Rongyue Platform: Achieving Cross-Department Collaboration with Low-Code to Build an Integrated Platform for the Catering and Banquet Industry

"DingTalk's low-code platform, YiDa, is undoubtedly an accelerator on our enterprise's digital transformation journey. As a fast-growing company, we urgently need a solution that can respond quickly to changing business demands while lowering technical barriers. With its powerful low-code capabilities, YiDa has allowed us to rapidly develop applications compliant with business logic, vastly improving development efficiency. More importantly, it allows non-technical personnel to participate in application creation and optimization, achieving seamless integration between business and technology." - Li Gan, Chairman of Rongyue Platform

"DingTalk's low-code platform, YiDa, is undoubtedly an accelerator on our enterprise's digital transformation journey. As a fast-growing company, we urgently need a solution that can respond quickly to changing business demands while lowering technical barriers. With its powerful low-code capabilities, YiDa has allowed us to rapidly develop applications compliant with business logic, vastly improving development efficiency. More importantly, it allows non-technical personnel to participate in application creation and optimization, achieving seamless integration between business and technology."

- Li Gan, Chairman of Rongyue Platform

Rongyue · Wedding Banquet Center, established in 2018, focuses on creating a new model of high-end one-stop wedding banquet hotels in China (i.e., banquet venues integrated with luxury wedding arrangements, catering services, wedding planning services, and professional wedding service personnel). At present, its business has expanded across several regions including Eastern China and the Greater Bay Area into more than ten cities, with over 20 branches and over 100 banquet halls, serving nearly 10,000 newlyweds annually. In 2024, it has successfully listed on the DGCX (Drip Capital Exchange) and received the 2024 Forbes China Consumer Market "Annual Emerging Enterprise" award. With the goal of becoming a nationally recognized chain banquet brand, Rongyue Platform plans to successfully open 30 new branches and add more than 150 banquet halls within five years, shaping core brand advantages through diversified, scalable, professional, and customized services while expanding its chain network.

In 2024, as the company entered its sixth year, it was confronted with severe challenges, including non-integrated business processes, difficulty in accumulating and managing customer data across various sales teams, and high-cost, error-prone interdepartmental data statistics. The hotel management started actively searching for solutions. As a result of multi-party research and comparisons, in July it chose YiDa - a low-code platform officially offered by DingTalk. YiDa captured the attention of management with its powerful business building capacity, flexible data handling abilities, and comprehensive industry-specific solutions. Particularly notable was its ability to help construct enterprise information systems according to specific business needs, which precisely met the banquet hotel's urgent demand for business integration and concrete data presentation.

With the standard modules and customizable setup provided by the YiDa platform, Rongyue, in collaboration with official DingTalk service providers, was able to complete development of 9 major business modules and nearly 100 core functionalities in just three months, meeting the company's digital management needs in core business scenarios, which included modules for: data dashboards, brand operations, CRM management, purchasing management, culinary operations management, project management, asset management, service monitoring functionalities, and more.

Operation Dashboard, helping managers "digitize operations, digitalize management"

Corporate-wide centralized data dashboard:

Key performance indicators (KPIs) from each operational segment are compiled and displayed visually in a data dashboard format to help management understand enterprise operations and provide data support for decision-making.

Executive Operation Dashboard：

Managers can leverage the mobile platform to access and monitor core business data anytime, using data to guide management effectively. Core data covers a comprehensive range including annual performance achievement, monthly performance breakdowns, branch receivables rankings, sales representative performance rankings, total customer acquisition numbers, number of prospects acquired but not converted, conversion rate, primary conversion rate, prospect mining status, referral rate, customer source channel proportions, banquet type distributions, add-on sales data, branch inventory status, gross profits, maintenance requests and repair costs, branch quality inspection reports, and more.

Brand marketing and operations management, calculating return on every event

Through the planning of a brand's annual marketing budget and monthly event schedules, the ROI of every event can be monitored, ensuring that decision-makers have visibility and oversight into budget spending. Operations focus on brand promotion core around stores that handle activities related to pre-sales or ongoing promotions. It deepens the integration of branch-specific event budget allocation mechanisms. By thoroughly planning prior to event execution, dynamically monitoring activity during the event, and completing in-depth post-event analysis, the system establishes a closed-loop management process. This strengthens management oversight of budget allocation accuracy and enhances insights and evaluations of marketing activity effectiveness and outcomes.

