Learning vehicles from every side of the sale

My father drove a light truck for a county grain station outside Xiangtan, and when it broke down, which was often, he repaired it at the roadside with parts he had bartered for. I learnt early that a vehicle is judged by the person who has to keep it moving, not by the person who sold it. Almost everything I have done since has been an attempt to bring that person's view inside the factory.

I studied vehicle engineering at Nanxiang Institute of Technology and graduated in 1998. My first job was as a process engineer at Hengxiu Light Truck Works, a state-owned plant in Xiangtan that built about 18,000 trucks a year on welding fixtures older than I was. I redesigned the cab fixtures and cut weld rework by a third. In 2001 the plant was merged into a provincial group and most of its engineers were moved into administration. I preferred to stay where things were made.

At Kunwei Braking Systems in Zhuzhou, a private maker of brakes for trucks, buses and cars, I became a quality engineer and then customer quality manager. Our most demanding customer was Jiangcheng Aubrecht Automotive, a joint venture between a Wuhan state-owned carmaker and a German manufacturer. Its engineers rejected our first submission for a new caliper because our measurements could not be repeated. They were right. I rebuilt the laboratory, and the second submission passed. A year later I telephoned that same customer to report a suspect batch of brake pads before it had found them, and learnt how much courage a supplier needs to do so.

In 2006 Jiangcheng Aubrecht hired me to manage final assembly at its second Wuhan plant, then still a construction site. I launched the line in 2008 and became deputy plant manager in 2009, responsible for 3,800 people across body, paint and assembly. A German production system taught me discipline. Our workforce taught me that discipline has to be explained, because a young assembler on a fixed-term contract has no reason to trust a method nobody has shown her the purpose of. In 2011 I moved to lead supplier quality for the joint venture, with 380 suppliers and a localisation plan that raised local content from 62 to 81 per cent. That job made me fluent in the economics of a defect: who finds it, who pays for it and who knew about it first.

By 2016 I wanted to see vehicles from the operator's side. Kuanhe Express, a Hangzhou parcel carrier that moved 3.6 billion parcels a year by 2020, hired me as vice president for fleet and hub operations. I ran 64 sorting hubs and 5,200 line-haul trucks and planned the network for five November peaks, when daily volume reached 58 million parcels. I also organised the purchase of 12,000 electric vans for our franchisees. Buying vans showed me how manufacturers lose fleet customers: rarely on price, usually through late deliveries, slow repairs and batteries that faded in a northern winter.

In 2021 Tanzhou's president asked me to become chief operating officer. Tanzhou had been one of our van suppliers, so for my first year I took no part in any contract discussion with Kuanhe. The company had grown quickly, had committed to a second plant outside Chongqing and planned its whole year around the parcel carriers' autumn orders. My first two years were spent making the plants calmer: levelling the build plan, bringing battery-pack quality under closer control and moving export logistics into operations. The years since have been dominated by a price war, in which I argued that we should give up volume rather than margin, and by a recall that taught me more about suppliers than ten years of audits had.

I lead 9,800 people across two plants, procurement, quality, logistics and service, with eight direct reports. I present to Tanzhou's board on capacity, safety and quality, and report to its audit committee on recall provisions and inventory controls. I ask my managers to bring me the figure they least want to show me, and I spend part of every week on a plant floor, at a supplier or in a customer's depot, because the reports I read are always a few days behind what the people there already know.

Inside the industry I am associated with three positions that have cost us volume in the short run: that idle capacity is cheaper than an unsustainable price, that a supplier who reports a defect early should share the cost rather than bear all of it, and that a plant should not take its pace from its customers' busiest weeks. I hold them because I have been the plant, the supplier and the customer.

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