Ningbo Qixi Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Qixi"), located in Cixi City, Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, has made great achievements in the field of small accessories, targeting travel and camping tracks, and wall mounted and embedded water purifiers for office and home decoration scenes.
Cixi is known as the "capital of small household appliances", and the core area of the modern furniture and smart home appliance industry cluster here achieved a revenue of over 100 billion yuan for the first time last year.
Behind each new product is a transformation in manufacturing methods.
Entering Qixi's digital production workshop, the electronic screen displays real-time updates of production scheduling and inspection data; In the intelligent warehousing area, automatic guided vehicles shuttle between shelves and storage locations, and materials are accurately circulated according to instructions. The 300 square meter and 18 meter high vertical warehouse has "stacked" six times the storage capacity.
In 2017, the annual output value of Qixi was 70 million yuan, but due to insufficient storage and materials piled up in the aisle, they were afraid to accept orders. The warehousing problem has forced enterprises to embark on the path of digital transformation.
The business is growing now, but there is no need to add more factories, "said Fang Shuguang, the chairman of Qixi. He calculated that the accumulated investment was only a few million yuan, and after years of not adding an inch of land, the output value increased from 70 million yuan to more than 400 million yuan, the material turnover days were shortened from 40 days to 7 days, the production efficiency was improved by more than 30%, and the yield per mu was close to 30 million yuan.
On the R&D end, the team used large models to assist in circuit board design, verify program errors, and improve testing efficiency by about 30%; On the after-sales side, enterprises organize hundreds of common consumer questions into a knowledge base, and the direct answer rate of artificial intelligence customer service reaches 80%.
The whole machine enterprise is changing, and the supporting enterprises are also changing. In Qiaotou Town, which is not far away, the power cords produced by Cixi Universal Electronics Co., Ltd. are continuously transported to Qixi's workshop by the main source.
As early as around 2010, we began automation transformation, "said Yu Chongwei, General Manager of Universal Electronics. After 6 rounds of iteration, Universal Electronics has built a power cord digital factory: a power cord is offline every 3.8 seconds in the workshop, reducing the number of single line workers from 6 to 1, increasing production efficiency by 40%, and shortening delivery cycles by 30%; The machine vision inspection system takes photos of each power cord, compares the images with the database, identifies defective products, and controls the factory quality.
A complete machine factory and a parts factory, together form the confidence of Cixi small household appliances: there are over 2000 complete machine enterprises and nearly 10000 supporting enterprises, and a small household appliance can be assembled with all components in less than one hour.
Enterprises are undergoing transformation, and the government is also reforming. The transformation of small and medium-sized enterprises is most lacking in talent, platforms, and channels. The solution for Cixi is for the government to provide support and share empowerment, "said Xu Cong, Deputy Director of Cixi Economic and Information Technology Bureau.
Cixi City has issued a "menu style" renovation list, and enterprises can make changes by simply ordering dishes; Implementing the Chief Data Officer system and collaborating with universities to cultivate talents related to digital transformation for enterprises... With the "industrial brain" and future factory construction as the driving force, Cixi City has cultivated more than 20 provincial-level intelligent factories and digital workshops in three years.
The new concept water dispenser of Qixi was jointly developed by Zhejiang University of Technology and the School of Science and Technology of Ningbo University. With government support and university empowerment, the cooperation between industry, academia, and research is even closer, and only then can enterprises dare to engage in advanced research and development, "said Fang Shuguang
Our reporter He Cong and Dou Hao
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