China has many complete and large-scale automobile production bases, and the corresponding automotive component supply chain is also growing. More and more factories are showing great interest in the processing and manufacturing of various automotive components. With the maturity of production technology, the production process is no longer mysterious. Under the influence of fierce market competition, automotive component manufacturing factories are shifting more of their energy from the client-side to the control of the production process, meeting customer needs with quality, and “producing quality.”
Let’s first talk about the advantages of automotive plastic parts:
1. Plastics can be processed and formed in one go, with short processing time and guaranteed precision; with experimental and customer permission, they can be recycled for secondary molding, and the waste recycling rate is also very high.
2. Plastic products themselves are lighter and have good elastic deformation properties, which can absorb a large amount of collision energy. The buffering effect against strong impacts is significantly better than other materials, which will provide better protection for vehicles and occupants. Many car front and rear bumpers are made of plastic to reduce the impact of external objects on the car body. Plastics also have the effect of absorbing and attenuating vibration and noise, which can improve ride comfort. Many mold factories have long received bumper orders from Ford, GAC, and even Land Rover, and are already very mature in manufacturing technology.
3. Plastic has strong corrosion resistance, and local damage will not cause corrosion. It is almost impossible to find non-plastic parts in automobile air conditioning refrigeration systems。
4. Modified materials are made by adding different fillers, plasticizers, hardeners, and elastomers to adapt to the uses and requirements of different parts of the car. The 18th Business Division of BYD Group has been able to modify corresponding raw materials by itself for many years to fully adapt to its own product needs. What’s more convenient is that the color of plastic can be adjusted by masterbatch and toner, saving the trouble of painting, and the electroplating performance of plastic is better than other materials.
How to achieve the technical requirements of customers by means of management. For the production base level, the technical matters that require experience cannot be achieved through management. Now we will use the complete process of a product to talk about our opinions:
1. Project management of auto parts
1) Introduction of new products
The technology and management methods in this stage should be based on the explicit and implicit needs of customers. These needs can be seen in the customer’s information. The source of internal transmission is the project manager. The timely, effective, and accurate transmission of this information by the project manager and the ability to realize the information in the development process is the correct start of production.
Project import is not just a matter for the project manager and project engineer; its completion requires the formation of effective logistics and its acceptance and payment collection before it can be considered closed. Therefore, this requires a small core team and contact with a large number of production resources to achieve.
Let us briefly elaborate on the basic project team members and their responsibilities:
The Project Manager (PM) receives, saves, distributes, and manages customer requirement information; organizes relevant personnel to review customer requirements; and communicates with customers promptly regarding unclear or ambiguous customer information.
The Project Engineer (PE) ensures that customer requirements are effectively translated into project development requirements and promptly communicated to all relevant units to ensure implementation during subsequent project development.
The Quality Engineer reviews the quality-related content of customer requirements; translates customer quality standards into internal quality requirements; ensures that customer quality standards are implemented during project development; and supervises and controls the process.
The new project team is small and simple, and its greatest responsibility is to analyze customer information and realize the explicit requirements in the data. Everyone hopes for good results from the start of production, and any new product is produced with detailed planning to achieve good results.
So we say that the project is also technology, and how to utilize the technology is the brilliance of management methods.
2) Technology in the Project Process
Many people believe that this stage does not involve any technology because they overlook the key to transforming information into reality in this stage—the realization of documents. Many people think that documents are just typing a few words in front of a computer. This idea simply ignores that the basis of documents comes from production reality, such as FMEA, APQP, etc.
The main means of transforming information into production capacity is to use the executability of various documents to control the process, which is why there are so-called “five core tools.” The goal is to promote contact with everyone involved and to ensure that the required steps are completed on time. One person or one department cannot complete all the work; it must be cross-departmental cooperation.
Make detailed plans in advance to identify the risks of people, machines, materials, methods, environment, and measurement, and have corresponding measures. Even if short-term economic goals are sacrificed, try to ensure that the product is done well the first time. To achieve these, no matter how excellent a project manager is, it cannot be solved. Only with the assistance of professional technical personnel from various departments can it be completed together.
In the first stage of the project, from the establishment of the team to the project initiation, only a simple project manager is needed to complete all the work. At this time, the main task is to receive and digest information. After establishing a suitable team, the project manager needs to deliver this digested information to the relevant responsible engineers for classification and implementation.
2. Technical Management of Production Workshop
1) Raw Materials
The application range of plastics in automobiles has expanded from interior decoration to exterior structures. In addition to the large increase in the use of polyolefin materials in the automotive field in recent years, the use of polyurethane, reinforced composite materials, etc., in automotive products is also increasing. The proportion of injection molded products in auto parts is increasing.
