How To Optimize Magnet Cost?

An enterprise is a profit-oriented organization, and it is facing unprecedented operating pressures currently. These pressures come from the demands of business growth, accelerated innovation, and continuous improvement in productivity, as well as market competition, globalization trends, the pace of information technology and business change is accelerating, also from the need to reduce costs.

The reduction in cost means the enlargement of profit margins, and it will have stronger competitiveness in the market. Here we discuss how to reduce costs healthily and effectively from the aspects of management improvement, process optimization, technological innovation, and manufacturing innovation.

Management Improvement

Most of manufacturing enterprises have relatively rapid initial development, rapid business expansion, and rapid expansion of production capacity, but actual profits are gradually shrinking, mainly due to the lack of effective management. Although most of them have applied for quality certificates, ISO9001, etc. the actual operation of the system is not effective, eventually turned into a piece of paper. The effective implementation of the quality system is conducive to controlling and reducing costs, helping companies seek ways to improve product quality. The management can also grasp the problems in quality management, and at the same time can broaden the cost management channels. In addition to the effective operation of the system, the use of quality tools, such as SPC, MSA, FMEA, APQP, PPAP, etc. can help companies in the manufacturing process to help us find the variation in the process, and take corresponding measures to restore production to normal, to reduce the defects caused by mutation, thereby reducing the cost of poor quality

Process Optimization

Manufacturing enterprises have many typical manufacturing processes and long cycles. In a long manufacturing process, various variations will occur, causing some quality problems and cost loss. At the same time, the long delivery period often causes customer dissatisfaction. Therefore, it is particularly important to reorganize the process. Through the identification, decomposition, and evaluation of each link in the process, unnecessary processes are deleted, compressed, rearranged and other management methods are redesigned. For example, at the magnet production site, each process site should be arranged in the order of production to reduce extra round-trip circulation and avoid bumping and damage of the magnet during the circulation process, so that the pass rate of the product will also be improved. While combing the process, speed up the operation of the process, reduce the waiting time of the material in the circulation process, shorten the production cycle, and avoid the backlog of finished products in the previous process without the flow of the next process, and the next process is always in the waiting state. Eliminate all unnecessary waste, the process of eliminating variation itself is also eliminating waste, which is the core of lean production.

Technological Innovation

Technological innovation is of great significance to the production process of products. It can not only greatly improve the production efficiency of enterprises, but also bring about cost reduction and win opportunities in market competition. For example, the current permanent magnet motors used in new energy vehicles need to use high temperature resistant neodymium iron boron magnets. During the manufacturing process of such magnets, a certain proportion of heavy rare earth element Dy needs to be added to the formula, which greatly increases the cost of the magnet. With the manufacturing innovation of the magnet technology, the grain boundary diffusion technology not only meets the performance requirements of the magnet, but also greatly reduces the amount of heavy rare earth used, resulting in a substantial cost reduction.

Manufacturing Innovation

Nowadays, the highest cost is labor cost. In the six major factors that affect quality, human, machine, material, method, environment, and measurement, the process variation is caused by human factors, and the probability of causing defects is the highest. In the manufacturing inspection process, people often make mistakes due to fatigue, and the efficiency of labor is also a major factor that restricts productivity. Automation equipment is a good solution. The introduction and use of automation equipment can greatly improve production efficiency. For example, in the magnet manufacturing process, one automation equipment can complete the four processes of identification-magnetization-inspection-packaging together. The efficiency is many times that of manual work, and it is not easy to make mistakes.