China manufacturing displays great power across the world. EP Equipment as one of Chinese lead pioneer companies in the material handling industry, committed to developing and updating factory construction and capacity. Today we are pleased to take an interview with the head of EP factory Mr.Paul. Let’s find the secret how EP developed our manufacturing to improve our production.
Brief introduction
EP factory has three bases in Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Hubei province in China so far. The total production base land area now is about 776,000 m2. Our overall production capacity is currently 270,000 units. Including 25,000 units for Class I & Class VI trucks, 45,000 units for Class II trucks, 200,000 units for Class III.
Every EP forklift truck is mainly completed manufacturing by 8 processes, material, welding, painting, assembly, commissioning, inspection, packaging and delivery. 3000 pieces equipment on the assembly line including welding lines, handling lines, forklift lines, new spraying lines, laser lowering lines on the process production line continuous working for it. These years, EP are increasing new type of spraying lines, with the advantage of environmental friendly, surface spraying high quality and also reduce costs, which is very advanced in China nowadays.
EP Factory functional distribution
EP Zhejiang is divided into the South factory and North factory, of which the South factory is mainly producing part sets, such as drives, lithium batteries, structural parts of the set, as well as the production of Class III, Class II and Class I trucks.
The North factory is still under construction, and its current function is only to do mainly Class III trucks, as well as some structural parts. In addition to the North and South factory, EP Zhejiang has a plate welding Centre specializing in the production of structural parts, which has also just been improved this year. EP Hubei is still under construction and will focus on Class I and Class V trucks in the future.
EP Jiangsu is divided into two factories, the East factory and the West factory, of which the East factory is responsible for the painting and assembly of Class I and Class V trucks. The West factory mainly focuses on sheet metal welding and painting. EP Fuyang mainly focuses on structural parts and gantries for forklifts, stackers. Our domestic production base covers these four major production factories.
Digital intelligent automatic factory
There are a total of 45 sets of robots in use in EP factory, including transport systems and shifters in the assembly lines. Digital Intelligence Production Line is invested with the core concept of Digital Intelligence Brain & five handling modes with automatic robots to realize the digital transformation and intelligent enhancement for whole-process supply chain and manufacturing chain. The process is subdivided into scenes, including supplier delivery, supplier receiving, material storage, material inventory, production line side pull, product storage and out of storage. It is connected with information technology. Working EP robots including: handling robots, stacking robots, jacking robots, picking robots, etc.
EP creates cargo-driven digital modelling to build a digital twin platform for IoT visualization, a smart brain system to complete the connection to the production, supply and demand sides, as well as achieving digital intelligence management for the production process.
The Digital Intelligence Brain can be connected to conventional factory management systems such as ERP.MES.SRM through the Digital Intelligence Platform. The robots with visual navigation modules, can realize the close collaboration and joint operation of multiple trucks. The complex logistics tasks across scenes and regions, will realize the efficient operation of logistics in the field, and it can reach the transformation the modern intelligent mobile factory.
Our Strength
Our company is an innovative company, our strength is in the design. We will regard the materialization, generalization, and modularization for each product at the
beginning of the design process. The first one is the core parts; we must develop and produce independently. The second one is our important parts; our factory has the advantage of our own design, according to our require
ments and foundry processing. This gives full play to our capacity for independent innovation and also makes full use of the production advantages of our suppliers.
Thirdly; our products are designed to be generalized and standardized, which greatly increases the number of batches of an overall product from the supplier, with our investment in molds, we will greatly reduce the cost. This is the advantage of our overall design and development.
The future
In the future, as our factory expands into a larger production scale and pursues a more complete industrial chain, the focus will be on progressively improving towards digital intelligence and mechanized production. We will improve production efficiency, ensure product quality, improve environmental requirements, ensure safe production and allow our employees to work in a better environment. At the same time, through the perfect MES system of production control, we will be able to achieve faster conversion of sales orders and production orders, control all production processes, speed up delivery and better serve the market.