The use of a dehumidifying and drying system must be considered before molding the raw materials. Raw materials with strong hygroscopicity must be fully dried before molding, and a dehumidifying dryer is the first choice for drying raw materials. Compared with the hot air dryer equipped with the injection molding machine, the drying effect is better, and the setting of the drying temperature must be based on the material property table. We will focus on a frequently mentioned situation in system audits here.
When the hopper dryer of an injection molding machine can dry 50 KG of raw material with a drying time of 4H, two problems are often encountered:
- If 50 KG of raw material can be produced within 3H, it means that the newly added raw material cannot meet the drying requirements at all. Does this mean that the raw material is not thoroughly dried, and can the product be regarded as defective?
- If it takes 30H to produce 50 KG of raw material, it means that the raw material that cannot be produced within a few hours needs to be baked at a temperature several times longer than specified. Will this cause damage to the raw material?
The commonly used method to deal with this problem is to tell the customer that we can ask the raw material supplier for a material certificate to prove that the raw material will not have any abnormalities within this time range. Both parties will accept this approach when there is no hope of review, but the crux of the problem is not ultimately resolved. Therefore, we must request the limit test of raw materials. Use experimental data to prove the feasibility and reliability of the production process. Only by introducing data into every technical link, the data quantification of work content is reasonable.
2) Injection Molding Equipment
Since auto parts are quite different from conventional plastic products such as mobile phone cases and home appliances, a considerable number of products have large dimensions, very complex cavity surfaces, and structural positions that are subject to uneven forces during the plastic molding process. The stress distribution is naturally difficult to balance, so the focus during design is on the required processing capacity.
Generally speaking, the processing capacity of an injection molding machine is reflected in two aspects: clamping force and injection capacity (expressed as the maximum theoretical injection volume). When the injection molding machine forms products, the clamping force must be greater than the mold opening force generated by the mold cavity pressure; otherwise, flash will occur on the mold parting surface.
3) Injection Molding Process
Since the advent of scientific injection molding, it has gained great fame in the injection molding industry. For technicians on the production site, it is questionable how much revolutionary technological change scientific injection molding can bring, but it must be said that it has a significant impact on the degree of refined production improvement on the production site. Anyone who uses scientific injection molding will deeply understand this.
Compared to complex technical lectures, “scientific injection molding” can be simply divided into six steps:
Gate freeze-off test
Flow balance test
Viscosity test
Water flow test
Optimal cooling time test
Mold dry cycle test
The above six sections can simply summarize this latest technology. Of course, many foreign companies have now begun to adjust products through mold cavity analysis technology by embedding sensing equipment in the mold cavity.
4) Quality Control
It is difficult for non-professional quality management personnel to deeply understand quality work. Cooperation with quality control is by no means blind obedience, nor is it simply holding materials and waiting for judgment. The most direct way for production to cooperate is “Top Three Defects Management.”
Use scheduled or unscheduled inspections as a means of supervising production daily reports. The on-duty personnel should sort out the defect rate of each product during the production process. The internal technical team of the workshop should conduct statistics and reviews on the top three defects of the product, and continuously improve the defective phenomena. This improvement should never stop.
In many factories, no matter how much importance the quality department is given by senior management, there are various contradictions with production. The reason is that any cooperation matters that exceed the scope of work of this department, if senior leaders always stay out of the way and treat them in a way that only cares about the results and not the process, it is certain that quality will fall into complete stagnation.
In fact, many things in the production process can be prevented in advance:
- When a certain abnormality occurs continuously in the initial stage of the product, if the improvement method has not formed a history, the history report will be the first basis for improvement when the same abnormality occurs in the production process. This history will be an important reference for production review.
- Establish a mold history file, evaluate all possible abnormalities, and make basic wearing parts. There are similar requirements in the system, and many abnormalities that occur in production can be resolved in corresponding preventive measures.
- The focus of the production engineer’s responsibilities is on prevention and improvement, rather than simple on-site technical assistance. When an abnormality occurs, the engineer should try to make two countermeasures, emergency measures and long-term improvement measures, and follow up on the results.
Any issue that appears to be a technical problem on the surface can be resolved through management coordination in the final review. Similarly, many matters that everyone believes fall within the scope of management can be handled through some hidden technical methods.
In fact, every company has a group of strong individuals who are familiar with production management methods and process technology. Their experience is enough to support a vast area. It is hoped that enterprises can rationally utilize their skills to make our factories stronger and larger, no longer just processing plants, but technology-based companies that can independently complete design and development and independent engineering.
Post time: Jul-02-2025