Just after the exhibition, my trouser legs were still stained with dust from the Pazhou Exhibition Hall, but the customer's words echoed in my mind: "Your equipment is tailor-made for our small batch orders!" I heard this at the booth no less than twenty times. As a veteran who has participated in the exhibition for eight consecutive years, this year's South China Printing Exhibition really surprised me-the entire Hall 5 was almost contracted by small and medium-sized packaging machines, and the three new models brought by our factory did not grab the C position.
On the first day of the exhibition, a strange phenomenon was discovered: in previous years, the "giant" equipment that occupied dozens of square meters was deserted, but our small and medium-sized packaging machines that occupied seven or eight square meters were surrounded by crowds. Mr. Li, who makes color box packaging next door, sucked his teeth and said, "Now customers are very sophisticated. They come up and ask 'what is the minimum order quantity' and 'how long does it take to change the mold', but few care about the maximum production capacity." In fact, we smelled the signs of this trend three years ago. Now when you walk into the factory workshops in the Pearl River Delta, you can see the "small order and fast response" production model everywhere. Just like the customer who makes Internet celebrity snacks in Dongguan, he produces dried mangoes in self-supporting bags in the morning, changes to nuts in four-side sealing bags in the afternoon, and rushes to make limited gift boxes for live broadcast channels in the evening. Their purchasing manager took a picture of our equipment at the booth and said, "This kind of small and medium-sized packaging machine is the only one that can be switched to production faster than turning a book!" We deliberately did an experiment at this exhibition: the operating station was completely open. Seeing the audience staring at the equipment with wide eyes as it completed the bag type switching within 10 minutes, a boss from Fujian took out his mobile phone to record a video: "This automatic deviation correction system is amazing! Last time we changed the roll film, we had to waste at least five or six packaging materials to test the machine." This made our engineer Lao Zhou very happy. The intelligent memory system he led the team to develop can now store 200 sets of parameter combinations, and the seven or eight packaging materials commonly used by customers do not need manual debugging at all.
The explosion of small and medium-sized packaging machines is by no means accidental. When visiting customers in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai last year, eight out of ten complained that "large equipment is not enough." On the contrary, the medium-sized pillow machine we promoted has become a "panacea" on the production line because it can be compatible with different categories such as cakes, daily necessities, and electronic accessories. At the exhibition, I met an old customer who makes pet food. He said that he now has an average of 15 SKUs per month. Using our equipment to convert production capacity saves 30% of working hours, "The time saved is enough to develop three new products."
Interestingly, even traditional large manufacturers have lowered their profile this time. Passing by the booth of a listed company, I was surprised to see their newly launched "mini line", the configuration parameters of which were highly similar to our product three years ago. On the third day of the exhibition, a technician from a competitor came to our booth to "learn from us" and spent half a day studying the visual inspection system. The young man in charge of reception came back and kept muttering: "Even the questions they asked were exactly the same as those asked by customers two years ago!"
In the last two hours before the exhibition was closed, a special customer came - the second generation of a family business in Foshan that makes Chinese herbal medicine slices. The young man had just returned from the UK and asked: "Can your equipment be connected to the MES system? We need to monitor the packaging parameters of each batch in real time." This demand is exactly what we want, and the newly upgraded Internet of Things module can achieve cloud synchronization of production data. Looking at his shining eyes, I suddenly felt that the story of small and medium-sized packaging machines has just begun.
On the way back to the factory, the technical director suddenly said in the back seat of the business car: "Next year, the power of the exhibition machine must be reduced by another 10%. Now customers even calculate the electricity bill per kilowatt-hour." This remark caused laughter in the whole car, and then everyone fell silent again - the market demand changes faster than the weather in Guangzhou, but fortunately, our group of "equipment doctors" have long learned to take the pulse of the times.
The brochure brought back from the exhibition hall still smells of ink, and the four gold-plated words "Flexible Intelligent Manufacturing" on the cover are shining in the sunset. Over the years, our factory has witnessed the transformation of countless companies from blindly pursuing production capacity to intensively cultivating benefits, and the rise of small and medium-sized packaging machines may be a vivid footnote to the high-quality development of China's manufacturing.
