Reporter | Zhuang key
Edit | Zhang Hui
1
Every weekday morning around 7:45, Yu Zhifu would drive to the factory area of the Ningde era. Put on clean clothes, wear a mask and gloves, change into labor protection shoes, and then complete the dust removal in the wind shower room for 10 seconds before he enters the battery coating workshop.
An important process in the production of lithium batteries will be completed here.
The coating process needs to control the particles and dust in the room within a certain range, which is why the workshop supervisor Yu Zhifu is fully armed. The 28-year-old has short neat hair, is about 1.7 meters tall, and has a slightly fat figure. When you don't speak, you usually have a serious expression.
Yu Zhifu's day's work usually begins with confirming the production status of the late shift and handing over equipment and materials with colleagues. The battery factory in the Ningde era adopted a two-shift working mode, with the day shift working from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. and the late shift working from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. the next day.
Fill Yu Zhifu's subsequent schedule by convening a morning meeting of the day shift team, assigning production tasks, inspecting the production line and following up on equipment abnormalities, and statistical production data.
It usually doesn't take until after 9 p.m. for him to finish his day. At this time, the WeChat step counting function on Yu Zhifu's mobile phone reminded him that in the past 13 hours, he had walked more than 24,000 steps in the workshop.
In May this year, the coating workshop managed by Yu Zhifu was put into use, just half a year ago.
This workshop is part of the NINGDE Times Z2 factory and belongs to the CATL Z Base. Located in the north of Ningde City, Fujian Province, Z Base is about half an hour's drive from the city center. The power batteries produced in the factory will be sold to car companies, including Tesla, and are an indispensable part of their production of new energy vehicles.
In the coating workshop that Yu Zhifu is responsible for, eight huge coaters are placed side by side, occupying an area of 130 meters long and 60 meters wide, an area equivalent to the size of a standard football field.
On the unwinding device of one of the coaters, a roll of aluminum foil is automatically unfolding. It is only 13 microns thick, which is equivalent to one-sixth the diameter of a human hair. If this roll of aluminum foil is fully unfolded, the total length can reach 15,000 meters.
At the coating station, the front and back of the foil are evenly coated with pre-blended slurry. The entire roll of aluminum foil is then transferred to the oven, and after the liquid slurry is dried to a solid, the foil is rewound into a coil.
A roll of aluminum foil usually takes about 1 hour to complete the above coating process, which is also a key hour to determine the quality of the battery.
During the coating process, the operator always pays attention to the process monitoring system, and once the production data deviates, the equipment must be adjusted in time to ensure that the coating thickness and weight of the aluminum foil surface are consistent. It should be known that the thickness of these coatings is also measured in microns.
One of the main tasks of the workshop supervisor Yu Zhifu is to find a solution in the shortest time when the equipment is abnormal, so that the highly automated production line can resume normal operation.
Yu Zhifu became acquainted with the battery industry in 2012. The accumulation of the battery coating industry in the past nine years has allowed him to find out the various doorways for equipment commissioning.
Yu Zhifu, who is working in the coating workshop, picture source: Ningde Times
In 2011, Yu Zhifu graduated from the high school in his hometown of Huanggang, Hubei Province, and his college entrance examination scores were not ideal that year. After the Spring Festival of the following year, he followed several relatives to Dongguan, Guangdong, including his younger brother Yu Zhide.
Through the recommendation of relatives, Yu Zhifu joined Dongguan New Energy Technology Co., Ltd. He felt that the factory that produced consumer batteries was well treated, so he entered the factory with the idea of working for a year first.
The battery factory assigned Yu Zhifu to the coating workshop and asked him to start as an apprentice. In the first three days of joining, the master arranged for Yu Zhifu to test the appearance of the roll material and at the same time be responsible for unloading the material, so as to familiarize himself with the workshop environment. As soon as he had the opportunity, he asked the old staff about the operation principle of the coating machine and learned how to troubleshoot the equipment. In less than a week, Yu Zhifu began to learn to operate a coating machine alone, and the master operated another equipment next to it, so that Yu Zhifu could ask for help when he encountered problems.
In 2015, the battery factory's base in Ningde, Fujian Province, needed manpower, and Yu Zhifu was named to the seaside town. A few months later, he joined the company he now works for, CATL.
At that time, the Ningde era had just been established for five years, far from having the current popularity, and the company's power battery business was still in its infancy, with an annual revenue of only 5.7 billion yuan.
By 2021, the revenue of CATL in a single quarter has approached 20 billion yuan. After the company was listed in 2018, its stock price also reached new highs, and once became the second largest company in the A-share market, second only to Guizhou Moutai.
In the six years since joining the Ningde era, Yu Zhifu has gradually adapted to local life. Yu Zhifu's parents moved to Ningde in 2019 to help him and his wife take care of their children who have just entered kindergarten. After work, Yu Zhifu will accompany his children to the playground in Ningde City or the surrounding ecological park to make up for the lack of busy work on weekdays and cannot accompany them.
The younger brother Yu Zhide's family also came to Ningde from Dongguan. Like Yu Zhifu, Yu Zhide also worked in the Z2 factory of the Ningde era. The younger brother works in the winding workshop, which is also one of the six major processes of battery cell production.
After the roll pressing die-cutting process, the aluminum foil rolls produced in the coating workshop will be sent to Yu Zhide's workshop for the next processing.
The Yu Zhifu brothers shared a three-bedroom house near the factory. The subsidies provided by CATL for employees have basically covered the costs they need to rent a house.
