Turn manufacturing into intelligent manufacturing

15 years ago, EVOC started as an agent for foreign industrial control products. Fifteen years later, EVOC has become the champion of China's special computer industry, and has taken the third place in the world in the special computer industry; while more than 20 companies of the same scale 15 years ago, most of them have fallen today.

Since 2006, EVOC's overall revenue and net profit have achieved double-digit growth. Especially in the first half of 2008, the company was flying against the wind under the macroeconomic downturn, achieving an overall revenue of 419 million yuan, a 170% increase over the same period last year, and a net profit of 42 million yuan, an increase of 31%.

"Continuously invest in research and development, from the beginning of the research and development product cycle, introduce marketing personnel to accurately grasp customer needs, and products are half a step ahead of the market." Sun Wei, general manager of EVOC Intelligence, attributed the company's success to the profound R&D, then flexible manufacturing, and smart sales.

Mobilize intelligence in R&D

EVOC's high-performance, high-reliability, and high-stability special computer products, which are different from civilian computers, require advanced computer technology, semiconductor technology, electronic technology and various Combined with specific applications in the industry, the product features a technology-intensive, capital-intensive, highly decentralized and innovative knowledge integration system. To gain market leadership, companies must master cutting-edge technologies and invest heavily in research and development.

Like Shenzhen's well-known high-tech companies ZTE and Huawei, EVOC has invested 10% of its total annual sales in research and development in the past five years. There are three main purposes of R&D investment: first, to recruit a large number of R&D personnel, whose total number reaches 1,400, accounting for 30% of the company's total number; second, to invest heavily in purchasing R&D equipment from abroad; experimental work.

EVOC has also tasted the benefits of continuous investment. 30% of the company's products are updated every year, and more than half of the new special computer products in China are launched by the company.

The company's products account for 20% of the world's newly launched specialty computer products. "Our goal is that in the next few years, half of the world's special computer new products will be launched by EVOC," Sun Wei said.

Establish a pre-research-under-research-improved R&D system. In the research and development system of EVOC Intelligence, the pre-research department is mainly responsible for collecting the latest developments in the global industry, including product and technology research and development. Through research and collection of information, they put forward the company's product development direction and market forecast, so that the company's next product development has accurate goals. The research personnel develop and launch new products according to the pre-research projects reviewed by the company. According to the feedback from customers of the products already sold and the new demands of the market, the improvement personnel will update the old products and prolong the life of the products.

The pre-research department includes technical personnel, marketing personnel, and marketing personnel. The size of this team has increased from a dozen people last year to more than 30 people. They submit quarterly reports and monthly industry updates to management and R&D staff.

"Learn to look at the enterprise from the customer's point of view. At the beginning of the product cycle, introduce marketers to tell engineers and designers what customers want and what price they are willing to buy through market research and analysis." This is management The success of General Electric Company (GE) summarized by master Drucker (Peter Drucker) is also applicable to EVOC Intelligence. In EVOC Intelligence, both technology orientation and market orientation are emphasized. Although the company requires R&D personnel to master the latest technology in the special computer industry, but at the same time requires them to devote their main energy to developing products that are more suitable for the market, just half a step ahead of other competitors in the industry.

Failure is tolerated, and the performance of R&D personnel is linked to results. All technological innovations are risky and have the potential to fail. Some companies just see failure and are unwilling to invest. "EVOC's experience is that failures are rare. We advocate that reasonable failures are allowed in innovation activities, and R&D personnel are allowed to be bolder. You have done all the work, worked hard, and ultimately failed, and the company will bear the consequences. ," Sun Wei said.

If product innovation cannot be completed on schedule due to changes in R&D personnel and shortage of purchased materials, and such reasonable failures, EVOC Intelligent adheres to a tolerant attitude and a relaxed environment, and will not hold R&D personnel responsible . For the assessment of R&D personnel, EVOC Intelligent believes that completing 70% of the R&D work is qualified.

EVOC implements a sales commission system for new products developed by R&D personnel, mainly in stages. New products are always on sale, and the commission period given is two years. After two years, new products must be developed, and in two years, the more sales, the higher the income of the R&D personnel. This also promotes engineers to make products closer to the market when developing products, with higher design quality, better performance, and higher user popularity.

