Since the reform and opening up, China has made remarkable achievements, and all walks of life are undergoing earth-shaking changes. Driven by the tide of reform, China's automatic weighing instrument industry has also made rapid progress. The number of automatic weighing instrument companies has increased rapidly, and the products have made great progress in digitalization, integration, networking and intelligence. However, we should also see that the development of China's automatic weighing instrument industry and even the automatic weighing instrument companies in the world has shown slow improvement, insufficient innovation ability, low service quality and declining profitability. As China's economic development enters a new normal and the world's economic development slows down, many companies have suffered losses or even closed down. There are also many relatively large automatic weighing instrument companies that have turned to other industries for development. How to carry out institutional innovation, system innovation, and model innovation based on the product characteristics and industry characteristics of automatic weighing instruments, and based on the laws and trends of economic and social development, and find a scientific development path, has become a realistic problem facing our weighing instrument companies and entrepreneurs.
1. Characteristics of automatic weighing instruments
Automatic weighing instruments refer to weighing instruments that automatically weigh according to pre-programmed programs, such as belt scales, batching scales, quantitative loading scales, chute scales, loader scales, unattended truck scales, etc. They are important equipment in industry, agriculture, commerce, and transportation. They are related to the measurement of raw materials and finished products, production process control, product quality control, production cost control, and production safety in these industries. Therefore, the automatic weighing instrument industry is a typical equipment manufacturing industry. At the same time, the automatic weighing instrument industry is significantly different from other equipment manufacturing industries and has its own characteristics and particularities.
1. There are many types and specifications of products, and the demand for each specification is small
Automatic weighing instruments are often connected or used in conjunction with conveying equipment, and the form, conveying capacity, process requirements, installation conditions, functional requirements, measurement performance requirements, and material properties of conveying equipment are all different. The combination of various factors forms the diversity of demand for weighing instruments, and the demand for a certain specification of products is relatively small.
2. Many related fields and rapid technological progress
Automatic weighing instruments involve many technical fields, such as materials, machinery, electronics, software, communications, computers, fluid mechanics, physics, the Internet (or the Internet of Things), smart terminals, industrial design, metrology, energy conservation, etc. In many fields, the limits of technology have been used, and the progress of any related technology will affect the progress of weighing instruments. When national standards or verification procedures change, products must often be updated.
3. Many basic disciplines are involved, and innovation is difficult
Since most automatic weighing instruments are measured in motion, that is, what we often call dynamic weighing instruments, if you want to innovate, you must create new mathematical models based on mechanics, including kinematic mechanics, create new measurement methods and calculation methods, and apply new materials and sensor technologies. This requires high-end scientific and technological talents in many disciplines and a lot of basic research work. Automatic weighing instruments are far from the technical complexity of the lever weighing instrument era, and are much more complex than non-automatic weighing instruments. In many applications, the requirements for metrological performance are getting higher and higher, which brings unlimited development space to automatic weighing instruments while also continuously improving the depth and difficulty of research.
2. The current situation and contradictions of automatic weighing equipment enterprises
There are many automatic weighing equipment manufacturing enterprises in China, but the scale of enterprises is not large and there are few high-end products. Nearly a thousand enterprises in the country each have their own R&D team, but each has insufficient R&D capabilities and often does low-level, repetitive R&D and design. Generally speaking, the waste is very large. At the same time, due to the limitations of the enterprises' own capabilities, the innovations and inventions of many enterprises have not played their due value and role, which seriously affects the economic and social benefits. It is precisely because the innovations and inventions of enterprises cannot be effectively promoted, which restricts the improvement of the economic benefits of enterprises, so disorderly and vicious competition has emerged among the manufacturing enterprises in this industry. This kind of competition is not to expand the market by improving the functions, performance, configuration, etc. of products to make the products more perfect, but to sacrifice the functions, performance, configuration, quality, etc. of products to reduce product prices and kill each other. In addition to being affected by the state of social development, the current situation of automatic weighing equipment enterprises is mainly caused by multiple contradictions caused by the characteristics of automatic weighing equipment. These contradictions are:
1. R&D investment is not enough, and it is not enough to invest too much in R&D.
Since the user's on-site conditions and requirements are different, automatic weighing equipment companies must be equipped with development and design personnel. However, due to market competition, the price and profit are very low, while the technical personnel, especially senior technical personnel, have high salary and treatment requirements, and the equipment, site and operating costs required for research and testing are also large. Therefore, companies often cannot afford or are unwilling to invest too much money in research and development.
2. The production scale is not small, and it is not large.
Since automatic weighing equipment belongs to the equipment manufacturing industry, its products are often used on continuous production lines, and the quality requirements for products are very high. The complexity of automatic weighing equipment also makes automatic weighing equipment have many fine parts. Therefore, small workshops and small workshops cannot make good automatic weighing equipment. However, due to the large variety and specifications of automatic weighing equipment and the small output of a single product, the production of automatic weighing equipment is made into an assembly line, and its use efficiency will also be very low. The application of Industry 4.0 technology in the production of automatic weighing equipment was originally very appropriate, but due to the lack of such a large output support, no one is willing to adopt it from an economic point of view.
3. The service team cannot be too small or too large
Due to the complexity of automatic weighing instruments, general users often do not have sufficient technical capabilities for maintenance and repair, and need weighing instrument companies to provide technical support and services. If the company does not have enough service personnel, it will be difficult to meet the user's requirements for timely service. However, the service is not stable, and is often accidental and sudden. It is often the case that there is no one when service is needed, and there is no service demand when there is someone. This leads to users complaining about not being able to get timely service on the one hand, and weighing instrument companies complaining about the high service costs on the other.