At the present stage, the market competition in machine tool industry is becoming increasingly fierce, and unfair competition and even price wars occur from time to time. The author thinks that machine tool enterprises should pay attention to the market order, improve the efficiency by reducing the cost, and finally enhance their market competitiveness. This paper takes company A as an example to talk about how to do A good job in cost control of machine tool enterprises.

I. problems in the company's cost control

Machine tool co., ltd. is a professional, large-scale CNC machine tool manufacturer, in recent years through the introduction of international advanced technology and equipment, committed to providing customers with the best quality of high-precision CNC machine tools. Since its establishment, the company has been suffering from high operating costs, which can be attributed to the following four aspects.

1. Production problems

Most of the production testing equipment used by the company is imported from abroad. Some of the automation equipment is not equipped with special maintenance personnel in China. In case of problems, professional technicians need to fly to the factory from abroad for testing and adjustment. Moreover, the automation content of some equipment often fails to meet the assembly conditions under the abnormal state of the product, and more time can only rely on manual operation. It can even be said that the cost impact of the adoption of some automation equipment is not falling but rising.

2. Procurement issues

Procurement, as an important link in the production activities of enterprises, is linked with each other and causes and effects, which can be said to affect the activities of many departments. Company A has more than 80 suppliers, but few of them maintain long-term cooperation. On the one hand, they are forced to reduce the purchase price, so they have to find cheaper suppliers. On the other hand, it is also based on the consideration of the purchase cycle, and the manufacturers who can provide goods quickly are easy to be the first choice. Two years ago, the upstream data provider of A company raised prices sharply, resulting in A company having to switch to the corresponding data of second-tier domestic manufacturers. However, due to the second-line manufacturers of poor data quality, the production of products formed many problems, to the company has brought huge losses. The problem caused by the random replacement of suppliers not only affects the product, but also increases the risk and uncertainty of the enterprise and increases the cost.

3. Manpower

Every year, the company undergoes a major reshuffle in the replacement of staff, and in the off-season of orders, it USES the channels of layoffs to relieve the pressure on staff compensation. At the same time, the position of senior managers will be adjusted. Procurement personnel will be rotated every year, and the loss of senior executives in various departments is serious. Although the total turnover rate has decreased, the active turnover rate has been increasing year by year.

The hiring philosophy of the company for senior management personnel has always been that "foreign monks will recite the mantra". Compared with internal training, the company is more willing to pay a higher price to recruit senior staff from foreign and domestic companies. This employment system will first bring new explicit labor costs. At the same time, the loss of more than half of the external senior executives not only affected the organization and management decisions, but also caused great economic losses to the company due to the chaos of the management process and the loss of relevant important technologies caused by personnel turnover.

Company always according to order production planning personnel, although in the short-term view this pipe can be avoid in the human cost of consumption, but layoffs cut away the heart, employees' lack of trust and sense of belonging to the company, thereby causing the loyalty of the staff is more and more low, it will not only reduce productivity, affect the delivery time and product quality, explicit and implicit cost caused by new, more will make the enterprise reputation and image. The lack of personnel reserve in company A leads to higher and higher labor costs.

Marketing issues

In recent years, the proportion of the company's marketing expenses in the total sales revenue is increasing, accounting for more than 30% of the total financial expenses, how did this amazing number come into being?

It is understood that the company has spent a lot of money on advertising and public relations travel, but this is not enough to move the market. This is a typical "cast a wide net for a small fish" behavior, and real product marketing needs to keep pace with the development of The Times.

In addition, the whole Marketing Department has a "sales first" concept for marketers, as long as there is an order, no matter the cost; Anyone can be a salesperson as long as they get orders. This undoubtedly makes the entire Marketing Department of the orientation and war there is a huge deviation, the utilitarian psychology is serious, plus most of the sales personnel from other areas, and there is no strong product knowledge and technology as a support, the market development and mining is very limited, hard to do.

Second, the optimization proposal of cost control

For machine tool enterprises, the cost control system is complex and affects each other, in fact, it is difficult to achieve effective control of every link, so we need to focus on the most effective link of cost control, breakthrough, targeted. Can proceed from the following four respects.

1. Cost control optimization in the production process

The more modern enterprises tend to use automated production lines to reduce the dependence on human resources, which is probably the consensus of enterprise modernization, but to specific problems specific analysis, blind use of automatic assembly line is often counterproductive. Not only because of the fixed content device and can't work according to the product information for the corresponding time adjustment and not dealing with special state macro-control and unable to cope with the product, thus wasting production time, but also because some equipment takes up the whole place, largely increased the product circulation time, to improve labor productivity, can be said to be a pyrrhic victory. At the same time, the maintenance cycle of key equipment is too long, will also have a serious impact on production planning and shipment. The use of manual replacement of part of the automatic production line, in addition to directly reduce the cost of equipment purchase, but also can avoid the high depreciation of fixed assets, equipment maintenance of labor costs and waiting time.