Participate in the formulation of national standards and aim at the forefront of industry development. The development of China's special computer industry has maintained a relatively rapid trend, but it has always lacked corresponding national standards. Most enterprises can only refer to similar foreign standards in the process of production and sales, and follow in the footsteps of others. In order to reverse this passive situation, since 2005, EVOC Intelligent has invested a lot of manpower and material resources to promote the drafting of the national standard of "General Specification for Microcomputer Part 3: Industrial Application Computer".

In December 2006, the National Information Technology Standardization Technical Committee officially held a seminar on this national standard in Shenzhen. As the leading force in the drafting of this national standard, EVOC Intelligence has standardized the basic technical requirements, test methods, product inspection rules of special computers in the production and sales process, as well as the standardization of industrial control products in various aspects such as identification, packaging, transportation, and storage. A detailed proposal was made. The meeting finally unanimously reviewed and approved the standardization implementation draft proposed by EVOC.

"The national standard is only a threshold for entry. For a high-tech enterprise that wants to be an international leader, it is possible to achieve great achievements only by insisting on continuous innovation on this platform." Sun Wei said, "EVOC's intellectual property work provides a guarantee for innovative achievements. At present, we have more than ten national-level scientific research achievement appraisals, nearly 200 patents and software copyrights, and dozens of them are under application. We are also applying these The patented technology has been transformed into more special computer products."

Injecting flexibility into manufacturing

Special computers are applicable to a wide range of industries, and show different product characteristics due to different application industries, thus determining their small batches, Multi-variety production mode. EVOC has successfully injected flexibility into this production model and established effective competition barriers.

A Chinese computer giant set up a company in 2003 to get involved in the industry. Later, it was found that its mass production model was completely inconsistent with the status quo of special computer applications, and finally had to give up.

The flexible way of EVOC's intelligence is reflected in R&D management, order processing, production line adjustment and QC group activities.

Flexible R&D management. In the work, EVOC Intelligent found that most customers often propose some technical or structural changes, which actually involve relatively few aspects. To this end, during the research and development, EVOC Intelligent proposed a "drawer" research and development management model.

The working principle of this mode is to effectively decompose the various parts of the product and place them in each "drawer". When developing a new product, most of the components can be taken out of the "drawer" for a simple technical combination, and only a few parts need to be re-developed. In this way, the research and development cycle is greatly shortened, and the research and development efficiency is improved. The products can be combined and changed arbitrarily, and the diversified customer needs can be effectively and timely met.

Now, the research and development cycle of a brand-new product of EVOC Intelligent takes at least 3 months, and the drawer-type research and development model, for some products with relatively small changes, mature parts can be found directly from the drawer, and it takes 15 days. Complete the research and development and provide samples to customers. Customers usually get samples and then send them to their systems for experiments. The quick response enables customers to meet their needs in a timely manner. Now EVOC's intelligent "components in the drawer" have accounted for 60% of the new product development components, which significantly saves the cost and time of research and development.

Order classification. Since special computers are a small-batch, multi-variety industry, the product models produced are often adjusted during production. The production equipment is fixed, so it is necessary to require the enterprise to adopt an effective mode in production management to realize the production of this product.

In order to ensure the smooth progress of production and guarantee the delivery time, EVOC Intelligence analyzes and categorizes the customer's orders during production. Products with similar product models or materials that use most of the similar materials are produced in the same work shift. , so that the time for replacing equipment procedures and materials will be greatly shortened.

Production line adjustment. In production, many components are common, and overall arrangements are made according to the situation of products sharing components. The adjustment of EVOC's intelligent production line can be completed within half an hour, including material supply personnel, quality personnel, and PE engineers entering the site at the same time. Under the command of the electronic department manager, materials and procedures are quickly arranged and entered quickly. to the production of the next product. EVOC Smart has achieved the production of four products in one day. It is to adapt to the fast and flexible production that EVOC maintains a rapid response to various customer needs and a high profit margin of its products.

QC Team. In production practice, EVOC has also carried out fruitful QC group activities for a long time in the production workshop. Many front-line workers and technicians have put forward some simple methods that can improve production efficiency, which also enables EVOC to continuously improve the level of flexible manufacturing.

For example, in order to reduce the defective rate of welding, the front-line workers and technicians of the QC team started from the reasons and found four major hidden dangers: unreasonable design of welding fixtures, poor maintenance of equipment, material oxidation or poor weldability , Improper layout of PCB design. They put forward four specification documents to solve these main problems. In the three months of implementation, the welding defect rate was reduced to 24.45% lower than the company's target requirements, which can reduce the company's cost by more than 1 million yuan a year. Satisfying customer delivery time has a further guarantee. This team won the title of Shenzhen Excellent Quality Management Team in 2008 because of its excellent performance.

