III. Successful Case | EFX Helps Jinfei Wheels Achieve Dual Benchmark Project

IV. Jinfei Wheels Project Challenges Wheels Project

After fully understanding the customer’s requirements, EFX identified two major challenges due to the appearance material and individual weight of the wheels.

Project Challenge 1: How to prevent scratches when the forks directly contact the wheels?

Project Challenge 2: How to ensure safety during high-speed wheel transportation?

During the project planning and design, to completely solve the problems of scratches and the risk of wheels flying off, EFX conducted transport and storage experiments using Jinfei’s wheel samples on its own factory conveyor line. By simulating real scenarios and conducting extensive testing and data comparison, EFX mastered the wheel product trajectories and principles in automated warehousing, effectively resolving the issues.

V. How EFX Helped Jinfei Wheels Reduce Costs and Improve Efficiency

• Improving contact surface materials and upgrading conventional fork materials to reduce cargo damage to zero!

  Before wheel hub products are put into storage, they are forked onto the conveyor line by forks. During this process, the forks come into direct contact with the wheel hubs and may cause minor scratches. The typical weight of wheel hubs ranges from 10 to 20 kg; the heavier the hub, the more severe the scratches caused by fork contact. Once scratched, the product becomes defective and must enter a rework process involving polishing, grinding, and repainting.

  Even a small scratch requiring reprocessing can significantly affect production schedules. To address this issue, EFX replaced the conventional hard contact materials on the forks with flexible materials wrapping the contact surfaces between the forks and wheel hubs, enabling damage-free contact and naturally reducing cargo damage to zero.

  

• Increasing contact surface friction to ensure safe automated conveying and storage

  Each wheel hub weighs over ten kilograms, combined with a high conveying speed of 120 m/min, resulting in high gravitational acceleration during high-speed operation. Products may shift or shake multiple times during conveying. When conveyor lines transfer tracks, speed must be reduced to zero; the heavier the wheel hub, the greater the inertia, and there is even a risk of products being thrown off the track, further increasing cargo damage.

  After multiple simulation experiments and data analysis, EFX concluded that increasing the friction between the wheel hubs and the conveyor line, combined with precise fixed-point positioning within no more than 1 cm on all sides, can prevent positional changes during conveying and ensure safe storage and transportation.

  

VI. Project Significance

A multi-party win-win pilot project establishing a strategically significant value cooperation model.

The smart warehousing project of Jinfei Wheels is a multi-party win-win pilot project jointly created by EFX, academicians from Zhejiang Normal University, and upstream and downstream partners.

As an industry leader, Jinfei Wheels took the lead in completing a smart warehousing pilot project, with an increasingly significant benchmark-leading effect; the academician team from Zhejiang Normal University successfully completed research topics and project implementation applications; through this project, EFX established a strong reputation in the wheel hub industry and the Jinhua market, laying a solid foundation for diversified cooperation models in the future.