the problem from the client’s perspective and within their broader business context.
- Second, we diagnose the root cause.
- Third, we explore existing assets. We ask: ‘What systems do you already have? Is there an off-the-shelf solution that meets 80% of your needs, that can then be tailored to fully meet requirements?
So, to answer your question directly: no, our starting point is almost never ‘how do we build a bespoke solution?’ In fact, it’s the opposite. We start with the assumption that a bespoke build is the last resort, we only recommend a custom solution when we’ve proven that no other path can achieve the client’s core objectives effectively.”
Defining innovation in custom solutions
While the team avoids custom builds as a first resort, their expertise shines when a bespoke system is the path to achieving a client’s unique objectives.
Their work on a bespoke WMS, internally known as ‘UPWARD’, for a long-standing customer is a perfect example of rapid, tailored development under high stakes.
We asked Nina to explain the system and identify the single most innovative feature that demonstrates the team’s technical capability.
“‘UPWARD’ WMS is a cloud-based Warehouse Management System designed in-house by Unipart in China. Its core purpose is to centralize inventory control, enhance operational visibility, and improve overall efficiency.
What I’m most proud of is our ground-breaking implementation of end-to-end Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) functionality for all core warehouse processes.
The most innovative aspect is how we designed a unified interface on the PDA that seamlessly guides users through receiving, put-away, picking, packing, shipping, location transferring, inventory inquiry and also DY operations, all with real-time data sync.
Completing the full rollout of this sophisticated warehouse management system in just two months (51 days to be exact) was a remarkable achievement for our team.”
From code to efficiency
The development of sophisticated systems like ‘UPWARD’ highlights the technical expertise of Nina’s team.
However, in logistics and supply chain, innovation is only valuable when it delivers measurable business benefits.
To close off the interview, we asked for an example where one of their custom digital solutions translated directly into significant efficiency gains and cost savings for a partner.
“In Shanghai RDC, we reviewed the outbound operation process and found that packing is a bottleneck, and the outbound team was struggling with a high rate of shipping errors.
The digital process capability team designed and implemented a custom packing scanning verification method. The new method means that packers now simply need to scan the barcode, part number one-of-one, until the box is full, then scan the HU number and record dimension/weight information.
The entire process is essentially a scanning and auto-accuracy verification operation, instead of manual work. If an error is registered, a voice warning will be issued. The entire packing scanning process is now simple, efficient and accurate.
Our data using this new method shows:
- The efficiency of small parts packing has been increased from 80 lines per hour to 160 lines
- The efficiency of medium/large parts packing has been increased from 45 lines per hour to 75 lines.
- The accuracy of packing has been significantly improved.
- The packing progress and performance can be captured from the scanning platform and visualized in real-time.
The digital solution implemented has not only yielded significant internal gains in efficiency and cost reduction but have also strengthened client confidence in our productivity, delivery reliability, and commitment to continuous improvement.”
To find out more about our operations and how we can support your supply chain and logistics requirements in China, and Asia Pacific, click here.
