In fact, industrial intelligence or intelligent factory or, have their own implementation conditions and path, there is no shortcut to take, different industries, different enterprises, the road will be different.
In general, the following ten path direction is China's ministry of industry from manufacturing towards a path of building, but for different industries and different enterprises, due to different market demand model, products, technology, management, foundation, etc., different side key differs somewhat, but you can always find a few path to industrial intelligent way.
1 the lean
Lean production was originally designed to meet the personalized needs of many varieties and small batches, and its two pillars are "just-time" and "intelligent automation".
So far, lean has evolved into an involved in marketing, research and development, supply chain, production, business process and even the whole value chain of the lean management concept and method, driving the transformation of the global industry, from manufacturing to service industry, she's pursuit of "creating value to eliminate waste" thoughts, methods and tools to promote the production of resources optimization configuration, Rapid improvement in quality, efficiency and response speed.
According to the experience of enterprises, as long as they stick to it, most of them can get 50% or more improvement room. Regrettably, Lean has not been effectively implemented in most enterprises in China. Most of them just talk about it. They cannot insist on giving up halfway due to their eagerness for quick success and instant benefits and lack of introduction of experience and methods.
It is impossible for industrial intelligence to be built on such an inefficient production model. Lean is the first step that must be taken, and it is the path with the highest return on investment. Because lean requires almost no additional investment by the enterprise, just redeploying production resources on the existing basis can achieve more than expected returns.
The successful implementation of lean is not difficult, the key lies in the determination of the leadership and the change of management concept.
2 the standardization
Standardization is the basis of automation and the premise of industrial intelligence.
Domestic enterprises sigh at the high degree of automation in the automobile industry. One of the important reasons why such complex products as automobiles can be used, while simple products like household appliances cannot be used is standardization.
The common platform, common parts and other strategies widely adopted in the auto industry have greatly reduced product costs. By changing the original method of parts production according to the whole vehicle to the method of parts production according to the whole vehicle, that is to say, standardized parts to achieve mass production, the cost has been successfully reduced.
Standardization, of course, also includes standardized operating procedures and methods. With standardization, automation can be developed, such as automatic welding and automatic assembly. Assuming that parts and components are ever-changing and operating methods are not fixed, automation will be difficult to achieve, even if the realization cost is high.
3 modular
Automobile and computer are the earliest industries to achieve modularization, from modular design, modular procurement to modular production, modularization is also the key to industrial intelligence can achieve low cost to meet personalized consumption. Once realized, personalized products in the true sense will become possible, such as mobile phones. Each person's mobile phone can be unique, and people can arbitrarily combine their favorite mobile phones just like assembling building blocks.
Modularity reduces the complexity from design, procurement to production, standardized interface and connection methods increase versatility, reduce manufacturing cost and cycle, and automatic production, logistics and information communication are easier to achieve. If the charger of each mobile phone brand is different before, a change of mobile phone is all thrown away, causing great waste, there is improvement now.
It is relatively difficult to implement the modularization, which involves industry and enterprise standards and requires the joint participation of upstream and downstream enterprises. This is a long-term work, so it is particularly important to build lean strategic partnership between each other.
4 automation
Automation is the most talked about in the industrial intelligence, many local governments and enterprises image to call it "machine replacement", but also made continuous attempts, there are successes and failures.
Through independent innovation, enterprises can integrate the original discrete processing mode of raw materials processing, connect the original independent processes together through automatic production lines, and implement lean continuous production, which eliminates the loading and unloading, storage and handling of intermediate links, thus improving the production speed and efficiency.
Automation and informationization are the largest part of industrial intelligence investment. Enterprises should be careful before doing automation transformation. Why should they upgrade automation? What's the rate of return on investment? How reliable is the automation equipment? What are the risks? Can adapt to the upgrade of the product? You have to think it through, or the cost will go up instead of down.
With the advancement of technology and the increase of labor cost, automation is an irreversible trend. For different enterprises in different industries, some have mature automation solutions, while others do not. Enterprises need to plan the direction of automation according to their own situation.
5 as a service
China now has more than 600 million Internet users and 700 million smart terminals. The booming development of the mobile Internet has accelerated the transformation from manufacturing to services. The "Industrial Internet" advocated by the United States connects people, data and machines to form an open and global industrial network. Its connotation has gone beyond the manufacturing process and the manufacturing industry itself, spanning the entire value chain of product life cycle and covering aviation, energy, transportation, medical care and other industrial fields.
In addition, manufacturing enterprises can also improve the reliability and efficiency of products by monitoring, analyzing and improving the design and manufacturing of equipment through the networked data of equipment.
Of course, different products in different industries can provide different services. Under the Internet + model, traditional enterprises need to constantly innovate their business model to find a suitable service way to impress customers.