Client Management, Achieving Centralized Customer Resource Management

At the early stage of business operations, each branch utilized some of the CRM systems available on the wedding banquet market. However, as the number of branches expanded, data silos became increasingly problematic; the cost continued to rise, and with each new branch, systems costing tens of thousands of RMB had to be purchased. Once YiDa was constructed, it enabled full-loop management of banquet customers, from lead entry, opportunity follow-up, order reservation, contract execution, to after-sales management, seamlessly integrating customer lead entry through brand marketing channels. At the same time, leveraging the notification capabilities and AI news broadcasting capabilities within the DingTalk platform, key data like branch lead acquisition status, existing customer sales opportunity progress, reservations, and target achievements are periodically shared, offering decision support for managers and branch presidents.

In the sales order process, for mobile device convenience, dedicated order pages have been created that visually display current booking availability and open slots. A single intuitive action can reserve a booking slot or order multiple products simultaneously.

As a service industry, customer referrals are an important source of clientele, thus after-sales service is equally critical. YiDa was used to create a full process system for service quality control of all branches. Through key functions like service quality standard formulation, service monitoring, monthly branch service rankings, and multi-dimensional statistical analysis, a closed-loop service quality improvement mechanism was established. By setting clear customer service standards, the system offers service personnel clear operational guidelines, ensuring consistent, professional service quality.

Integrated Catering, Procurement, and Supply Chains

The system builds a database for menus and packages, entering food, and banquet menu data from all current branches. Additionally, a "menu card" (standard operation procedure card) is generated, including ingredients, spices, condiments, preparation steps, etc., accumulating and consolidating core catering industry data. Moreover, this system connects to procurement systems, automatically calculating item quantities based on material master data when stores place automatic orders.

Daily raw material procurement in the stores: Before placing a purchase order, store purchase managers can view detailed banquet orders for the next day through the CRM system. Based on this banquet order, the system automatically generates a detailed raw material purchase list, showing the estimated quantities of all required ingredients and beverages. Purchase managers use this data to create the raw material order list, ensuring its accuracy before generating a PDF purchase order to be sent to suppliers.

Upon receiving the purchase order, suppliers prepare and deliver the goods to the stores within the agreed-upon timeframe. Back-of-house staff then use the delivery receipt functionality to check each item against the purchase order, verifying quality, quantity, and item specifications to meet order requirements. Once verified, the goods are stored in designated storage areas. During this inventory process, the store's procurement page automatically updates the inventory records, increasing the inventory count of each food item, and generating an inbound note as proof.

After banquet execution, warehouse personnel are guided by actual quantities of food and beverages available on the day, as provided by the CRM system, to efficiently and accurately complete outbound documents. These records also provide feedback for future inventory adjustments and cost control. With the help of this system, the entire procurement process can now be fully tracked and managed, from order placement to execution.

AI Assistant: One-Click Maintenance Request

During daily branch inspections, if equipment malfunctions are discovered, maintenance requests can be rapidly submitted using AI Assistant voice input. Also, real-time data on equipment condition and repair costs is quickly accessible via AI queries. For data most crucial to branch management leadership, AI Assistant can provide scheduled automated reports.

Rongyue Platform has built an all-in-one banquet management platform through the YiDa low-code platform. By centralizing all operations within a single platform, barriers across departments have been eliminated. Collaborative and paperless office processes have been achieved using forms, workflow tools, and dashboards, increasing efficiency and reducing operating costs. With over 20 branches, Rongyue Platform has implemented comprehensive digital transformation covering all group and branch business processes. Compared to fully custom-coded development solutions, over 1 million RMB in software development costs has been saved. In terms of development cycle, full-code implementation normally takes 10-12 months; by using YiDa, the transformation has been completed in just four months. This digital platform, built by the group through YiDa, has already been fully implemented and is in active use, finishing ahead of schedule by 6-8 months.

Mr. Li stated: The integrated banquet management platform built on DingTalk's YiDa covers the full scope of large-scale banquet industry business management. He is very willing to share Rongyue’s construction insights with peers in the industry, helping others avoid unnecessary detours and contributing to further advancement of banquet industry operations and branch management.