May 20, Friday

We started off the day bright and early at 7 in the morning by taking a 4 hour bus ride to Tian Jin.  The bus was really quiet this morning as most of us were taking a nap.  After we arrived at Tian Jin, we stopped at a John Deere engine factory.  The factory currently has 157 employees working there. The Tian Jin factory currently has the capacity to produce 50,000 engines annually but is only producing 10,000 annually due to demand and emissions regulations. The factory is broken up into seven different sections.  The first section is the materials warehouse.  This is where all the engine parts are stored before the engine assembly.  The next section is material staging.  This is where all the parts a gathered before they are assembled.  After material staging is the assembly section.  This section is in charge of assembling the engines.  The next section in the factory is testing cells.  Here the engines are tested to make sure they are functioning properly.  After the test cells section, the engines go to the paint and final trim section.  This is where the engines are painted.  After painting they go to the shipping section to be shipped off.  The last section of the factory is the axel section.  Here they assemble axels.  The factory currently produce 40 engines and 2 axels each day.  It was interesting to see how John Deere incorporates AGV's (automated guidance vehicles) to move the engines throughout the factory as they are being built.   

Our next stop in Tian Jin was at the Artex Barn Solutions factory.  The factory can process 20,000 tons of steel materials annually. Fifty parent of Artex finished products get exported to countries around the world.  The other 50 percent is sold within China. Three hundred containers of finished product are sold to over 40 countries throughout the world.  Some of the products Artex produces are free stall gates, head gates, calf zones, and barn fans.  This past year Artex has started to incorporate robotic welders into their manufacturing process.  These robotic welders help to save labor costs and to improve the consistency of each weld.  The factory that we visited did not do any of the galvanization process in-house.  This is due to the difficulties of getting permits to perform the galvanization process.  It was very interesting to see how they transform raw materials into the finished products.   

This evening we met with a group of ag students from Iowa State University for supper. We split off into groups of about half and half SDSU and Iowa State students and talked about what they had seen so far on their China trip. We were all able to try some Chinese hard alcohol called Baijo while we had dinner. This concluded our twelfth day in China.