Automobile automatic transmission maintenance is a very professional branch of the automobile maintenance industry, and the maintenance of its core part, the valve body, is even more specialized among professionals. More than ten years ago, when VBX first started its valve body remanufacturing business, many people were not optimistic about its business prospects. However, more than ten years later, VBX's products are of excellent quality and its business is booming. What special way does it have to survive? ?
On a bright spring day in April 2010, the author had the honor to visit VBX, a professional remanufacturing plant for automatic transmission valve bodies located in New Jersey, USA. This is really a rare opportunity, because VBX's valve body remanufacturing plant is generally not open to the public, but this time VBX serves as the host of the annual meeting of the American TASC FORCE Association, and all participating members have the opportunity to communicate face-to-face with VBX experts and managers. Technical experience. The TASC FORCE association is composed of some experts in the automatic transmission repair industry and some technicians from the American SONNAX company. Its members are mainly distributed in the United States, Canada and Europe. In the past years, the experts of TASC FORCE have solved many problems that have troubled the entire industry. technical problems in the industry.
When it comes to car automatic transmission repair, everyone knows that it is a very professional branch of the car maintenance industry. Since it requires high professional knowledge, automatic transmission repairs are generally performed by professional repair shops. to perform repairs. The core part of the hydraulic control in the automatic transmission is the valve body, and the maintenance of the valve body is even more professional. Due to the lack of relevant technical information and maintenance experience, ordinary specialized repair shops usually replaced the valve body with a brand new original valve body. Assembly, or use the original old valve body directly.
With the fierce competition in the industry. Maintenance profits are decreasing year by year, the price of new valve bodies is too expensive, and the quality of old valve bodies is unstable. Therefore, repair shops generally hope for a remanufactured valve body assembly with guaranteed quality and relatively cheap price. This is The market foundation for the emergence and development of professional remanufacturing plants such as VBX. But when VBX first started its valve body remanufacturing business, many people were not optimistic about its business prospects because it had to ensure quality, control costs, and deal with customer pickiness. The specific operation was not easy. Many users of valve bodies are repair shops who don't know much about valve bodies. Generally, they encounter problems that cannot be solved. Even if the problem is not actually the valve body, customers will often blame the problem on the valve body, which makes this professional Remanufacturing operations are difficult to operate. But more than ten years have passed, VBX's products are of excellent quality and its business is booming. There must be a reason for VBX's success. How do they control costs while ensuring quality? There must be a lot that can be learned from domestic peers.
During the visit, the author discovered several special features of VBX, which were completely different from the original imagination.
1. Think about the meaning behind the data
First of all, all the equipment used by VBX is very common, from cleaning machines to From solenoid valve testers to valve body testers, there are not a few specialized workshops in China with these special equipment, and some newly developed testers in China are more advanced in function than VBX! But I met many people in China Everyone told me that this kind of tester is often inaccurate and not very useful. It is just for show in the workshop. It seems that in the maintenance industry, whether the equipment is expensive or not and whether the functions are up-to-date are not the main issues.
The author asked this question to Robert, who is responsible for testing at VBX, and he told: These ZOOM company’s test equipment are indeed very common and can be purchased on the market, but the difference is that I spent a lot of time Let’s study the real meaning behind the test data on these instruments. The test process can be automated through SMRT-SWITCH, but how to parse the test data depends on humans. For example, for a certain familiar valve body, I can know whether the valve body is normal just by looking at the data changes on the instruments. This can only be done with your mind.
?Indeed, one difference between the maintenance market and the original parts market is that the maintenance market relies more on the level of maintenance personnel. To achieve the level of automation of the original parts production plant requires a large investment in equipment, and this is not the case in the maintenance market. Unrealistic. Therefore, in maintenance shops, the professional level of personnel is the primary factor in reducing costs and ensuring quality.
2. Deep understanding of technology
Secondly, VBX only uses professional testing equipment as the final means of valve body testing. The means used by front-line technicians to ensure quality mainly rely on vacuum testing and other simple and practical methods that do not require a large amount of equipment investment for wear detection. They also work closely with the professional company SONNAX, which develops high-quality professional valve body repair solutions to ensure Its valve body maintenance can provide a long enough shelf life. In addition, VBX has in-depth research on the inspection, refurbishment and remanufacturing of solenoid valves, which can save a lot of update costs on this important part of solenoid valves.
These factors are still very different from the domestic situation. In recent years, we have also tried to introduce and promote this simple and practical vacuum testing method to domestic gearbox maintenance personnel. However, since this method still relies heavily on the operating level of the operator, it cannot be very effective. not much. The professional repair parts of the valve body use fewer parts. They mainly clean or replace the valve body and replace the solenoid valve with a new one. The cost is relatively high but the reliability and durability of the quality are low. Jeff, the technical director of VBX, revealed the method they use for vacuum testing, which is dedicated to dedicated personnel. They have 3 vacuum testers. It is difficult to obtain exactly the same measurement values ??of the data, but this does not affect their use because each device is used by a specific person. Even if the data is different and the judgment standards are different, in the end The conclusions drawn are consistent. Jeff also explained and operated the vacuum testing method of the valve body and related operating details to all visitors on the spot. The author can't help but feel what true professionalism is - it does not lie in any external equipment or factory buildings, but in the understanding of technology. This profound understanding is reflected through various details. Talking about "paying attention to details" is useless without a deep understanding of technology.
