Digital transformation serves as the core engine for upgrading and enhancing the manufacturing industry. In recent years, Nanchang has leveraged its status as a national pilot city for SME digital transformation, relying on a coordinated three-tier working mechanism spanning provincial, municipal, and district levels. Adhering to the service philosophy of "enterprises raise the challenges, government delivers the solutions," the city has precisely addressed the prominent difficulties traditional SMEs face in digital transformation, namely the reluctance to transform, the lack of know-how, and the prohibitive costs.
Through the layered linkage of provincial policy empowerment, municipal overall coordination, and district-level implementation services, targeted support has been provided to help industry SMEs carry out lightweight and practical digital upgrades. This has continuously unleashed new momentum for the digital economy to empower the real economy, with the city's manufacturing digital transformation showing a robust trend of expanding scale, rising quality and efficiency, and the emergence of exemplary models. The carbonated beverage production line at Baisui Beverage (Nanchang) Co., Ltd. exemplifies the collaborative coordination across the upstream and downstream of the production process.
Building a digital transformation service system
As one of the first batch of national pilot cities for SME digital transformation, Nanchang closely aligns with the province's "Number One Development Project" for the digital economy. It has established a three-tier working system spanning provincial, municipal, and district levels to precisely match enterprise needs and target bottlenecks in the transformation process, effectively resolving the challenges faced by SMEs. SMEs generally struggle with numerous practical shortcomings during transformation. Xu Jian, head of Jiangxi Mingfang Auto Parts, admitted that the company's transformation journey is hindered by issues such as rough order scheduling, severe inventory backlogs, and prominent data silos. The lack of a professional digital team also creates concerns about the investment and outcomes of transformation. Traditional manufacturers like Jiangxi Lingyun Automobile and Hexie Aluminum also commonly face problems including extensive production controls, low labor efficiency, and fragmented, lagging data, severely restricting their ability to improve quality and efficiency.
In response to enterprise demands, Nanchang leverages its three-tier linkage mechanism to tackle issues at every level with precision. At the provincial level, the focus is on strengthening policy guidance and cultivating benchmarks, smoothing the channels for applying for central special rewards and subsidies, and advancing the evaluation of provincial digital "Little Lighthouse" enterprises. This provides policy support and demonstrative guidance for enterprise transformation. Hexie Aluminum and other companies have successfully earned the provincial "Little Lighthouse" designation, becoming industry transformation models. At the municipal level, leveraging its pilot advantages, Nanchang coordinates city-wide transformation efforts by establishing special work teams, building public service platforms, and innovatively launching four long-term mechanisms, including "horse racing" for service providers and digital specialist training. These four mechanisms and case studies from three industries' transformations have been selected as national typical experiences by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Simultaneously, the city regularly organizes "learning from models" workshops and factory floor observation activities, allowing enterprises to directly perceive the value of transformation. At the district and county level, efforts are focused on deepening localized services to bridge the "last mile" of policy implementation. Anyi County has iteratively upgraded the provincial-level public service platform for the aluminum profile industry brain, empowering the transformation of its characteristic industrial cluster. Jinxian Economic Development Zone is concentrating on the medical device industry, promoting the overall digital upgrade of the cluster through one-on-one local enterprise liaison, precise recommendation of service providers, and full-project tracking, ensuring that beneficial policies directly reach frontline enterprises.
To date, 489 enterprises in the city have signed digital transformation project contracts, with 417 companies having completed acceptance checks and met the national Level 2 or above standards. The processing base of Yihai Kerry (Nanchang) Grain and Oil Food Co., Ltd. stands as a testament to this progress.
Precision strategies yield tangible results across multiple fronts
Relying on the precise services of the three-tier linkage, Nanchang's SMEs are now embarking on digital transformation with reduced burdens and focused efforts. Through lightweight and targeted upgrades, they are achieving cost reduction, quality improvement, and efficiency gains. The effectiveness of collaborative transformation across industry chains is becoming increasingly evident, and the matrix of intelligent manufacturing benchmarks continues to expand. Building on comprehensive city-wide services, Nanchang has tackled the challenge through chain-based transformation. Leveraging the leading role of "chain master" enterprises, it has cultivated 11 replicable and scalable "chain-type" transformation models for various industries. This effectively addresses the dilemmas of SMEs transforming "in isolation, at high cost, and with insufficient coordination," pushing the shift from individual enterprise upgrades to a holistic leap for the entire industry chain.
Inside the production workshop of Nanchang Highly Appliance Co., Ltd. As an industry "chain master," Nanchang Highly has adopted a digital model of "external introduction and internal integration," aggregating upstream and downstream industrial resources. It has attracted over 20 core supporting enterprises to establish operations locally, raising the provincial supporting rate to over 31% and boosting local procurement volume beyond 2.6 billion yuan. Leveraging its digital platform, the company shares open data with more than 300 suppliers, achieving 4-hour ultra-fast supply and 6-hour efficient inventory turnover. This significantly compresses the industry chain's circulation cycle and markedly enhances the quality and efficiency of industrial collaborative development.
Nanchang is continuously improving the service ecosystem for SME digital transformation by refining long-term service mechanisms, moving service fronts down to the frontline, and building supply-demand matchmaking platforms to safeguard enterprise transformation development comprehensively. Nanchang persistently strengthens the service foundation for SMEs, being the first in the province to achieve full coverage of the SME service alliance at both city and county levels, bringing together high-quality service institutions. It has innovatively established a "1+N+X" three-tier service workstation structure at the city, county, and township levels, setting up 71 frontline service stations to extend beneficial enterprise services to the forefront of industrial parks, streets, and townships. In 2025 alone, the city has conducted over 100 various service activities, including policy briefings, transformation training, and supply-demand matchmaking, serving more than 20,000 enterprises and facilitating industrial transaction orders worth 759 million yuan. Thanks to its solid service measures and excellent business environment, Nanchang has been rated as an "Outstanding City for SME Development Environment" by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology for several consecutive years, and it has ranked among the top in the province's SME development environment assessment for three straight years.