The first step of “digital intelligence” : do a good job of cloud infrastructure

In the industrial design link of the manufacturing industry chain, Haier Innovation Design Center (hereinafter referred to as Haier Design) keeps up with the tide of The Times, from digital to digital intelligence.

Haier Innovation Design Center was established in 1994, currently has more than 500 designers, Haier Wisdom’s seven global brands, Doda +8000 products to do design innovation and model exploration.

In the view of Wu Jian, vice president of Haier Wisdom and general manager of Haier Innovation Design Center, in the field of industrial design, in the face of rapidly growing business needs and accelerated iterative product cycles, industrial design also needs digital transformation, and several major problems are encountered in the transformation process:

High cost and time consuming: Traditional industrial design processes often require a lot of time and resources.

From concept design to prototyping to product testing and validation, the entire process can take weeks or even months. This makes the design cycle longer, increasing development costs and time to market.

High reliance on human experience and intuition: Many industrial design processes are still highly dependent on the experience and intuition of designers, which limits the innovation and efficiency of design.

The limitations of human experience can lead to limited innovation, and results can vary from designer to designer.

Information asymmetry and collaboration difficulties: In the process of industrial design, the flow of information between designers, engineers and manufacturers is often not smooth, and there is a problem of information asymmetry.

This can lead to a mismatch between design requirements and technical requirements, which in turn affects product quality and performance. In addition, collaborative work between different teams also faces challenges, and there is a lack of efficient cooperation platforms and tools.

And this directly leads to the concept design stage (that is, the preparation stage) high labor costs, low efficiency of concept output, and low concept passing rate.

The first step to solving these pain points is to go fully digital – to the cloud. In the cloud stage, Haier design locked the partner as Amazon cloud technology.

Previously, Haier designed and used a self-built private cloud system, deployed in its own IDC.

However, this private cloud system has many problems, such as resource preemption in the desktop system, the file storage system cannot store historical documents for a long time due to capacity limitations, the rendering system needs to queue up for a long time due to resource limitations, the basic system is complicated to maintain, cannot be flexibly expanded, and the service system is difficult to innovate. These problems have a great impact on services.

In this regard, Amazon Cloud Technology provides four complete cloud-based solutions for Haier Design, completely replacing its own computer room, so that the design center’s workflow can be fully cloud-based and automated.

Amazon Cloud Technology provides Haier design solutions including 3D cloud desktop system, rendering farm system, file sharing system and automatic design system:

Cloud Desktop: In the Qingdao office designed by Haier, the 3D cloud desktop system provides a convenient and easy-to-use desktop environment for more than 300 3D designers and graphic designers.

Through the resource isolation division on the public cloud, Haier designed to completely solve the original self-built IDC VDI solution “resource run caused by deadlock, flash back or downtime” and “performance decline when many people use” and other problems, but also can improve the performance of about 30%, can be said to be multiple.

Shared Storage: A file sharing system built on Amazon S3 features that allows companies, groups, and individuals to share storage.

This unlimited capacity storage system for automatic layering of hot and cold data has improved data security by three times, and the previous self-built IDC maximum allocation of 500G capacity per person, only allowing one backup per day and maximum retention of 7 days has become a history.

Rendering farm system: The rendering farm system uses Amazon Thinkbox deadline software and HPC cluster, Amazon cloud technology’s own rendering products, to render images, with high performance and flexibility, so that designers can get rendering renderings after submitting tasks, and completely solve the problem of queuing rendering tasks.

At low loads, it automatically reduces the number of Amazon EC2 spots and pays for the actual time of use (down to the second), so no more waste.

Intelligent design system: Automated design system/Intelligent design rendering system runs automated design software such as Amazon EC2, Amazon Thinkbox Deadline, Amazon DynamoDB, etc., and can automatically generate large-scale rendering renderings that take several days to complete manually within 10 minutes. Completely solved the problem of computing power bottleneck existing in the original self-built IDC.

It is reported that after the launch, the application of automated design system has shortened the original project cycle by 30%.