3. Execution of standard processes
The author found a beautiful scenery in the VBX factory - the main valve body in the workshop The maintenance technicians are all female workers in their twenties and thirties, which is unprecedented in the domestic automobile maintenance industry, because it is generally difficult to associate this kind of maintenance technical work with women who know little about cars. But these female technicians did a great job, which makes people admire the management ideas here. General manager TIM told the author: Although they know little about cars and gearboxes, they work seriously, pay attention to details, and completely follow the set process flow, so as to minimize human operating errors. ?In this regard, VBX also has the same experience as domestic repair shops. In the past, VBX also hired male technicians with experience in gearbox repair, but in actual operations, they often relied on their previous experience to perform operations, or had their own A simpler and less labor-intensive way without fully complying with pre-set standard specifications. While their own approach is not unreasonable, it can easily introduce additional human factors that increase the variability in quality control.
Once the standard process (SOP) is formed, it must be operated according to it. Even if there is room for improvement in the SOP itself, this will make it easier to find the source of the problem. I think it is still difficult to achieve this in China. First of all, because China is currently a repair shop rather than a remanufacturing workshop, there is not enough maintenance volume to support this standard model. Secondly, there is still a lack of experts in the country to rationally set SOPs. Most of them, from managers to ordinary maintenance workers, are not very professional, and their understanding and operation of details are still at a relatively early stage. It’s almost enough. This is what we encounter most often. The key to the general mentality is that we do not have a deep understanding of professional knowledge.
4. What is happening during the operation?
During the visit, VBX also showed the visitors on-site The valve body was reamed and repaired. They use the same SONNAX reamers as domestic users, but some people in China complained that their reamers became dull after being used more than a dozen times, so they attributed the problem to the poor reamers. VBX reaming operators told us that the SONNAX reamers they use can be used hundreds or even thousands of times without replacement. Although a reamer is not cheap, the actual cost of use is very low. This surprised the author. Is there any secret in VBX?
After observation, inquiry, and experiments in the laboratory, the author found that there are two details that require special attention: First, the positioning of the reamer. Even if an electric automatic reaming device is used, the positioning of the reamer must still be completed on the valve body fixture VB-FIX, and this inevitably depends on the operator's experience and care. If the operation is sloppy, the reamer may deviate from the central axis of the hole, and the reamer may get stuck easily. If the machine is used to rotate hard, the life of the reamer will be seriously reduced; secondly, the valve body is made of aluminum alloy, which is very soft compared with the reamer. Generally, when we feel that the reamer is dull, it does not mean that the reamer is really dull, but The aluminum chips are partially overheated and melted, and stick to the blade, causing the blade to lose its cutting function. So VBX came up with a wonderful and simple method, which is to continuously blow the cutting area with a gun during the cutting process so that the chips do not accumulate on the cutter head. At the same time, the amount of cutting is controlled as small as possible, so that the hinge can be greatly extended. The service life of the knife is greatly reduced, and the processing cost is greatly reduced. This is really amazing. Just such a small detail can have such a disparate result. This reaming operation is similar to "Pao Ding Jie Niu"! I really hope there are more like this in the domestic industry. ?Pao Ding? Ah!
5. Professional cooperation, each doing his or her best
During the visit, almost all the visitors Everyone has similar problems: For professional valve body remanufacturing plants like VBX, they do not have customers’ vehicles for debugging. Some customers often attribute problems other than the valve body to the maintenance quality of the valve body. Everyone in the gearbox repair industry knows that this often happens, so how does VBX deal with this difficult problem?
VBX’s answer is their upstream and downstream partners To carry out division of labor cooperation, the upstream mainly relies on SONNAX Company to develop and provide various repair tools and parts for the valve body to ensure the remanufacturing quality of the valve body. Although the cost of parts is high due to the small production batch and sophisticated design and manufacturing process. However, there is a good guarantee for the maintenance quality of the valve body. Without quality guarantee, there is no need to save costs; the downstream mainly relies on cooperation with individual large parts dealers rather than directly dealing with individual users, which means ordinary repairs The factory cannot buy its remanufactured valve body directly from VBX. The biggest advantage of doing this is to avoid the cost of negotiation with individual customers, and transfer this cost to the dealer, and at the same time provide the dealer with the most favorable price. Since dealers are good at dealing with users, this forms their own An industrial chain that leverages its own strengths. Even if the dealer has requirements for returns and replacements, since they only deal with a limited number of dealers and the quality of their own valve bodies is indeed excellent, the cost in this regard is not very high. Sometimes even the problem is something other than the valve body and the dealer insists on replacing it. VBX will also be replaced accordingly. This kind of division of labor and cooperation in the industrial chain that leverages their respective strengths is the inevitable result of socialized production, which is very different from the large and comprehensive business ideas common in China. The more professional you are, the more cooperation you need. This must be the general trend in the future.
When the visit was over, I felt that there was no mystery about VBX’s operations anymore. Everything seemed so normal, but they were indeed doing an outstanding job that no one had done more than ten years ago. This way of survival is what many of our colleagues in the auto repair industry need to learn.