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.

III. Successful Case | Smart Warehousing Strengthens Automotive Parts Supply Chains

IV. Wheels Project

Challenge 1: Two-floor inbound and outbound operations make duplicated equipment too costly

The first and second floors each have independent warehouse operating areas. Under a conventional design, each floor would require its own equipment, significantly increasing capital cost, maintenance workload, and floor-space requirements - making the solution neither economical nor practical.

Challenge 2: Highly irregular load shapes are difficult for standard equipment to handle

Stored items include finished goods, semi-finished goods, and bar stock up to 3,500 mm long. Their wide variation in shape and size makes it difficult for standard stacker-crane forks to handle all non-standard loads safely and reliably.

Challenge 3: Mixed storage of multiple load types makes intelligent scheduling and accurate control more complex

The system must manage finished goods, semi-finished goods, and bar stock with substantially different pallet sizes (1,500 x 1,500 mm, 1,000 x 1,200 mm, and 3,500 x 500 mm), load limits (1,500 kg and 700 kg), and storage heights. Poor slotting can leave upper locations unused, increase equipment reversals, and create retrieval-route conflicts, significantly reducing overall throughput.

V. Solution

• Steel Platform Connects Both Floors with One Integrated System

  By installing a steel platform between the two warehouse levels, the design creates a direct operating connection between floors, allowing a single stacker crane to serve inbound and outbound operations on both levels. This avoids duplicate equipment, controls investment, and maximizes the value of available space without compromising efficiency.

  
• Custom EFX Stacker Crane Engineered for Bar Stock

  Drawing on nearly 20 years of logistics equipment R&D experience, EFX developed a dedicated stacker crane for bar stock. A customized fork structure and handling method accommodate long, slender loads that are prone to rolling, enabling safe handling and efficient coexistence of non-standard materials and standard palletized goods within one system.

  

• WMS + WCS Coordination Enables Flexible, Intelligent Slotting

  The project integrates WMS warehouse management and WCS equipment control and monitoring. The system automatically assigns locations using strategies such as heavier loads at lower levels, flexible zoning by category, and FIFO outbound rules. During put-away, identical SKUs are distributed across locations to balance access and improve throughput; during retrieval, earlier-received inventory is prioritized. The WMS also provides standard interfaces to MES/ERP, keeping warehouse data and production plans synchronized in real time.

  

VI. Project Results

Designed to meet the stringent requirements of the NEV supply chain, the project upgrades warehouse capabilities through automation and digitalization. Its value is reflected in three areas:

Operational: High-density AS/RS design maximizes vertical space and raises storage capacity to more than 3.5 times that of a conventional warehouse. Stacker cranes combined with intelligent scheduling improve inbound and outbound efficiency, while WMS/WCS integration provides real-time inventory visibility and full traceability. Delivery accuracy reaches 99.9%.

Financial: Automation significantly reduces reliance on manual labor, lowering labor costs by an estimated 40%-50%. It also prevents handling-related product damage and keeps physical inventory aligned with system records. The investment is expected to pay back within several years of operation.

Strategic: The project is a key step toward becoming a provincial-level smart factory. Deep integration between WMS and MES/ERP connects warehouse and production information flows end to end, providing robust logistics support for future capacity expansion and customer fulfillment.