Turning Manufacturing into Smart Manufacturing: Injecting Flexibility into Manufacturing

Editor's note: 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, marketers are introduced 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 Mobilize intelligence in research and development, inject flexibility in manufacturing, and exert resourcefulness in sales.

Special computers are applicable to a wide range of industries, and show different product characteristics due to different application industries, thus determining their small batch, 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.