Huawei Technology Jinlei: A digital experiment in a spring 丨 Little Giant

Economic Observer reporter Chen Bai/Wen

Looking at the news photos of Huawei Technology, most people can easily see Jin Lei at a glance.

Fair-skinned and wearing glasses, he was born in 1988 in a manufacturing company that has been at the helm of the company for nearly 10 years, despite being a little younger among the crowd.

The main business of Huawei Technology is the research and development and manufacturing of springs, and it is currently the largest private spring enterprise in China. In 1975, Jin Lei's father, Jin Zhangxiao, stepped into this industry, from the seventh workshop of Zhuji Leaf Spring Factory in 1986, to the establishment of Zhuji Jinsheng Spring Co., Ltd. in 1998, and then to the official renaming of Huawei Technology in 2009, until today, this company has been cultivating in the field of springs.

As the basic parts industry of industrial manufacturing and automobile manufacturing, springs are widely used in automobiles, trains and even various mechanical equipment, although they account for a small proportion of the overall scale of manufacturing, but they are the foundation and base of a complete industrial chain.

However, most people tend to have some stereotypes about companies in such a field: boring and boring assembly workshops, branded foundry factories, and away from all the cutting-edge waves we are familiar with in this Internet age.

But if you talk to Jin Lei further, people will find that this is a company that is extremely young from him. This youthfulness is not only reflected in the average age of management - according to Jinlei, most of the company's board members are the same age as Jinlei, but also in the penetration of digitalization into the capillaries in this traditional manufacturing industry: as early as 2001, Huawei was promoting paperless office, and today, 90% of Huawei's equipment has been installed with equipment sensors. On Jinlei's mobile phone DingTalk APP and the factory's workshop digital screen, from the beginning of raw material storage to the pass rate of product production and even after-sales complaints, it can be displayed in real time. Jin Lei said that this is also a very cutting-edge attempt in the whole industry.

In addition, in the manufacturing industry, this is a company with a large proportion of R & D personnel. There are 127 R&D and technical personnel, accounting for 15.16% of the total number of the company.

In an exclusive interview with the Economic Observer reporter, Jin Lei told us that he pays great attention to the emerging things in society, and he is at ease with some popular topics. The chairman of the company, which has a total size of about 600 million, has no PR words and official responses, and the dialogue with him is effortless except that sometimes he can't stop the technical terms in the field of springs.

Since graduating from college, he entered Huawei, from grassroots work to dying succession, Jin Lei said that in this process, he did not encounter some resistance encountered by other "second generations", on the contrary, teachers and masters gave him a lot of support.

Today's Huawei, under the leadership of Jin Lei, is also exploring a more cutting-edge path: they have withdrawn from the competition in the low-end spring market and regarded the research and development of spring technology as a more important business.

A phased result of this transformation is that they have established a national spring laboratory and been selected into the third batch of "specialized and specialized" small giants of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in 2021.

Succession and inheritance

Time pulled back three years ago.

Jin Lei came to the office as usual to open the mailbox, and a mailbox from France caught his eye. It was a product test notice from a leading auto parts customer in the world. Huawei Technology spent three years investing in the development of a spring, passed its product test.

In 2000, the company's first CNC computer reed reeling machine was put into production. The imported brake springs were scientifically researched, and the domestic brake springs with exactly the same function as the imported products were manufactured, rewriting the history of the brake springs that had to be imported. More than ten years later, this email, for Huawei Technology, means that they have truly entered the vision of global host manufacturers. For Made in China, this means that in the field of springs, Huawei has taken a key step from Made in China to Research and Development in China.

Thomas Friedman, author of the best-selling book "The World is Flat" many years ago, once wrote in an article about his understanding of the current Sino-US relationship, which in his view is rooted in the contradiction between the so-called "shallow goods" and "deep goods" (deep goods).

Taking the spring industry as an example, shallow products are the types that we learn from foreign spring manufacturing technology and copy a similar domestic version; and deep products are the type that has the right to define the development and changes of the industry, and the latter needs a lot of lasting research and development investment support.

At Huawei, we hope to focus on research and development in the future, and we can find a way to inherit. Jin Lei's father, Jin Zhangxiao, was an engineer on the spring production line.

In 2011, due to the death of his father due to illness, Jin Lei, who had just graduated from college, took over the company. However, when he came to Jin Lei, for this concept inheritance, he studied business administration in college, and he also had some new explorations.

The steel wire is made into a high-quality spring, of which the coil spring is the most critical link. In order to let the process of this link precipitate, so that new people can also easily get started. Jin Lei, a graduate of management, has thought of many ways, through three-dimensional scanning, imaging overlap, etc., and finally, he wants to let the teacher Fu write a "small book" of process experience and reuse it extensively.

