Want to automate? Manufacturers need to combine the actual situation

The advantage of low price made in China is gradually lost. How will Chinese suppliers seek survival and development? How to formulate an effective promotion strategy? How to make the order profitable, where is the future development direction of export enterprises? Quality assurance The founder of the company Sofeast Ltd, Renaud Anjoran, shared his insights on how to deal with the changes in foreign trade at the Shenzhen Station of "Outsmart the Future Export Series Forum".

A brief history of the development of European and American manufacturing industries

Anjoran: Let me tell you about the development of manufacturing industries A brief history, starting in 1900, as early as the early 20th century, many factories in the United States had many low-skilled laborers who could only do some simple operations and repetitive operations, usually piece-rate workers. His production processes such as Say process 1, process 2, process 3, as shown in this process chart. This production cycle takes a week, sometimes even more than a month. I have inventory in many places on the production floor, and I am in many Chinese factories See a similar situation.

Let's look at the example of the Ford Motor Company, Ford The company was the largest manufacturer in the world at the time, and they did some experiments in 1910, and they used a continuous production line approach, which increased their production efficiency by a factor of 4. This production model greatly reduced inventory, The production process is faster. During World War II, the US military created a very interesting training method called TWI, and the factory adopted the TWI method, using this method to teach supervisors how to fill out the work process, train new workers, and educate workers to follow the new process rules, It's not just for supervisors, it's for ordinary workers as well, giving them a way to assess their own productivity and then see how to help them improve it. TWI's approach was very useful, but after the war entered a golden age for American industry, the demand There are many, not many competitors, and there is no great pressure to control costs, so the American industry does not think about continuing to improve itself, they forget about such a useful training method of TWI, and do not try to improve themselves.

At the same time, during the 1950s and 1970s, many factories in Japan, especially Toyota, adopted this TWI training method invented in the United States, and practiced this method in many factories, and they learned from Ford Motor Company. Inspired to use their set of production lines, which greatly increased their production efficiency. In the 1970s and 1980s, many Japanese cars were made in Japan, and their quality was higher than that of American products and the cost was higher. Low.

Under the background of Japanese competition, how did the American factories react? The American factories responded differently. Each factory has its own set of practices. American companies say that the Japanese companies' approach is very interesting. , so they borrowed some good practices and ideas from Japanese companies to improve Self, so as to improve their competitiveness. GM's approach is completely different. He said that Japanese cars are cheaper than us, so let's fully automate our factories. GM bought a lot of robots. In the early 1980s, GM invested a total of 15 billion dollars bought a lot of robots and made a lot of robots. Its purpose is to replace employees with robots, and they hope that most of the work will be done by robots, but after a period of time, they completely stopped , because they feel there is no reduction in operating costs through automation and robotics.

Want to automate? Factories need to combine the actual situation

Let's go back and look at the situation of Chinese factories. Chinese factories also want to strengthen their automation. Many Chinese factory bosses hope to use more machines instead of labor in the factory, but I think this kind of It's not the right way to do it, as I just mentioned with this example from General Motors, you buy a lot of robots that actually have a lot of downsides. Will buying a lot of machines help you cut costs? Actually the answer is not that simple. Although you can reduce the number of your low-skilled employees by having this machine, you will have to spend more money, pay higher wages to hire engineers, run the machine, and if the machine breaks down and repair the machine, you have to go to the engineer Do, their cost is not low.

And if you want this machine to produce, you must have a special person to watch the machine. If the machine produces defective products, you need to monitor the production process of the machine. Will this fully automated factory give you a competitive advantage? The answer is not that simple. Sometimes full automation can even destroy your edge.

If I am an importer from France, there is a fully automated factory in China, and a fully automated factory in France, you are fully automated, there is no labor cost, then your price, speed may be It's almost the same. In this case, it may be more cost-effective for French importers to buy from fully automated factories in France. If your factory is fully automated and has very large machines, which are generally used for large-scale mass production, you will not be able to accept small orders at this time, and your factory will lose a lot of flexibility.

Will full automation cost a lot of money? The answer is yes, you need a lot of investment to add so many machines and equipment.

As a manager of a factory, you have to ask two questions: The first question is how to help existing employees improve their production efficiency, maybe you want to buy new machines to help these employees improve their production efficiency . Now that the factory continues to hire workers, you need to ask a question, how to reduce human errors in the production process, there are many methods, I will not go into details, but many times you can pre-think and improve the production process and some procedures, A lot of the mistakes of thinking are avoidable.