Innovation Plus Strict Quality Control: Jiangyin Lida Flexible Packaging Machinery Keeps Winning Customers in China and Overseas

Technology Builds the Product, Quality Builds the Market

Jiangyin Lida's Flexible Packaging Equipment Keeps Winning Over Customers

Sustained fallout from the economic crisis has left China's printing and packaging machinery manufacturing sector badly battered. Add rising raw material prices and higher labor costs, and the printing and packaging equipment market has slid into a slump in which enquiries are plentiful but orders are scarce. Rather than retreat, Jiangyin Lida Printing & Packaging Machinery Co., Ltd. (hereafter Lida) has held firmly to independent innovation, building premium machines on technology and opening markets on quality. The outcome is tangible: technical content and build quality have both moved up sharply, market share has expanded steadily, and more and more buyers are coming to the company on the strength of its name. The evidence is clear—Lida's technology-and-quality strategy is carrying it down an ever-wider road.

Founded in the 1990s, Lida is based in Jiangyin, a city in the heart of the Yangtze River Delta and one of China's most economically vibrant areas. The Yangtze River lies to its north, Lake Tai to its south, the international metropolis of Shanghai to its east and Nanjing, the provincial capital and ancient capital of six dynasties, to its west. The Gushan exit of the Yanjiang Expressway is just 3 km away, giving the site smooth connections by water, road and air. Lida specializes in the R&D, design, production and sale of flexible packaging machinery. Its plant occupies more than 12,000 square meters, including over 8,000 square meters of modern production workshops, together with staff dormitories, a canteen and cultural and recreation facilities, and it is powered by a highly qualified team that is technically strong, experienced and relentlessly focused on improvement. The product line covers mid- and high-end gravure printing presses along with laminators, coating machines, slitting machines, inspection rewinders and other flexible packaging equipment. Since its founding, Lida has built its corporate culture on teamwork, integrity, quality and a pioneering spirit, adopted "progress through technology, growth through innovation" as its technical creed, and made quality first, customer first, continuous improvement and 100% customer satisfaction its operating principle. Through in-house R&D, engineering innovation and technical upgrading, it has rolled out complete mid- and high-end flexible packaging lines. Competitive pricing and attentive after-sales support have carried its machines to more than 20 provinces and municipalities across China—Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Guangdong, Anhui, Shandong, Liaoning, Jinan, Shenyang, Nanjing and Qingdao among them—as well as export markets in Southeast Asia such as Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, and destinations including Colombia, Spain and South Africa. The company has earned titles including "Contract-honoring and Credit-worthy Unit", "Demonstration Unit for Quality and Credit Dual Guarantee", "Top Ten Unit for Technological Innovation" and "Outstanding Private Sci-Tech Enterprise of Jiangsu Province".

So how does Lida keep refining its products and enlarging its market amid such fierce competition? General Manager Liu Li gives a straightforward answer: "Our guiding idea has always been that we need not be the biggest, but we must be strong and built to last, with products made excellent and refined—we must never end up like some private firms that survive only three to five years. That is why Lida has stuck with technological innovation, gripped quality management tightly and never treated after-sales service casually, which is how the company keeps growing. As a manufacturer we focus on the two ends: technical R&D and innovation before the sale, and equipment installation and maintenance after it—including for machines shipped abroad, where service backup has to be in place before the equipment leaves. We compress the middle, the production links, as much as possible, and all parts and components are outsourced. This supports our three-guarantee management and also brings product costs down. Every component must pass inspection by our inspection department and be 100% qualified before it can be used. If a company insists on doing both assembly and machining, handling everything itself, it simply cannot juggle it all. Outsourcing frees up time and manpower so we can concentrate on product development and after-sales service." That serious, disciplined attitude inevitably produces quality hardware. Lida's dry laminators, for example, are built for energy saving and environmental performance, and their energy-saving oven system has been granted a national utility model patent; against comparable machines in the industry, it cuts annual energy consumption by close to 10% or more. The high-speed dry laminator is even stronger in aluminum foil lamination: in tension control, drying performance and laminating pressure alike, it is ahead of comparable domestic equipment, and it holds a decisive edge in near-zero consumable loss and in automatic splicing of aluminum foil without stopping the line. At an international printing exhibition in Beijing, one of Lida's LGF-1050M high-speed dry laminators demonstrated automatic aluminum foil splicing at a line speed of 220 m/min, earning recognition from the flexible packaging converters and printing and packaging association experts present; Shaanxi Beiren, a leading player in China's printing and packaging machinery industry, also rated the machine's all-round performance as industry-leading. Marketing staff note that the inspection rewinder Lida has developed is the most advanced in China in both structure and control method, with no domestic equivalent: it runs at up to 300 m/min, and an accompanying Japanese fully automatic image scanning unit makes the equipment even better. On price it holds a clear advantage over other brands, with a very high cost-performance ratio, simple operation and high efficiency; most of its components come from internationally known brands, which makes future maintenance far easier. The model has applied for a number of patents. Lida's independently developed gravure printing press combines high technical content with a distinctive three-dimensional appearance. It can work with domestic electronic shaft systems and also with European and American electronic shaft systems, and this flexible configuration meets the needs of buyers at every level. Its gravure press electrical box structure, tape-free winding and splicing mechanism, impression limiting device and independent drive unit for axial floating motion have each won national patents. The machine also replaces conventional, complicated operating methods with simpler, faster and more user-friendly controls, and its many utility model designs feed directly into customer benefits. In PE printing, where tension is notoriously hard to control, Lida equipment has earned a strong industry reputation for the stability and precision of its tension control—praise that is especially loud among users in the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta.

To win customer trust, build products that fully satisfy users and meet their needs with complete sincerity, Lida pairs technological innovation with sharp attention to quality management and after-sales service. Quality management comes down to one word: strict. "Quality is the lifeline of the business" is the company's long-standing creed. General Manager Liu Li regularly reminds employees that without product quality a company cannot survive, let alone grow, and that every person, every position and every department must conduct itself honestly and work diligently, focusing its hard effort on product quality. The company has therefore put in place numerous stringent quality rules, tight inspection and monitoring of product quality, serious handling of quality incidents and strict sign-off on every machine that leaves the plant. Because the word "strict" is genuinely enforced, Lida still holds a record of zero quality accidents and zero customer complaints. In after-sales service, the emphasis is on sincerity. To spare customers worries, the company promises that no integrity issue is too small and that service stays close at hand, and it works to strip out cumbersome intermediate layers that can lead to buck-passing, safeguarding both service quality and response times. Installation and commissioning, operator training, equipment maintenance and spare-part replacement are each given a firm timetable and assigned to a named individual. If a machine breaks down, a single phone call or text message is enough: no matter how far away the customer is or how big or small the fault, the company resolves it unconditionally within a very short time. Where flowers bloom, butterflies follow; where goods are good, customers arrive. Figures show that in recent years several companies, including Youbang Plastics and Wanchang Printing & Packaging, have together purchased more than 30 units of Lida printing and laminating equipment.

This article is adapted from China Packaging Network (news.pack.cn); original link: http://news.pack.cn/show-377097.html. Copyright belongs to the original author; shared here for industry exchange and learning.