In 2012, Midea has invested 600 million yuan in reconstruction and spent 6 years to build a fully automatic assembly line for core parts of central air conditioning. The production efficiency has increased by 70%, the number of people on the production line has decreased by 50%, and the product pass rate has reached 99.9%.



In the polishing workshop of Dongguan Jinsheng, 60 robotic hands work day and night to polish the frame structure of each mobile phone. One robot hand replaces six to eight workers. In the workshop that used to require 650 workers, only 60 people are now responsible for line reading and inspection. In the future, this will be reduced to 20 people. Compared with skilled workers, just on-line robot hand is "new", but the quantity and quality of the production of products is far more than skilled workers, experts.



In Chia Tai Food's unmanned dumpling factory, the machines work 24 hours a day, from mixing noodles, filling and kneading dumpling, which is a completely clean and tidy assembly line. Factories that used to employ 200 people now employ fewer than 20 to make the same thing, meaning that "unmanned factories" can reduce the number of workers by 90%.

Intelligent factory from the enterprise practice, the purpose of the enterprise makes unmanned factory workers is not completely eliminated, but by reducing the sewing worker implementation of repeatable work less "humanization", through the automatic production line and workshop, make a sharp fall in the number of workers, reduce to the original one over ten, one over twenty, even less. The goal of unmanned factories, therefore, is to eliminate low-value jobs, not to make them unmanned.





2

Black light factory ≠ unmanned factory




Dong Mingzhu, a deputy to the National People's Congress (NPC) and chairman of Gree Electric Appliances Inc., of Zhuhai, said during the two sessions last year that Gree Electric Appliances has eight bases in China, all of which are unmanned factories, or machines that can replace human operations. She also calls these factories "black light factories." That is, you can turn off the lighting in the working area and leave the factory completely to the machines. From raw materials to finished products, all processing, transportation, and testing are done in the empty "black light factory", with no workers on duty.



Black light factory in the end is unmanned factory, different people have different views. If you think of a factory where no one is seen on the shop floor or on the assembly line as a "unmanned factory", it is technically possible that intelligence will eventually get there, but whether that is the case is another matter. For machine instead of the subject, Mr Ma's point of view is very profound: "to the world's future is not technology, but the people behind the technology, is the ideal, dream behind technology and value systems, human can't be completely replaced by machines, humans have the creativity, thinking, and the machine does not have, machine again, it also could not make words."

For those of us engaged in industrial transformation, intelligence is a means, not an end. Intelligence is the core in order to support the enterprise strategy, such as in response to individual needs, the authors synergistic business requirements, such as the enterprise needs to intelligent means to improve the production process of flexible ability, in order to reduce manufacturing costs, companies need to use robots to replace low value-added repetitive work, at the same time, improve production efficiency. But the operation, control and maintenance of all the smart systems behind it require more professional technicians than ordinary workers.