During the Qingli period of the Northern Song Dynasty, a craftsman carving Chinese characters from Yingshan County, Hubei Province, created movable characters with baked clay and did layout and printing, which unintentionally promoted the progress of the world civilization. The craftsman is named Bi Sheng. He invented movable type technology, one of the Four Great Inventions of Ancient China. Movable type technology is a technology which applied the modularization idea in practice earliest. 

Nowadays, the modularization idea has been applied in various industries. Automobile manufacturing modularization is the most popular and the most typical representative. And Volkswagen Group does best. MQB is its newest modular transverse matrix. It can realize standardization of a large number of auto components and parts and make them realize sharing in different brands of and different levels of models. Application of this technology will greatly reduce model development expense, period and manufacturing cost. 

XCMG is also a pioneer applying the modularization idea in the engineering machinery industry. 

Modularization:

On March 19, 2014, the lattice boom wheel crane XCL800 of XCMG won the TOP50 Goldfinger Award which is known as industrial “Oscar”. XCL800 is a typical representative of the complete vehicle modularization idea of XCMG. The machine combines all terrain crane chassis and crawler crane boom, is currently a lattice boom wheel crane with the strongest lifting capacity globally, and has filled the gap in the field in China. 

Lattice Boom Wheel Crane XCL800 (Combining All Terrain Crane and Crawler Crane)

Application of complete vehicle modularization in the engineering machinery industry is mature. But application of components and parts modularization has a large space for development. At the next step, XCMG will be committed to establishing product module platforms at the components and parts level and establishing a general module library for components and parts to improve product compatibility and reliability and to lower users’ costs.

Mature application of modularization will greatly promote the progress of product customization. 

Customization:

In the future, only enterprises adopting customer-oriented policy will survive. In the crane industry, market competition is intense, products homogenization is serious and it is hard to meet customers’ personalized needs. So enterprises must accelerate product customization. 

In recent years, XCMG has made remarkable achievements in customization. By communicating in depth with customers and fully understanding customers’ needs on such aspects as construction condition, operation environment and usage habits, XCMG has successfully launched three heavyweight products- XGC88000 crane, QAY1200 crane for wind and power uses and XCD300 tractor mounted crane which were well-received by customers. After launch, XGC88000 was reputed as “World’s No. 1 Crane”, represented the highest technology among crawler cranes and won the TOP50 Goldfinger Award, and was selected as the representative of the engineering machinery industry into a CCTV documentary Chinese Machines. 

XGC88000 (4000t Crawler Crane)

QAY1200 (for Wind and Power Uses)

XCD300 Tractor Mounted Crane 

At present, customization of construction machinery products mainly means R&D of large equipment with high technology content. Individualized customization for ordinary customers has big difficulty and needs high cost. Promotion of components and parts modularization makes large-scale individualized customization possible. Perhaps someday in the future, on XCMG’s e-commerce platform, customers can use computer or mobile terminal to realize configuration, model selection, ordering and purchasing with one key and get the customized products within a short period of time. 

(The Part 6 ends. The next part of “To Solve Pain Points, See the Seven Highlights of XCMG Leading Technological Innovation Development of the Crane Industry” is coming soon.)