In the early spring of last year, our factory's technical department received an emergency call-Lao Zhou, the director of the packaging workshop of a dairy company in Qinghai, was so anxious that he was furious: "Your equipment is expensive, but it's minus 20¡æ on this plateau, and the machine will go on strike once it freezes. The frozen milk that is poured out every day is enough to buy a yak!"
This case has become a classic textbook for our factory's technical breakthroughs. The customer is located in a pastoral area at an altitude of 3,800 meters. It has to deal with a temperature difference of 30¡æ between day and night, and deal with the local unique thick fat yak milk. The "cheap" fully automatic milk packaging machine they purchased before was indeed cheap, but after using it for half a year, the maintenance costs and waste of raw materials alone were worth half the cost of the equipment.
First battle: head-on confrontation with low temperature
Our engineers were stationed on site for three days with thermometers and found that the lubrication system of ordinary equipment solidified into paste at -15¡æ. The technical team transformed the "antifreeze lubrication cabin" overnight and wrapped the key transmission components in a constant temperature interlayer, just like putting a down jacket on the equipment. Although this made the price of the fully automatic milk packaging machine about 15% higher than the standard model, after a month of trial operation, the customer achieved continuous production in winter for the first time. Lao Zhou pointed to the monitoring screen in the video and laughed: "Look at this picture of smooth filling at minus 18¡æ, what's the point of this little extra money?"
Second battle: taming the "violent temper" of yak milk
The viscosity of thick fat milk is high, and the pressure pump of ordinary equipment will "gasp" at any time. We customized a double-screw propulsion system for the customer and added a dynamic pressure compensation module to the filling head. On the day of debugging, watching the thick yak milk slide into the packaging bag like silk, the workshop master slapped his thigh and said, "We should have used this equipment long ago! The cheap machines before were just pouring milk as cement!"
The third trick: the secret war of packaging material loss
The equipment used by the customer originally had to stop production for at least two hours every time the packaging material specifications were changed. The quick-change module we designed allows operators to adjust the equipment as easily as changing a mobile phone case. During the return visit last month, the workshop statistician showed us the data: 12 new packagings were trial-produced in the past six months, and the packaging material loss rate was reduced by 60% compared with the old equipment. The financial director said privately: "The money saved alone can make up for the price difference of the fully automatic milk packaging machine in three years."
In early spring this year, Lao Zhou called again, but this time he was telling good news: "Come and see the 'side effects' of your equipment!" It turned out that they used the production data we provided to persuade five surrounding ranches to set up a joint purchasing center. Now their packaging workshop produces for themselves during the day and does OEM for neighbors at night, and the equipment utilization rate has reached 92%. Lao Zhou did a rough calculation on the whiteboard in the workshop: Based on the current OEM income, we can add another new machine next year.
This case later became the "ice-breaking weapon" of our sales department. Last month, a customer in the northwest compared prices and repeatedly struggled with the price lists of fully automatic milk packaging machines from three suppliers. We took them directly to see the real-time production monitoring of the Qinghai customer - the "continuous operation days: 217 days" jumping in the lower right corner of the screen made the customer decide on the spot: "We want this set! We don't mind if the equipment is a little expensive, we want a hen that can lay golden eggs."
When I was looking through the customer files recently, I saw the notes column of the Qinghai customer when he signed the contract that year, which said "requires a five-year payback." Now it's only the third year, and they have expanded the production line to three. Last week, their chairman came to inspect the factory and touched our newly developed cold-resistant model and sighed: "I thought the price of the fully automatic milk packaging machine was a threshold, but now I understand that it is the golden key to open the plateau market."
Standing in the test workshop, watching the antifreeze model customized for Northeast customers undergoing low-temperature testing, in an environment of minus 25¡æ, the filling line still operates smoothly. I suddenly remembered the rough words of Lao Zhou: "Cheap equipment is like a paper tiger, it looks scary, but it will break with a poke." The price of the fully automatic milk packaging machine that we consolidated with technology eventually became a real competitive advantage in the hands of customers.
