Looking around the world, the AI applications that people have learned from the media are only focused on the service, retail and logistics industries, such as: driverless stores, driverless hotels, driverless restaurants, drone logistics, driverless driving, driverless delivery cars, drone delivery, etc.

Improve the competitiveness of enterprises


Today, artificial intelligence has been widely used in all walks of life. It can not only provide effective business solutions for a specific need, but also revolutionizing the entire industry and ecological chain. From the perspective of the manufacturing industry, especially the make-to-order production, consumers are paying more and more attention to the pursuit of product personalization, and the production cycle required by customers is getting shorter and shorter, which has a certain impact on the industry and promoted the rapid rise of the concept of "Industry 4.0" in recent years. The use of AI by enterprises is increasing rapidly and is expected to continue to affect industry reform and development in the next 10 to 20 years, thus improving the competitiveness of enterprises.


The goal of Industry 4.0 is to achieve self-optimization and a smart factory -- where each step of production will be seamlessly connected and machines and equipment will be able to optimize themselves and make their own decisions to produce products at a faster pace to meet customer requirements. Simply put, you can get to lights-out Manufacturing or close to unmanned factories.


However, there are only a handful of instances where the goal of a "lights-out factory" has been temporarily achieved, mostly by a particular segment of a business or product. In fact, many companies are still in the early stages of exploration. According to a 2018 study by a leading international IT research firm, 31% of manufacturing companies surveyed still lack a clear timetable for the introduction of AI technology.


Strengthen self-optimization ability


Even transform and upgrade manufacturing, improve competitiveness is certainly big trend, to upgrade to 4.0 "industry", no matter enterprise expectations on the course, the ultimate achieve what degree of self optimization, enterprise management idea and the IT technology application, IT is very important, suggested that with the method of step by step, don't jump one pace reachs the designated position.


The first is to promote a comprehensive data-based corporate management culture, to ensure that everyone in the enterprise is based on relevant data when making business decisions, executing, tracking and reporting, complementing the traditional management model of people-centered and relying solely on experience and intuition.


A large amount of data will be generated in the daily business of manufacturing industry, whether in production or in interaction with customers. Through the installation of the Internet of Things, mobile devices and the Internet, data can be collected more effectively, directly and in real time, and a Single Source of Truth can be realized to build big data storage. To support business analysis and decision making.


Automating your office


Finally, the combination of artificial intelligence and machine equipment can be applied to office automation and factory operations to improve efficiency, such as customer risk rating, pricing and quotation, question period, order processing, material planning, production scheduling, manufacturing execution, automatic warehouse navigation and delivery, and enterprise performance indicators.


In the increasingly competitive market, the manufacturing industry to break out, intelligent factory is the only way. New technologies, led by technologies such as artificial intelligence and big data, will be an important driving force for the sustainable development of the industry.