But Jinlei did not find a suitable way, the spring belongs to the three-dimensional molding product, accurate debugging program, the need to be highly familiar with the product, but also need to be proficient in the operation of the system.

Today, he is thinking about how to use the process experience of the teacher to form a digital work instruction manual, so that every product problem encountered by the production line workers can be found on the mobile phone with one click.

In addition, in the process of making a spring, due to order changes, inaccurate reporting, inaccurate material calculations and other issues, it is easy to cause excessive production backlog inventory.

Jin Lei said, "Management should be to reduce inventory every year, but our inventory has increased, which is caused by insufficient production flexibility and inaccurate data." Today, Huawei's headquarters in Shaoxing has expanded a warehouse of more than 7,000 cubic meters.

Two years ago, Jin Lei once visited the Ford Toyota production line and found that the host manufacturer can make different products on the same production line and accurately complete the cooperation of different parts. If the spring production line can also achieve such flexible production, it will greatly reduce inventory, or even achieve zero inventory.

But soon, JinLei found that even the most advanced OEM manufacturers, the production line experience can not be copied to the spring production. The main engine factory usually has four major processes of stamping, welding, painting and assembly, and the production of a spring has more than a dozen production processes, only to produce a lightweight and highly elastic spring.

Huawei Technology began to face the pain points and opened an innovative experiment.

In order to make the data of the production link more accurate, Huawei Technology has set up a set of working hour settlement process through "dragging and pulling" on DingTalk, pulling the notification work data, material data, and piece data, so that the production link becomes transparent, and lean production according to the order quantity, which becomes a good way to improve the efficiency of the production line and reduce the pressure on inventory.

"The construction of the digital workshop has also made a qualitative leap in the quality of the company's products, and has been recognized by customers such as American Capital, Knorr-Bremse of France, and FAW Hongqi of China." According to the relevant person in charge, after digitalization, the company's production efficiency has increased by 20%, energy utilization rate has increased by 10%, operating costs have been reduced by 20%, and the rate of defective products has been reduced by 20%.

Digital new attempts

Open the official homepage of Huawei Technology, and you will also find that they are extremely closely following the tide of the times.

The company disclosed its products' carbon footprint report in August and soon updated its greenhouse gas emissions data report. In fact, as early as 2001, Huawei Technology began to buy ERP to achieve paperless office.

However, paperless attempts soon encountered challenges, because the circulation of production orders and the entry and exit of products still rely on manual statistics.

Data acquisition is a major pain point in production. Taking the heat treatment link as an example, a workpiece enters the heat treatment link, it takes more than 60 minutes to come out, and the workers need to manually count and fill in the form, and this data is often inaccurate and cannot be automatically counted. Once the statistics are too much, it directly affects the cost of inventory.

Jin Lei said that he believes that the ideal piece counting now is that no one intervenes, and digitization is to involve people as little as possible in repetitive and tedious work and reduce the process of manual filling.

In addition to the "low-carbon attempt", Jin Lei is also thinking about some more cutting-edge issues.

In 2014, three years after he took over, he resolutely chose to spend more than 40 million yuan to build a fully automatic spring production line and began to try "machine substitution". However, at present, in the outbound link, the factory still relies on manually looking for goods on high-risk shelves, in the future, Huawei Technology hopes to establish an intelligent warehouse system, complete the warehousing scanning code, intelligent delivery process, let people use mobile phone operations, you can achieve intelligent delivery, and no longer need to run between high-risk shelves.

Of course, the other side of this attempt is the corresponding lack of high-skilled workers. Taking the industrial machine tool manufacturing field related to spring manufacturing as an example, the relevant survey from the Human Resources and Social Security Bureau shows that by 2025, the shortage of young talents in the fields of medium and high-end CNC machine tools and robots will be as high as 4.5 million.

The revitalization of the manufacturing industry requires many favorable conditions at all times and places. But as far as the enterprise is concerned, according to the research of Dr. Zhao Xiangyang of the University of Giessen in Germany, germany's hidden champion, its research and development intensity is generally about 6%, the median of research and development funds is generally about 20 million euros, and it has been continuously invested for at least 30 years before this, accumulating a large number of patents and technical know-how, and laying out an airtight patent defense system.

And if we look at Huawei from this perspective, we will find some similar places. Jin Lei revealed that at present, The annual R & D investment of Huawei is about 5%, the company has a history of more than 40 years in the field of springs, and now has 120 utility model patents and 9 invention patents.

While the management community is still relishing the century-old hidden champions in those segments of Germany and Japan, in China's Yangtze River Delta, the post-85 entrepreneur is already on the road.