2. Cost control optimization in human resource management

(1) cultivate employee loyalty, and let fixed assets appreciate

People are the most important participants in enterprise activities. Enterprises can be short of equipment, but they can never be short of employees. People should play the roles of employee supporter and change agent. The company should increase the training of experienced and valuable employees, cultivate their loyalty and reduce the replacement cost of employees. Company A does not have A strong corporate culture and does not know how to build A sense of belonging among employees. In fact, the workers in the production field are the real experts of the enterprise. They have a good grasp of every key point in the working process and are the first to find and improve every detail.

To this end, the human resources department should establish a mechanism to encourage the staff to put forward reasonable Suggestions and innovative ideas, regard the staff as human resources "fixed assets", strengthen the phased training of staff, not only to the enterprise reputation and public praise can play a good role, but also to the enterprise human resources cost control of the great contribution.

(2) eliminate departmental barriers and strengthen team building

Internal cooperation between enterprise departments is sometimes far less close and smooth than external cooperation. Because of the organization's own classification there are invisible barriers. The most important job, then, is to break down these barriers, to work together that jumps out of departmental responsibility, to put the company's interests at the centre, to get the team members of the various departments involved to work closely together to remove organisational boundaries and to identify useful parts that contribute to improvements across the value chain.

The company should strengthen the construction of the organizational structure, formulate detailed procedures in the aspects of material purchase, technology research and development, product certification, marketing and after-sales service, and review every purchase, certification and other behaviors. This can reduce information communication and duplication of work problems, avoid the addition of a variety of intangible costs.

At the same time, the company shall set up a financial staff's office on the warehouse site to facilitate the inventory taking and immediate feedback of information. Strengthen the construction of the cost management team of the whole enterprise, publicize and stick to the cost control concept of the general pattern, closely coordinate the relationship between various departments of the enterprise, and form the linkage mechanism of cost control.

3. Cost control optimization in procurement management

The company should adhere to the management idea of creating a win-win purchase, actively use the electronic quotation request system to understand the competitiveness of the supplier's equipment, or to understand the supplier's estimation of the production level of specific data, through such a detailed understanding to select the best supplier to cooperate with. Cooperation innovation should focus on the use of suppliers, from the early stages of product development should let suppliers involved, this not only is advantageous to the suppliers in the product development better when combined with the product structure, to speed up the cycle of supply, as well as put forward opinions and Suggestions, from the Angle of design and materials used and so on various aspects cost savings, improve the product efficiency. It is a win-win situation to select high quality suppliers with systematic supplier estimation system and establish good cooperative supply mode with them.

On the other hand, the company has to optimize the number of suppliers. Start with a general review of all available suppliers and then filter through. If reducing the number of suppliers for a product category does not reduce the total supply cost, the number of suppliers is likely to be substantially optimized. So the rationalization of the number of suppliers is an inevitable result.

Companies can try to support expansion into new areas with key suppliers as they expand. Try to work with suppliers to define the risk-return situation on the basis of each product project, and in some cases to launch new business in a new region, the data supplier is likely to be the best marketing partner, promising to bear the risk for the manufacturer. This can effectively establish a close working relationship with suppliers.

Company A can also use technology forums and product exchanges to attract A large number of suppliers and establish A strong network with them. These suppliers can take this opportunity to introduce their new technologies to the company's purchasing staff, while company A can combine the total cost model and information sharing to promote the technological improvement of suppliers.

4. Cost control optimization in marketing management

(1) online marketing is faster

In recent years, due to the development of network technology, Internet + has become an inevitable trend in the market, and many manufacturing enterprises have conducted product marketing through e-commerce platforms. Online supply, online collection, delivery and installation, which greatly reduce the enterprise in marketing costs, but also broaden the audience, speed up the order response mechanism. As A result, A machine tool company should quickly abandon the current marketing in the "cast A big net to fish for small fish" high-input operation mode, make full use of the network to complete product distribution and capital assurance.

(2) focus on after-sales service and walk the last mile

Good marketing is not only before the sale of the grasp of the customer, the sale of the customer mining, more reflected in the customer concern. In the purchase, the customer value is competitive price and product service quality, but these are good factors, aside from these essential factors, the most important part of the reference is the product after-sales and maintenance links. It is safe to say that quality after-sales service is an important means to maintain customer loyalty. After-sales service is only the last kilometer of the supply chain.

In short, in order to meet the more severe market challenges, the majority of machine tool enterprises must prepare for the rainy day, carry out effective cost control, in order to survive in the brutal market competition, meet the wind.