6 the personalized
In the past 30 years, the variety of goods in the market has expanded dramatically by dozens or hundreds of times. In the era of personalized consumption, everyone can have his or her own blog, microblog, WeChat and so on to spread his or her own voice.
The realization of high quality and low cost personalization first depends on your level of lean production, that is, lean advocates "value comes from the pull of real customer demand". Personalization is secondary to your standardized and modular design. The rapid development of the Internet and other information technology provides support for it, making it easy to achieve personalized.
At the present stage, personalized or limited conditions of personalized, can not be complete personalized, whether it is cars, computers, mobile phones, clothing and other goods, personalized is a choice within a certain range.
Each enterprise needs to decide its own personalized mode according to its own lean level, standardization/modularization level and informatization level. It is not the more personalized, the better. It is based on certain implementation conditions. Perhaps future developments in 3D printing and artificial intelligence will offer the possibility of complete personalization.
7 ecological
The competition among enterprises is gradually changing from the competition between individual enterprises to the competition between supply chains and even between ecosystems. Kevin Kelly writes in Out of Control: "The wave of alliances among big businesses, especially in the information and Internet industries, is another aspect of the growing coevolution of the world economy. Rather than eating or competing with rivals, it is better to form alliances -- symbiosis... The future of control is partnership, collaborative control, hybrid control, where humans share control with our creations."
8 the globalization
In today's interconnected world, when your business achieves a certain scale, you need to consider globalization to allocate resources to improve efficiency and reduce costs. Globalization resources include market resources, design resources, procurement resources and production resources.
China's "One Belt And One Road" strategy is to seek global market resources and export our surplus production capacity, including high-speed railway technology. Design resources are to set up research and development technology centers in foreign countries to develop products close to the local market or to make up for the lack of domestic design capabilities. In addition, 24-hour global product development can also be formed to shorten the research and development cycle.
Procurement and production resources is to seek better quality, lower cost material supplier in the world, in addition to consider the procurement and manufacturing unit price, also need to consider the transport cost, complicated supply chain, supply chain visualization, delivery cycles, higher inventory long carbon, environmental protection, quality stability, local labor policy and exchange rate fluctuations.
9 digital
Digitalization is closely related to informatization, and automation is the same, this is the largest piece of industrial intelligent transformation investment. With the rapid development of information technology, everything can be digitized, from people, products to devices, and everything can be connected.
Products can be digitized through PLM/ERP software, from product development and design, material procurement to production and delivery. Each product drawing, each material information and each production process are digitally connected together.
The equipment can transmit operation data to MES, Internet and other networks through PLC, sensors, etc., so GE can optimize its operation parameters to reduce fuel cost through the analysis of data sent back by aircraft engines, and Google can realize the unmanned driving of cars.
This means that in the "Industry 4.0" era, for the first time, it is possible to connect resources, information, goods and people digitally! This communication includes the exchange of information between people, people and products, people and machines, products and machines.
The characteristics of each industry and the foundation of the enterprise are different, so the order of digitization is different. In my opinion, for those process-based manufacturing industries, most of their manufacturing processes have been connected with a high degree of automation, and some equipment data can be collected automatically, so it is relatively easy to digitize.
For discrete manufacturing industries, such as machinery and equipment, textile and clothing, electronic appliances, household items, etc., because the manufacturing processes and parts are scattered and the number is large, it is indeed difficult to realize the connection, even if the realization cost is very large. The feasible approach for these industries is not to do it all at once, but to do it gradually. Lean and continuous manufacturing techniques are applied first to connect key processes to materials.
Due to the immaturity of technology and the huge investment, each enterprise needs to weigh the timing of import, and consider the investment return, system reliability, information security risk, talent reserve and other issues comprehensively, just like automation.
10 intelligent
Intelligence contains two meanings, one is the intelligence of the product, the other is the intelligence of the manufacturing process.
Let's start with the intelligence of the product. Compared with the intellectualization of consumer goods, the intellectualization of industrial products is actually more urgent. All equipment needs to be added to the intelligent control module, automatic collection, analysis and control of processing data, equipped with a standard data interface, can be connected with the enterprise MES system or other information systems, these industrial big data through the intelligent software system calculation and analysis will help to improve operational efficiency, reduce failures, reduce energy consumption.
Making the manufacturing process smarter is more complex. You need to make the above changes to lean, standardized, modular, automated and digitized, and the investment in automation and digitization is also high.
Made in China has gone through 30 years of rapid development, become a manufacturing power, but really can take out very few products. In the next 30 years, Chinese manufacturing needs to shift from focusing on speed over quality to focusing on quality over speed. It needs to carry out continuous innovation in the above ten areas, and realize the transformation from business model, technology and management to smart manufacturing in China.
