1.1.1 Policies, institutions and systems need to be improved

The whole life cycle of instrumentation products from basic research and development to promotion and application involves scientific and technological innovation policies, promotion and application policies, industry management policies, public service system construction policies, preferential tax policies, infrastructure construction policies and macro comprehensive policies, etc. Therefore, the high-quality development of the instrumentation industry requires synergy between different policy systems. In particular, the formulation and implementation of macro-comprehensive policies and promotion and application policies require not only the competent departments of science and technology, industry, quality supervision and inspection and other industries, but also the full cooperation of the National Defense Science, Technology and Industry EPC-5A Commission, the Development and Reform Commission, the Energy Bureau, the emergency Management Department, the Health Commission, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Natural Resources, the Customs and other instrument application fields. However, at present, China lacks the top-level design and working mechanism of the series of instrument-related policies and systems, and the synergistic effect between different policy systems is not obvious.

The vast majority of instruments and meters have measuring functions, so measuring instruments and metrological verification regulations are the “basic criteria” for the development of instrumentation products. With the development of instrumentation technology and the broadening of application fields, the relevant measurement standards and technical specifications in different fields of our country should also be continuously improved. At present, although China’s metrological standards and technical specifications have actively adopted international metrological verification regulations, and actively participated in the formulation of international metrological verification regulations, there are still differences with the international metrological system in some measuring instruments, measurement standards and metrological verification, which is EPC-5A bound to affect the internationalization of China’s instrumentation products. For example, since January 2018, the new International Legal Metrology Organization Certificate Mutual recognition system (OIML-CS) has proposed 39 kinds of measuring instruments and metrological verification regulations, while China currently only has non-automatic weighing instruments, weighing sensors, gravity automatic loading weighing instruments, non-continuous cumulative automatic weighing instruments, high-precision linear scale and other 11 kinds of measuring instruments certification qualifications. The transformation of OIML certificate and domestic existing metrology certification, and the mutual recognition of domestic and foreign metrology verification regulations are also actively promoted.

EPC-5A

1.1.2 The policy guidance mode needs to be optimized

With the continuous development of China’s instrumentation industry, product technical indicators are constantly catching up with similar foreign products, but the gap between the system performance, stability and reliability of domestic high-end instrumentation and foreign countries is large, especially precision optical instruments, analytical instruments, laboratory instruments and medical instruments, etc., so most users are reluctant to purchase domestic instrumentation. The gap not only has technical reasons, but also issues such as industry foundation, technical understanding and policy guidance, which are related to the entire instrument industry ecology.

EPC-5A Instruments and meters have high requirements for manufacturing process, and there have been special instrument and meter machine tool enterprises in the history of our industry, specializing in the manufacture of instrument and meter tools, accessories and spare parts. In recent years, although China’s industrial base capacity has made great progress, but the quality of domestic general parts and basic parts can generally only meet the technical needs of low-end instruments, high-end instrument core parts are mostly dependent on imports. This is because the performance of instrumentation products also has obvious craftsman skill attributes, and the manufacturing process requires long-term research and precipitation accumulation. At present, domestic instrumentation technology research is mainly based on product development, lack of instrumentation manufacturing process research, cultivation system research and accumulation.

Although domestic instrumentation enterprises have recognized the shortcomings of product technology and product availability, it is difficult for small and medium-sized enterprises to rely on their own strength to systematically study and improve the system performance of products in the short term. Taking reliability as an example, reliability engineering runs through all aspects of the whole life cycle of instrumentation products, not only related to product research and development, but also related to process design, material analysis, enterprise management, tooling equipment improvement and other factors are closely related, product reliability improvement requires the entire industrial chain of all links to work together, so as to achieve comprehensive system performance improvement. However, the development of instrument and meter products in China is mostly oriented by functional indicators, and the design of reliability system is missing, resulting in reliability improvement mostly relying on post-processing, and the number of product iterations and cost are high. The user participation in the development of instruments is very low, resulting in unclear and untimely feedback on reliability problems, and the lack of product technical maturation. In the long run, the reliability index of high-end instrumentation products is naturally obvious compared with foreign products. In addition, problems such as poor user experience and poor operability are also aspects that users often criticize domestic instruments.