Transform a paper machine to open up a new world| microscopic horizons

Xie Hong/Wen

Retrofitting a paper machine

Recently, I visited Opped, a company engaged in the manufacture of high-power servo motors in Jiangmen, Guangdong Province. Founder Shi Huashan was originally engaged in the manufacture of small motors, and now manufactures high-power motors, the biggest difference is not only the technical problems, but the understanding of the technical application scenarios.

In order to support the development of servo motor application scenarios, Shi Huashan has successively invested in papermaking equipment companies, papermaking companies, and electric drive companies to gradually understand the application scenarios of high-power servo motors and solve relevant problems one by one.

Technological evolution would have needed to be carried out in tandem with market development, either technology driving the market or market-driven technology. But if China's technological progress is placed in the context of replacing imports, it is where the technology is, where the market is, and the most difficult thing to cross is the time threshold.

The principle of the steam engine was invented as early as ancient Greece, but it was not until the seventeenth century that a working model of the steam engine appeared, and the steam engine with real productivity did not wait until the improved steam engine of Watts in 1776.

Watt was not an inventor, he was a mechanic. A device with practical value, in addition to the principle, but also has the appropriate technology, process. Waiting for the right technology, technology, accessories, may wait for hundreds of years, thousands of years. What's more, modern large-scale devices require the underlying software to drive and control.

Don't look at China's equipment manufacturing enterprises have decades of development history, but the drive and control software in the equipment are imported from abroad. Recently, I learned from a large equipment company in Guangzhou's Zengcheng Development Zone that several Huawei engineers have created a software company engaged in equipment driving and controlling, hoping to cooperate with the equipment company.

As soon as the two sides communicated, they found that there was a lot of potential. Mainly after decades of development of Chinese equipment, there have been many technological innovations and new application scenarios, but the original driver software to achieve new function iteration of its response efficiency is too low, and many new scenarios can not be supported. Therefore, after technical communication, the two sides found that only through software reconstruction of the equipment system, the structure and design can be optimized, saving links and saving costs.

Back to Opped, the same is true. The servo motor manufacturing link is not the most difficult, the most difficult and most complex is the servo motor technology application scenario. It needs to be understood, it needs to be precipitated, it needs to accumulate, it needs time. Therefore, the first technical scenario is the papermaking equipment, and the second technical scenario is the paper mill. The realization of each scenario does not take several years, and it is difficult to achieve a breakthrough.

Kung Fu paid off, and Opped still made a breakthrough at the Jinghua Paper Mill in Shandong. Shi Huashan said that he originally just wanted to install a servo motor, but found that the drive software was foreign and could not move. Therefore, he acquired a software-driven company, cooperated with a robot company, and technological innovation, software and hardware combination, and intelligent manufacturing came together to a "joint operation of sea, land and air", which is basically equivalent to recreating a papermaking equipment.

After transformation, this equipment with an annual output of 200,000 tons of paper can save more than 25% of electricity, and save more than 5 million yuan in annual electricity costs. The drive side of the equipment is compact and saves space. Because of the improved drive, the gearbox, paper machine gearbox, and coupling are eliminated, a large number of maintenance points and lubricating oil use are reduced, and the noise is greatly reduced.

Shi Huashan introduced that the transformation of this equipment is more difficult than high-speed rail. He said that the efficient principle of high-speed rail also comes from servo motors, but the linkage speed of high-speed rail is the same, the torque is the same, the motor is the same, and all are steel connections. The servo motor papermaking equipment speed is not the same, the torque is not the same (large 18000N *m, small 300N *m), the same type of motor is very few, the paper connection dry motor environment needs to maintain a temperature of 80-100 °C to ensure reliability. Any one motor or drive that breaks down will cause the entire machine to stop.

However, what makes Shi Huashan happy is that although he has been "pregnant" for five years, he is finally a late bloomer. He considers himself to have made one of the most advanced papermaking equipment in the world: a servo direct drive paper machine. He said that this is of epoch-making significance, believing that Oped's servo direct drive technology will upgrade the paper industry from the era of green-skinned trains to the era of trains. He said OPPED has been involved in the transformation of 1,000 papermaking equipment in the country. In the context of carbon neutrality, he can dig a "carbon gold mine". Moreover, petrochemical, chemical, building materials, steel, nonferrous metals, electric power, aviation and other large industries also need a large number of servo motor drive transformation, the industry prospects are very broad.

From the product to the system

I discussed with Shi Huashan that in order to do a good job in servo motors, several companies have been continuously supporting investment, of which there is a slight jam, which is not a great risk. He said that it is indeed risky, so he does not dare to put it in the basket of listed companies.

In order to sell the servo motor, the papermaking equipment has been reconstructed once, the enterprise from the development of the motor to the development of papermaking equipment, to the development of the drive system, to the development of servo direct drive technology, then its value realization can only be achieved by the sale of servo motors? Bought a hen to eat eggs, bought a whole cow for milk?

In fact, the value of OPPED is not the servo motor itself, but a low-carbon, intelligent manufacturing solution for papermaking equipment, and the application solution for servo motors. The value of high-speed rail is not servo motors, but the solution of high-speed transportation. The value of the servo direct drive paper machine is not a servo motor, but a low-carbon, energy-saving and efficient papermaking solution. Although this value is not a product value, but a system value. However, OPPED's pricing is still a product pricing method, not a pricing method solved by a systematic solution. If a foreign company provides such a valuable product, it is easy to turn the product into a product service solution and a securitization product.

