Cixing: Let Small Businesses Afford Robots

As the development of the industry has matured, labor costs have been on the rise, but on the contrary, the cost of robot parts is decreasing. Moreover, industrial robots are suitable for 24 hours of continuous production and become the main force in the future production link. It seems that the robot has become an indisputable fact.

Industrial robots, which are used in the field of production and manufacturing, aim to achieve automation and intellectualization, and the image is "tall and big", which makes many small and medium-sized enterprises consciously fall down on them. However, Sun Pingfan, chairman of Ningbo Cixing Limited by Share Ltd and chairman of Cixing Robot Technology Co. Ltd., Li Lijun, seems that the vigorous demand of SMEs is only temporarily concealed by high investment funds. The future industrial robots will inevitably enter small and medium-sized enterprises to serve them.

Due to the asymmetry of supply and demand in the robotics integrated application industry, as the world's largest knitting flat knitting machine manufacturer, Cixing Limited by Share Ltd began to deploy the 6 axis robot controller in 2013. After this year, it decided to enter the field of system integration, set up the Cixing machine man Technology Co., Ltd., and embarked on a brand-new industrial robot application business mode.

"Cock wire" enterprises need robots

Li Lijun jokes the small and medium enterprises as the "cock wire" of the business world: "now the Internet thinking says to do" cock wire economy ", pay attention to the very large number of low-level users, I think so is the business services, the service of a large number of" cock wire enterprises "is a good choice.

Cixing has found that the demand of small and medium-sized enterprises for production oriented industrial robots has been suppressed in fact. "An industrial robot with hundreds of thousands of yuan and millions of yuan, naturally makes small and medium-sized enterprises in a long way. I think to let robots enter small and medium-sized enterprises, we must first reduce the price of the robot application system. Sun Pingfan said.

Of course, Small and medium-sized enterprises The requirements for production robots are also different from those of large enterprises. For example, many small and medium enterprises in Zhejiang are still producing relatively low quality goods, and the demand for production accuracy is not high. They hope that robots can first replace repetitive manual labor, so as to improve production efficiency and reduce production costs, and can be applied to high noise and dusty working environments.

Besides technical factors, financial accounts should be counted as well. "The surveyed SMEs hope to be able to get back to the books in the best two years, not more than 3 years at most. Because SMEs are more sensitive to uncertainty in the future, they can only control the production within 2~3 years. Once the market fluctuates, the ship will turn around. If robots are not deployed, they will drag down the flexibility. Li Lijun said. Therefore, the positioning of Sun Pingfan and Li Lijun for the Cixing robot is to provide a cost-effective solution for industrial robots.

As far as industrial robot application system is concerned, it is all right to not sell out. How to train employees to learn how to operate and use them is a major topic. The solution they offered was that the Cixing robot built up a perfect after-sales service network relying on the details of Cixing stock, and at the beginning it was fully trained by Cixing. "Of course, this is just a drop in the bucket. Only by establishing a socialized training system can we solve this problem completely. Any employee, after studying in the training school, can operate a variety of industrial robots, instead of going to an enterprise to learn again. After the establishment of a socialized training system, production enterprises no longer need to pay too much cost for training their employees. "

Focus on the system Integrate

Most industrial robot enterprises like to take the whole industry chain route. But after analyzing the market of Cixing, they abandoned this route, and decided to cut into the industrial robot industry as a system integrator. "Cixing just wants to concentrate on the application of industrial robots - making robots play a real role in the production process, rather than seeking to cover the whole industry chain." Li Lijun said.

Cixing designed a set of business models that are different from traditional ones: focus on system integration, do not produce robot body, but choose to purchase mature production robots at home and abroad, and then set up production procedures according to customer needs and production scenarios, sell customized industrial robot system to customers, and provide after-sale services.

The core hardware of the Cixing robot comes from the best and most cost effective robot supplier in Germany, including KUKA, Kawasaki, Japan, etc., and the software is customized to develop according to the specific production process requirements of the customers, and the control program is injected into the industrial robot system, so that the robot knows what to do and how to do it. "The simplest robot application we provide is that workers only need to press the button to start, pause and close. The advantage of this model is that the Cixing robot does not need to start from scratch, nor does it need to invest a lot of money to build the production line, so the financial pressure will not be great. Li Lijun said.

Cixing shares dare to enter Industry The bottom line of the robotics industry and the establishment of cistar robotic company is its accumulation in the field of intelligent knitting equipment for more than 10 years. They have a research and development team in Ningbo, Switzerland and Italy to conduct in-depth research on the production automation of knitting industry. Chi Xing smart knitting machinery has no difference in the precision of its mechanical structure or the complexity of its control system. In fact, they are highly interconnected in the basic principles, hardware structure and underlying software of the control system, and differ only in application level, hardware I/O board and so on.

Cixing stock has been developing and producing the controller of intelligent flat knitting machine since 2003, and the control system is one of the four parts of industrial robot. Tsing Xing shares its experience in the production of the flat knitting machine controller. In 2013, it cooperated with Hong Kong University Science & Technology to develop a 6 axis robot control system and put it into operation in Wuhu, Anhui. This is the most advanced robot control system in China, and it is the only 6 axis robot control system that has been put into commercial operation in China. According to Li Lijun, the competitive advantage of the Cixing robot is much more than the grasp of the core technology, which means that Cixing has the ability to independently provide customers with a complete set of robot application solutions.

The robotics industry is not only a technology intensive industry, but also a capital intensive, high-end talent intensive industry. The Cixing robot must be bigger and stronger. It needs more capital investment, and the deployment of industrial robot system also requires a lot of money. So how can we reduce the cost of industrial robots? Li Lijun hopes that governments at all levels can make greater efforts and omnidirectional financial policy tilt, not only after subsidies are given to enterprises, but also need to provide some financial support before deployment. "We will provide diversified payment methods for sellers of high-quality SMEs, such as installment payment, in the process of cooperation."