Every month, the two brothers can receive tens of thousands of yuan in wages from the company. In 2021, Yu Zhifu also received a salary increase of more than 20%.
Yu Zhifu (left) and Yu Zhide (right) at the Z2 factory, image source: Ningde Times
Yu Zhifu, who first settled in the Ningde era, rose from an ordinary operator at the time of entry to the current production supervisor, managing a team of about 80 people. In addition, he also has another identity: the first batch of coating craftsmen in the Ningde era.
CATL launched the Langya List for the first time in 2019, with the aim of selecting skilled talents among front-line production workers and opening up the channel for their promotion. By the end of 2020, the front-line production personnel of the NINGDE era exceeded 20,000 people, accounting for more than 60% of the total number of employees of the company.
By 2021, the Langya List has been held for three consecutive years. In the first year of the launch of the Langya list, the three items of coating, winding and welding were selected in the battery manufacturing process. Yu Zhifu was nominated by the workshop supervisor at the time and became one of the 48 coating technicians who participated in the list. The contestants went through three rounds of judging, and in the end, six people were selected for that year's Langya list, and Yu Zhifu was on the list.
After receiving the title of Master of Coating, he was promoted to the company's seventh level technician. In the original grade system of the Ningde era, the operators on the front line of the factory usually faced the ceiling of the rank after being promoted to the sixth level. In 2020, Yu Zhifu also obtained the equity incentive granted by CATL by virtue of his status as a master of coating.
After Yu Zhifu joined the Ningde era, the new energy vehicle market at home and abroad gradually rose, and the Ningde era also began the rapid expansion of production capacity.
In 2015, the battery production capacity of the Ningde era was only 2.6 GWh. By the first half of 2021, the battery production capacity of the CATL era has exceeded 65 GWh, and another 92.5 GWh is under construction.
The expansion of production capacity in the Ningde era means that mature manpower needs to be drawn from the old factory to support the new base to be put into operation as soon as possible. Almost every once in a while, Yu Zhifu, who has extensive experience in production lines, is deployed to one of the company's battery bases under construction to help the new factory's coating workshop get on track. The Z2 factory is already the fifth battery factory he has worked in the Ningde era.
Yu Zhifu said that every time the production line of the new factory is successfully put into operation, as an advance force, he will have a sense of joy of success. In addition to the welfare benefits, this is another important reason why Yu Zhifu is willing to stay in the Ningde era.
In May this year, Yu Zhifu was transferred to the Z2 factory as the director of the coating workshop. Faced with tight pressure to deliver the product, he and four other colleagues stayed in the workshop for three days and two nights, and finally equipped the new coating line with mass production conditions, and gradually increased to the current production capacity in the following 45 days.
The challenge that followed was to train a sufficient number of operators to keep the coating shop running normally for the rest of the day.
NINGDE Times Z Base, Photo: Zhuang Jian
Yu Zhifu brought five experienced old employees from the previous factory, and the remaining 90% of the staff gap in the workshop needed to be filled by training newly recruited employees. Most of these employees are young people after 90 or even 00.
In the early days of operation of the Z2 plant, the equipment operation of the coating workshop was not stable, which put a lot of pressure on the new operators. Soon after the workshop was put into operation, an operator who had recently graduated from a secondary school applied for resignation. He gave Yu Zhifu the reason that he was not capable of personal ability and was not qualified for the job.
With years of experience, Yu Zhifu felt that the other party was making trouble, did not immediately deal with his resignation application, and waited for two days for the other party's mood to calm down, and then asked him in person for the reason.
The young man told Yu Zhifu that the equipment he was responsible for often went abnormal, and although he was busy all day, he still could not reach the production target he had set, which made him feel frustrated.
Yu Zhifu reassured him that the production line had just been opened and pulled, and there would indeed be more equipment failures, but it would certainly gradually improve after that, and advised him not to only see the difficulties in front of him.
"When the equipment runs smoothly, people won't be so tired." He told the other party to treat the device like a baby and to be patient. After Yu Zhifu's enlightenment, the new worker in the production line withdrew his resignation application on the spot.
In addition to work pressure, personal emotional problems have also become a potential cause of instability for production line workers.
Recently, a newcomer who has been employed for two months also proposed to Yu Zhifu to leave, on the grounds that he had recently quarreled with his girlfriend and wanted to leave his job to calm down for a while.
Yu Zhifu planned to find an opportunity to talk to him in person to see if he could keep the worker who could already operate the coater independently. Eventually, the worker and his girlfriend rebuilt the old ones and remained in the coating workshop.
When planning for his future, Yu Zhifu said that he intends to continue to experience at the grassroots level of the factory and accumulate more operation and management experience.
In the first two years, he enrolled in the college course of Ningde Radio and Television University and used his spare time to study online courses. If you are successful, you can get a diploma in business management in 2022. Yu Zhifu is particularly interested in the course on communication styles, which he hopes to use to improve his ability to communicate with others at work.
Yu Zhifu also made a good decision to obey the company's arrangements and go to the new factory again to support. In the past year, CATL has successively announced a number of large-scale battery expansion plans, with a total investment of tens of billions of yuan. In addition to its headquarters in Ningde, the company is planning to build new battery factories in Yibin, Sichuan, Yichun, Jiangxi, and Xiamen, Fujian.
Mr. Yu said he didn't know if he would be sent to a new factory next year, but he was happy to take on the unknown challenge.