“In the future of garment factories, it is not the ability to take orders for 10,000 pieces of clothing, but the ability to take orders for one piece of clothing is the real ability.” Ma Yun’s words revealed the direction of the digital development of the manufacturing industry.
As far as the opportunities brought by digitization to PCB companies are concerned, it can undertake “one sample order” from a pool of millions of users, realize “mass production of customized needs”, and become a leading role for companies to expand and strengthen PCB proofing and small batch markets. The essential.
Insight: Proofing/low-volume market, once unpopular, is actually promising
Looking back on the development history of China’s PCB industry, the orders undertaken by circuit board manufacturers in the early stage were mainly in large quantities, and no one was interested in small orders. “The reason is very simple. It looks like a common PCB board. In fact, there are many production processes. The small order volume is not cost-effective for the factory, and even the startup cost is not enough.” An electronic engineer who has been engaged in research and development for a long time explained the reason.
However, in the past 10 years, China’s manufacturing industry has undergone historic changes. In the past, Europe, the United States, Japan and South Korea mastered research and development, and we were the manufacturing plants in the world; now, with the continuous improvement of the innovation and competitiveness of my country’s manufacturing industry, it is accelerating from “Made in China” to “Created in China”, and hardware development is active. The degree of improvement has also greatly increased, which has also led to the release of strong demand for PCB proofing and small batches.
At the same time, for small and medium-sized enterprises, scientific research institutions, and electronic engineers, hardware research and development also requires continuous iteration through proofing to realize the whole process from proofing to small batch trial production to mass production.
If the situation of “manufacturers do not accept small orders” does not change, it will restrain the innovation and creativity of the electronics industry to a large extent, which is not conducive to the development of the industry; and although the single order volume of proofing and small batches is small, the scale of users In this vertical, there are millions.
“If these proofing and small batch orders are put together on a large board for production, can it change the status quo of ‘the factory does not accept small orders’?” At the beginning of this century, some electronic engineers began to think about how to reduce PCB proofing through technical improvements. , The production cost of small batches, and the development of a new format. “Just like people go to Beijing by plane, the cost of going to Beijing alone will definitely be high; then if 10 or 100 people go to Beijing together, the cost will definitely come down.”
In 2006, a company named Jiali Chuang Technology Development Co., Ltd. was born, and officially started PCB proofing and small batch business. A large number of small and medium-sized enterprises, electronic engineers, scientific research institutions and other customers flocked to it like “a long drought meets sweet dew”. , showed great enthusiasm for this service. And Jiali Chuang also gave feedback to users with “excellent price, fast delivery and stable quality”.
Since its establishment, the business scale of Jiali Chuang has developed rapidly, and it has become a thriving in the PCB proofing and small batch market.
What is the core support behind the industry’s “breakthrough and development from 0 to 1, and from 1 to N”?
Core: original “virtual puzzle” technology to achieve mass customization
The person in charge of the German automation benchmark Siemens Amberg factory once described its intelligent “digital factory”: “There are two factories here, a real factory and a virtual factory. Any changes in production plans are assigned tasks through the virtual factory. Transfer to real production implementation, and this planned adjustment can happen in the blink of an eye.”
Jialichuang’s original “virtual puzzle” technology is precisely to quickly aggregate a large number of users’ personalized orders on a large board before assigning actual production tasks to the factory, so as to obtain the optimal “cost reduction and efficiency increase”. It is also the key to its realization of “mass production of individual needs”.
Schematic diagram of Jialichuang’s “virtual puzzle”
“Personalization” is synonymous with intensive cultivation, flexible creativity, and “scale” used to mean large-scale and repeated production. It is impossible to achieve high-efficiency mass customization production only by traditional production management methods and informatization methods. The production model of Jialichuang’s “paneling” integrates the two originally contradictory concepts. By using the Internet of Things, big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence technology, it is integrated into the production system to form intelligent manufacturing to achieve large-scale Customized production. The “virtual jigsaw puzzle” technology is one of the most critical technologies to realize the “jigsaw puzzle” production mode.
According to the relevant person in charge of Jiali Chuang, the company has been developing software and algorithms for “virtual puzzles” since 2009. This technology has roughly gone through three stages of development: from the manual menu in the stand-alone mode at the beginning, to the realization of the system’s automatic paneling, and then with the explosive growth of orders, distributed computing has been further developed in the past two years. From the original single physical machine to the parallel computing of many computing terminals, this mode breaks through the bottleneck of the physical resource priority of a single machine, and makes a great leap in computing performance. With the improvement of the computing performance of the system, the computing time is greatly reduced, which provides a huge space for the optimization of the algorithm; it also provides infinite possibilities for improving the utilization rate of the board, reducing the production cost and optimizing the production process.
More than a decade ago, it would take dozens of people to complete the production tasks for thousands of sample orders in the stand-alone mode; now even tens of thousands of daily orders can be completed by only two people.
Through the improvement of the algorithm, the efficiency and cost of jigsaw puzzles have leaped to the forefront of the industry. Even if the order volume continues to increase in the future, the upper limit can be continuously expanded through the flexible adjustment of machines and algorithms.
In the electronics manufacturing industry, technology is always the primary productive force. The fast-paced “virtual puzzle” has laid a solid foundation for the development of the industry.
Barriers: technology and users, build a solid moat
In the semi-open field of PCB intelligent manufacturing, it may not be difficult to be one step ahead, “but every step is one step ahead”, which means a deep understanding and insight into the industry. Since its establishment in 2006, every step it has taken is critical.
As a production enterprise that has successfully applied the “virtual puzzle” technology , Jialichuang has a faster layout in independent research and development of industrial software, automatic puzzle, multi-machine network, distributed computing, etc. In practice, it not only allowed the rapid growth of its own business scale, but also promoted the development of the electronics industry with practical actions.
Another amazing data of Jiali Chuang lies in the traffic of the platform itself. After 16 years of accumulation, this company has become one of the largest PCB manufacturers in China. With a large enough user group and customer order volume, it forms the advantage of large-scale production, thereby further improving the efficiency of paneling, compressing the cost to the extreme, and thus attracting more customers.
This closed loop from “customer to production, to efficiency, to cost, and then to customers” complements each other with technology, which is an advantage that peers are difficult to overcome in a short period of time. Jia Li Chuang is like a “China Intelligent Express” that can carry tens of millions of orders, efficiently and high-quality to meet the personalized and customized needs of each “passenger”. When followers enter the game, they will find that technology is required to seize the market, cost to purchase software, development cycle, and high cost to acquire customers. Therefore, only solid practice of internal strength and deep precipitation is the long-term way of enterprise development.
Jiali Chuang started from PCB proofing and small batches, and its business scope has been continuously extended. Now it has established the most complete PCB production and intelligent manufacturing system in the market, including PCB proofing, small batches, and large batches. As of January 2022, the company’s annual production capacity has reached more than 7 million square meters, and its products and services are distributed in more than 170 countries and regions around the world.
In 2021, Jia Li Chuang will carry out strategic integration with Li Chuang and CITIC China to build a one-stop service ecosystem for the electronics industry from “PCB Design Software ➤ PCB Intelligence ➤ Component Mall ➤ Laser Stencil ➤ SMT Patch”. With the support of technology and traffic, it has brought more efficient and convenient services to companies and engineers in the global electronics industry, continued to promote industrial development, and made technological innovation more efficient!
Leifeng Network
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