Wang Yiming: R&D is the starting point of reliability. Reliability is the foundation of photovoltaic inverters.

At the age of 22, he started a company in his university dormitory and did research and development work for British government projects;

At the age of 24, he returned to China to start a business, becoming one of the first overseas students to start a business in his hometown;

At the age of 28, he was selected into Zhejiang Province's "Hundred Talents Program" to introduce overseas senior talents and was specially appointed as an expert by the Zhejiang Provincial Government;

At the age of 29, he was included in the list of the National Thousand Talents Plan and was hired as a special expert of the State Council, becoming one of the youngest "national-level" talents introduced;

At the age of 34, he has been in business for 12 years. His products have successfully become mainstream brands in the mature markets of Europe and the United States. He also serves as a member of the IEC61400-2 Standard Formulation Committee of the World Wind Energy Organization, a part-time professor of Shanghai Electric Power College, and a specially appointed doctoral supervisor of the Ningbo Institute of Materials, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

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Wang Yiming, a young man from Ningbo born in the 1980s, started from scratch and created such a rich experience and achievements.

Although he is only 34 years old, he is already an "old man" in the photovoltaic inverter industry. Not only is he familiar with the changes in the industry, but the Ningbo Jinlong New Energy Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Jinlong Technology") he founded has successfully entered the international mainstream market and become one of the few Chinese new energy manufacturing companies with global market competitiveness relying on comprehensive quality rather than price advantages.

In the "Made in China 2025" recently issued by the State Council, the first ten-year action plan for implementing the strategy of building a manufacturing power, manufacturing is established as the foundation of China's country, the tool for its prosperity and the basis for its strength.

Therefore, Wang Yiming's achievements in the field of new energy manufacturing are even more eye-catching. In the view of this expert entrepreneur born in the 1980s, product reliability should be the most basic proposition in the upgrading of China's manufacturing industry.

Reliability is the foundation of all products

In early 2015, an article by the well-known financial writer Wu Xiaobo, titled "Going to Japan to Buy a Toilet Seat," sparked heated debate in the domestic public opinion about the quality of Chinese-made products.

This reminded Wang Yiming of his experience when he went abroad to participate in exhibitions.

"At that time, many foreigners were curious when they saw the inverters made in China. We had to describe a long paragraph to explain the origin of the product. For example, the team was from the UK, the R&D was done in the UK, but the production was in China, and so on. We were not confident enough and didn't even know how to explain it. It was like we had done something wrong and couldn't get over it."

This inexplicable sense of guilt made Wang Yiming spend a lot of time studying the gap between Chinese manufacturing and German and Japanese manufacturing. He gradually realized that the biggest shortcoming of Chinese manufacturing is reliability.

So, he learned from everywhere and drew on the management experience of advanced international manufacturing companies. He then transformed the overall management system in his own company, and thus began a pursuit of almost extreme product reliability.

Time flies, and in a blink of an eye, it has been ten years since Wang Yiming returned to China to start his own business. Although Wang Yiming is still young and dynamic, and sometimes a little childish, he has grown into an entrepreneur with rich management experience.

His company, Jinlong Technology, has also achieved a series of remarkable results.

For example, the world's first 10kW wind turbine that has passed the world's wind power IEC standard, the US AWEA and the UK MCS test; the world's first wind grid-connected inverter with 40 programmable power curve points; the first grid-connected inverter that realizes the switching of various countries' grid-connected standard parameters and wind power and solar energy application software; the earliest grid-connected inverter in China that has passed the certification of the United States, the European Union, Australia and the United Kingdom...

Behind these many "firsts", there is a common annotation: Jinlong Manufacturing.

Today, Ginlong Technology's photovoltaic inverters have been sold to more than 60 countries and regions around the world. Not only has its export volume ranked among the top three domestic companies for years, it has also become one of the mainstream brands in the mature markets of Europe and the United States. Some of its products are even leaders in the global market.

Especially in the UK, where Wang Yiming once studied and started a business, Jinlong Technology has been shining brightly. It is not only the largest Chinese photovoltaic inverter supplier in the local area, but also one of the largest suppliers of global photovoltaic inverter companies in the local area.

A piece of news in March 2015, "French Eiffel Tower installs a 'Chinese heart'", made Wang Yiming and Jinlong Technology, who have always been little known in the domestic market, the focus of public opinion.

It turns out that a wind power generation system has been recently installed on the Eiffel Tower, a landmark building in France, and the entire electronic control part (controller and grid inverter) is manufactured by Jinlong Technology.

Wang Yiming believes that this is the inevitable result of Jinlong Technology's insistence on pursuing reliability. "From our experience of successfully entering the overseas mainstream market, the most fundamental selling point of any product is reliability, and this is especially true for power electronics products."

Reliability is a systemic thinking

No one's success is smooth sailing, and Wang Yiming is no exception.

He told the reporter without reservation that Jinlang actually had many lessons to learn in terms of reliability.

When the company was first established, the products we produced always failed the tests, or there were huge differences among the same batch of products, some were good, some were not. We couldn’t figure out where the problem was, and ended up spending a lot of time on product R&D, design and optimization.

"Those of us who came back together to start the business may have been great in academic research, but in terms of production management, we were not even as good as elementary school students, so we took many detours." Later, Jinlong Technology solved this problem by introducing the production management team of the country's top OEM company.

It was also during this process that Wang Yiming realized that in order to achieve the reliability of the final product, it is necessary to think about solutions around the entire life cycle of the product.

As a result, he proposed a reliability project within the company and made it a top priority for the entire company.

This reliability project, which draws on the strengths of many industries, is far more than just product quality management. It includes reliability construction in all aspects from product research and development to supply chain, production, warehousing, logistics, sales, marketing, after-sales service, etc. It is a systematic project based on the overall reliability of the entire enterprise operation management.

However, this is not something that can be achieved overnight, but requires years of accumulation. Therefore, "We talk about reliability every year, every month, and every day, hoping to develop a corporate habit over the years so that this concept will be embedded in the consciousness of the entire company," said Wang Yiming.

In his opinion, some domestic inverter companies may have a tendency to ignore reliability and over-market.

For example, more and more non-inverter functions are loaded onto the inverter. "Intelligent inverters are definitely a direction. But this should be based on improving the performance and quality of the inverter itself, and be intelligent from the inside out, using the inverter as a source and main platform to develop and spread some functions outward, rather than loading some irrelevant functions onto the inverter from the outside."

Regarding the intelligent analysis and intelligent operation and maintenance of the system, Wang Yiming believes that what the inverter needs to do is to collect data more accurately and meticulously, rather than pursuing intelligent calculation and analysis of the data, because this is a matter for another professional link.

"Why don't those who make components and brackets engage in so-called intelligent operation and maintenance? Because this is irrelevant. The essence of an inverter is to achieve better conversion efficiency and power quality, so product reliability is its basic proposition. Forgetting this fundamental point is just changing the concept."

R&D is the starting point of reliability

In the reliability engineering construction based on the overall life cycle of the product, Wang Yiming believes that the R&D and design phase is the starting point of reliability. If this starting point is not done well, no matter how well you do later, you may still bring unqualified products to the market.

Therefore, he spent more time on reliability building for R&D and design, which he was already good at.

The most important task is to make full use of the resources of external software companies and management consulting companies to concretize, process and software the overall R&D and design ideas of Jinlong Technology, and embed them into the company's internal ERP automation management system.