At present, in EVOC's production workshop, it is often seen that one production line will produce two or three types of products in one morning; and when changing lines, employees are busy and orderly, and they will be in an orderly manner. It has been fully adapted to the production method of small batch and multi-variety.

Exercising wisdom in sales

Customers who use special computers are non-personal users such as terminal product manufacturers, scientific research institutes, and system integrators. Customers have many personalized needs, and products need to match the overall design of customers. To this end, EVOC Intelligent has established a marketing model with direct sales as the mainstay and agents as the auxiliary, specifically a three-dimensional sales model consisting of regional market direct sales, industry user sales and product division sales.

Regional market direct sales means that EVOC Smart's long-term best-selling products and batch-sold product series are mainly direct sales, targeting all regions of the country. Industry user sales are aimed at some common national projects in the industry. For example, the products used in the gas station IC card project are unified nationwide, but each province invites bids separately. EVOC set up a department for unified coordination and deployment, which can achieve twice the result with half the effort and draw inferences from others. The product market management department is specialized in the promotion of new products, mainly technical personnel. When the new products are sold in batches, they are transferred to the regional market sales department. This three-dimensional sales model makes the three teams more professional and fully covers the market.

Practice has proved that, because the direct sales model can directly contact customers, the feedback on customer needs is one to two months faster than general agency sales. In this way, on the one hand, EVOC can understand the market dynamics more directly, and learn about the needs of users; Provide services directly to users.

For example, in the IC card system project of Sinopec gas station, the design adopts a 4-layer structure, that is, the head office level, the provincial level, the prefecture level and each business terminal. 25,000 gas stations in the entire gas IC card project in a province will be equipped with two control computers as business terminals. The control computer is responsible for the daily statistics on the quantity and amount of IC card refueling, the printing of transaction receipts, and the monitoring of fuel dispensers. It sends sales transactions to the provincial data center every day, and downloads the account management information and the latest oil prices of IC card users across the country.

The requirement of this project for the control computer is to comprehensively consider the operation speed and reliability, and adapt to the high temperature and dusty environment of the gas station. EVOC Intelligent adopts high-performance FSC-1713VNA as the main board. Considering the problem that the gas station control computer needs to deal with a large amount of data storage on a daily basis, a Promise SMA RAID card is configured in the system. This card can combine two hard disks of the same specification into a disk mirror. In this way, even if a hard disk is damaged, the control computer can still operate normally.

At the same time, because some gas stations are located in areas with unstable power supply, such as suburbs, rural areas, etc., the voltage of the power supply network is too high or too low, the control computer is equipped with a wide-range industrial power supply, and the external voltage range is 185V -265V environment can also work normally and effectively.

Relying on excellent quality and unique sales service, the market share of EVOC's smart products in the IC card system of Sinopec gas stations has been rising steadily, from less than 30% five years ago to 70% last year.

"In the first five years, the price of our products was slightly lower than that of foreign products, but in the last two years, the price of their products was lower than ours, but Sinopec did not choose their products, the main factor is that we have the advantage of network services We have set up 42 branches across the country, which respond very quickly to product maintenance and customer needs, while foreign product agencies obviously lag behind in responding to customer needs, which has a great impact on industrial application companies," said Sun Wei. .

He went on to say: "EVOC is more efficient than competitors in terms of R&D and product delivery to customers; we have a more accurate grasp of customer needs and can adapt to different customers; in terms of functions, we mainly Requirements, provide main performance, remove unnecessary functions, and the price/performance ratio of the product is better than that of peers; in terms of after-sales service, generally if there is a problem with the machine in the city, the after-sales personnel can come to the door within 1-2 hours, and we will also Send someone to the scene to solve the problem within 24 hours."

In the special computer industry, EVOC is currently the only company that proposes and implements "one month guarantee" and "global guarantee" in terms of after-sales service. enterprise.

As a leader in China's special computer industry, EVOC will focus its future development on the international market. It sets a vision for the next ten years to increase the share of foreign market revenue from the current 10% to 70%.

Currently, China's total special computer market only accounts for 15% of the global market. Developed countries and emerging markets are future growth points. In order to realize the beautiful vision of EVOC Intelligence, in addition to taking advantage of the market growth, the most reliable thing is to cultivate the internal skills of "flexible and intelligent manufacturing" to perfection.