Let's continue to explore, if Opped is a software company, can it achieve this solution? If OPPED is a pure hardware company, can it break through to this system implementation? Shi Huashan said, it is difficult. Software companies can't last three years without the demand of hardware companies. Hardware companies have no way to form technical systems without the system capabilities of software companies. So. Opped's technical success, somewhat by chance. From the perspective of capital, although OPPED technology is successful, its return, compared with its risk, the return is indeed not high.

We can look at China's automobile industry and China's high-speed rail industry, their development model is not the same, the automobile industry is a bit by bit technology digestion and introduction model, high-speed rail industry is a technology, system, market packaging model. High-speed rail can form a system in China, mainly relying on the size of the Chinese market. But from the perspective of market returns, even if China has the largest high-speed rail market size in the world, its returns are not satisfactory. In order to quickly form a technical and product system, market verification is required, and it is necessary to make a profit in pricing. If you want to make a profit in the market, you need the market to accept the technical pricing, and the formation of the system requires a relatively long process of education, cognition, accumulation and polishing.

This is also the reason for the difficult development of industrial software in China, as is chip manufacturing and aircraft manufacturing. A truly competitive manufacturing industry is one that has the ability to system and solidifies the results on a software architecture. Similar to Germany's Siemens, SAP, France's Dassault, Schneider, the United States' Autodesk, General Electric, Japan's Fanuc, Yaskawa Electric and so on. Their industrial software is born independently of manufacturing entities, first there are manufacturing scenarios, then there are software technologies, and then there are other market applications of software, and rich market applications continue to optimize the ecology of software. Boeing, for example, has seven or eight thousand pieces of software based on aircraft manufacturing. The time and precipitation of industrial software, this is the distance between China's manufacturing and the world's advanced manufacturing.

Although Oped has transformed a paper machine, it has gone back and forth from hardware to software, from products to systems, but it has unconsciously gone to another world of Chinese manufacturing.

The highest level of manufacturing

Forty years in China, more than a hundred years in Japan, and hundreds of years in the Western world, the development of manufacturing industry is a process of blue wisps and winds and rains, from simple to complex. China's manufacturing industry is on the road to catch-up, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, sometimes the road is off, sometimes over the head, that's because there is no time to be relaxed. There are always some pathfinders, although they may have changed from pioneers to martyrs, but as long as there is a trend to catch up, the final rise of Chinese manufacturing is a high probability event. One is the scale of China's economy, and the other is the continuous spirit of entrepreneurial innovation.

The development of the manufacturing industry has its own logic and process, from OEM to ODM, to OBM, and then to OSM. OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer), original equipment manufacturer, that is, foundry manufacturing. ODM (Original Design Manufacturer), original design production. OBM (Original Brand Manufacturer), the original brand manufacturer, is the company has its own product brand. From OEM, to design, to brand.

Forty years of reform and opening up, Made in China, unconsciously, has developed from the OEM in the early years to today's realm. At this stage, there are few OEMs in Chinese manufacturing, even if it is OEM for the world's brands, there are many design components, such as Apple mobile phones and so on. Chinese brands are also rising, such as Midea, Gree and other home appliance brands, gradually going to the world Huawei, Xiaomi brand, fast fashion SHEIN brand. With the rise of Chinese manufacturing, Chinese manufacturing has reached an era of breakthrough in the development of original standard manufacturing, that is, OSM (Original Standardizatio Manufacturer).

OSM is the original standard manufacturing, many standards through software, architecture, standard solidification results, on the basis of the standard also formed a certain architecture, which should be the highest stage of manufacturing development. Original standard manufacturing is not just a standard, but a kind of thinking. If China's manufacturing industry is product thinking, then it will always be subject to various standards and systems. If China's manufacturing industry has the original standard manufacturing thinking, perhaps China's manufacturing has a real right to speak.

Recently, I gave a speech at the forum of the 2021 Guangzhou International Innovation Festival on how to develop specialized new enterprises in Tianhe District, Guangzhou. My suggestion is that Tianhe District should vigorously develop industrial software, and the software industry should achieve manufacturing in serving the manufacturing industry in the Pearl River Delta, and also achieve itself - to become a specialized and special new enterprise. The most typical is to cultivate enterprises like Shangpin Home Delivery. Shangpin home delivery is "software + home", Tianhe has talents, the Pearl River Delta has manufacturing, in the context of the industrial Internet, is a rare opportunity in a thousand years.

I am also thinking about whether Shangpin Home Furnishing has created a home customization industry, but also created an industry standard, system and business model, so that the industry has a common architecture, standards and software, which belongs to the category of intellectual property protection. If the system and software of Shangpin Home Delivery can be protected, the vicious competition in the industry may be alleviated, and perhaps the protected enterprises can do more in system research to make China's industrial software more competitive.

Of course, shangpin home delivery's business model developed ten years ago, and it may not have solidified intellectual property rights in software ideas and related designs. But all of this may require legal and environmental support for China's future development of industrial software and new system solutions.

In 2019, China's international trade deficit in services was close to US$500 billion, which is closely related to R&D, standards and licensing expenditures. The emergence of new standards such as 5G technology and low carbon may change the pattern of industrial technology standards in the future, and will also change the pattern of service trade. Chinese enterprises need to pay attention to the changes during the period and use new thinking to lay out the future of the industry.

I communicated with Shi Huashan, can OPPED open the underlying technology drive platform of servo motors, so that the application of servo motors in all walks of life can use OPPED's technology, forming a solution for servo motor applications in all walks of life? During this period, it is necessary to abstract from the specific industrial engineering, software, architecture, standards, laws to solidify the company's results, is this not the original standard manufacturing? And then continue to copy the results, output software, output standards, this is not the scope of trade in services?

From hard to soft, from products to systems, from single-point innovation to architectural standards, Made in China may be touching new boundaries.