October 26, 2015
Profile | The Iron Rose of the Bearing Industry — Wang Bing: No Innovation, No Way Out
In April 2015, Wang Bing was named a National Model Worker, recognised as an outstanding representative of a new generation of innovative workers in Guangdong province. Facing the weight of that honour, Wang has said she hopes to repay it through action: to keep leading her team in the patient study of core bearing technologies, to keep pushing past the limits of precision, and to break the foreign lock on China’s access to top-tier bearing technology.
In the office of Wang Bing — a “science and technology expert” and a leading figure in China’s bearing industry — sits a group of technical professionals drawn from across the country. The easy atmosphere makes Wang and her research team look less like colleagues and more like close comrades-in-arms.
Rising to the Challenge: Steering the Company Through Transition
After graduating from Hefei University of Technology in 1982, Wang went to work at the Luoyang National Bearing Research Institute.
The institute offered excellent research conditions and advanced testing facilities. The team Wang worked on developed a control momentum wheel that flew aboard the second Fengyun-1 satellite; when the onboard computer suffered a soft failure, the wheel played a critical role in recovering the out-of-control satellite. The work won a first prize for scientific and technological progress from the former Ministry of Machinery and Electronics Industry.
In 1990, responding to the urgent needs of local industrial development, Wang and her husband moved south together, both transferring to the Zhongshan Bearing General Factory.
“From a heavy-industry region to a small city in the south, from a research institute straight into a factory floor — the drop felt enormous.”
—— Wang Bing
Her first impression of Zhongshan, she says, was simply how “small” it was. The then fast-growing city bearing general factory made mostly ordinary bearings for domestic agricultural machinery, electric fans and tractors, and its technology badly needed upgrading.
In 1999 the Zhongshan Bearing General Factory was restructured, and TCB Bearing Manufacturing Co., Ltd. (also known as Yingke, or TCB) was born.
In the early days of the restructuring, with employees lost and onlookers doubting, watching and waiting — some predicting the company would “last six months at best” — Wang, then head of the technology department, refused to give up. She led her technicians in breaking with traditional design concepts and management models, introducing group technology into the development system. Before long, the original 10-plus commodity bearings supplied for fans and farm equipment had been replaced by more than 100 types of high-value-added, integrated and multi-functional new bearing assemblies, while product precision improved by one to two grades.
The right products found their way into European and American markets, with first-year orders exceeding US$2 million. That brought the company hope — and opened a new path for solving the long-standing industry problem of developing and producing bearings in small batches with wide variety.
Mastering Core Technology, Winning Orders
Under Wang’s leadership, the TCB technology team has pursued research for 20 years, filling multiple gaps in domestic and international technology. Their designs — mechanically simple, reliable in operation, easy to maintain and more economical — quickly won customer recognition and were successfully matched to high-end machinery and CNC machine tools.
On that basis TCB became an OEM supplier to globally known machinery makers including Switzerland’s Schindler and Germany’s thyssenkrupp, as well as a designated supplier for key domestic CNC equipment; cumulative sales of new products have exceeded 200 million yuan.
“Watching our products grow ever more refined, our customer base ever more high-end and our team ever stronger, I feel truly gratified.”
—— Wang Bing
According to Wang, today’s TCB already has the capability to produce the world’s most advanced bearing products, which has impressed many in the industry.
Under Wang’s leadership and efforts, TCB’s technology team has contributed 20 person-times to the drafting of 10 national standards, with more than 100 person-times granted national patents. Several technical backbones have been elected to professional committees of the Technical Committee of the China Bearing Industry Association, becoming a backbone force in the company’s development and in the industry’s technological progress. In the past two years, two TCB engineers have been promoted to professor-level senior engineer and two to senior engineer.
Wang has been named both a “cold-working technology expert” and a “science and technology expert” of the China Bearing Industry Association, and serves on its Technical Committee. She has mastered the industry’s core technologies; some overseas customers take it upon themselves to recommend her to others: “If you want to buy good bearings in China, go to Wang Bing.”
Innovation as a Habit
“No matter what the external environment is like, without innovation there is no way out.”
—— Wang Bing
Rather than passively riding the wave of Zhongshan’s vigorous push for transformation and upgrading, Wang’s team has actively “pressed the accelerator”, continuously upgrading products and reforming technology. “Now, if we go a while without launching a new product or process, employees come and ask why there is nothing new lately. People genuinely love this industry. They treat it as a career, not just a way to put food on the table.”
It is precisely this commitment to technological innovation that has given TCB its position in the industry today. “During the financial crisis the domestic bearing industry was in poor shape, with performance sliding year after year — 2012 in particular saw an industry-wide decline. But we were one of only three to five companies in the whole country still growing,” Wang says.
“Many overseas companies come to inspect our operations. They have full confidence in our technology; what they worry about is whether our output can keep up with their demand. These days we can afford to pick and choose our orders — we do not take just any order.” She is eager for a new site in the Torch High-tech Industrial Development Zone to give the company room to grow, and hopes for continued government support.
“Guangdong is now promoting an innovation-driven development strategy and attaching great importance to scientific and technological innovation. I can feel that spring has come for our company and for the industry.”
—— Wang Bing
Source: Nanfang Daily, originally published 26 October 2015; translated and adapted by TCB