“we have measured how far each staff needs to walk from assembly and completion of a 2000 tons machine prior to promote the toyota lean production, the test result is 21 km. our ideal goal is to shorten it to 1.5 km, this not only can reduce the staff’s work intensity, but also can save the space and logistics time…” jiang zhijian introduced (general manager) the production mode of the company to the journalist confidently yesterday in the chen de plastics machinery co., ltd., of fengxiang industrial park.
chen de is a domestic large scale injection molding machine enterprise. just last week, liang weidong, the member of the standing committee of foshan municipal committee of the cpc, secretary of shunde district, highly recommended the media to report its good experience for transformation and upgrading after he researched it. what on earth is the enterprise different from other companies that can obtain the high appraisement from the secretary of district committee?” with these questions in mind, the journalist went to chende.
even a broom is well placed.
chen de has two factories in shunde, one is the old honggang factory established in 1986, with an area of 55000 sq.m.; the other one is the new factory located at fengxaing industrial park, established in 2006, with an area of 66000 sq.m. these two factories have been involved in various links from research and development to production of the injection molding machine.
walk into the production workshop of chende, you will find that there are many different things from the traditional plant:.the traditional mechanical plant will use many forklifts, but the forklifts can’t barely be seen here, instead there are many cranes and manual carts; the lathe, milling machine and grinding machine of traditional mechanical plant are placed row by row separately, and each row has more than ten or twenty machines, and each batch of goods need to be transported to the other process after one process is completed, and the logistics is complicated. but at here, the lathe, grinding machine and milling machine were put on the same “flow”, one small place can finish a complete process; and the original mass production is changed into small batch and customized production, and the production arrangement is more flexible and the efficiency is higher.
jiang zhijian said that “for the previous mass production, it took about two weeks to produce 40 machines, but now the small volume production only takes one day to produce about 10 machines, and two weeks to produce about 100-120 machines. if you order today, we can arrange it into production tomorrow, and it has no influence to the production”.
in addition, what impressed the journalist most for the workshop of chen de is its very tidy and clean, jiang zhijian said that “for each part even a broom in the plant, we think they need to have a fixed “home”, thus saving the time for the staff to find things.” these are the results for enterprise to strongly promote the toyota lean production, except for the tidy and clean overall environment, there are large savings for site, logistics, storage, etc., which greatly improved the production efficiency.
every staff mastered many skills
one thing special about chen de is that every staff mastered many skills.
jiang zhijian said “though our plant is large, we have few staff and we hope to reduce staff as far as possible. sometimes a staff needs to operate 1-2 equipment at the same time, because it took 5 or 6 hours to finish the part processing after it is put on the equipment, and during that process, the staff can operate other equipment.”, based on this consideration, the company paid more attention to train the “multi-skill worker”. a staff also needs to be able to operate the grinding machine and milling machine, except for the lathe. “the staff can get more bonus only he/she turns into multi-skill worker, and thus not wasting the time during machine operation”.
in a “cart guide rod continuous flow”, the journalist sees two staff operating 5 equipment. jiang zhijian said “multi-skill worker” is also inspired by the toyota lean production. chen de trained the multi-skill workers mainly through the “masters train the apprentice” mode, and the master can get bonus after the apprentice passed through the examination.
“multi-skill worker” training also reduced many staff for chende, and there are only about 650 production workers combing two shunde factories of chen de.
environmental protection and intelligence are the transformation direction of the industry
currently, the annual sales amount of chen de is about 1 billion yuan, and the market ratio of market sales volume is 3:7 in the foreign market and the domestic market. wherein, chen de has set offices in europe, brazil and india, and adopted the agency method in other countries. chen de owns the “guangdong research and development center”, which is the first injection molding machine enterprise research and development center of guangdong. now, chen de used 4% of its annual sales amount in research and development.
for the research and development direction in the future, the technical director of that company introduced that environmental protection and intelligence are the direction for upgrading of injection molding machine industry. currently, chen de and european enterprises are cooperating to develop new controller, and the sensor remote control which emphasizes the internet of things can meet the needs of different users. “this will lead to the new intelligence breakthrough of injection molding machine.”(source: zhujiang business)