Li Chuping, Vice President, State Grid Shandong Power Equipment Co., Ltd., China

"Higher output at lower costs"

As a developer and manufacturer of power transformers for Chinese and international customers, we are active in a market marked by intense competition. Companies that wish to succeed over the long term must be able to innovate at a rapid pace. However, that alone is not enough. It is equally important to take every opportunity to continuously improve productivity. This is especially true in production.

Time-consuming warehouse management
We use some 200 C-parts to build our transformers. As a result, warehouse management was time-consuming and costly before we started working with Bossard. We had eight employees in our warehouse, with one person responsible exclusively for fastening elements. Two additional employees were needed to sort and distribute these parts to the production lines. This task took about five hours and was carried out three to four times per week. In addition, the fastening parts had to be checked again on the production line. This activity required another two to three employees. 

Increase our output
When we changed over to SmartBin technology from Bossard about six months ago, we no longer needed all of these manpower-intensive steps and were able to reassign these employees to more productive duties. This helps us to gain extra 37 % productivity in warehouse workforce. However, the main benefit is that we can manufacture more products and increase our output. There is also a third benefit: In the past, we had to order C-parts four times every month. Delivery delays, for instance due to holidays, regularly caused us to run out of certain parts for production. With SmartBin, we no longer have to deal with such interruptions to production.

In the future, we hope to expand our partnership with the Bossard Group. This includes their logistics solutions as well as their expertise in application engineering. We are already reviewing the first proposals from Bossard for improvements in fastening technology.

Ref. BOC-CL-PO-02314