Enable “intelligent car building” with hard core strength

Automobile manufacturing has always been one of the highest level of automation in several industries, however, the new era of new car listing cycle is getting shorter and shorter, high-speed iteration of models, personalized demand is getting stronger and stronger, forcing automobile production from “manufacturing” to “intelligent manufacturing”, the new production line must not only be able to quickly go online, but also support flexible manufacturing, agile manufacturing and intelligent manufacturing. With decades of accumulation of core strength in the automotive manufacturing field, Rockwell Automation enables the automotive industry to move from “manufacturing” to “intelligent manufacturing”.

In the Chery intelligent network connected gigafactory, Rockwell Automation, in the role of EPC, provides Chery with full life cycle services from consulting and project research, to system blueprint design, functional design of the target system, as well as project implementation, system development, on-line commissioning and acceptance. Through the implementation of the industrial Internet of Things project, not only the production of the whole plant is paperless and transparent, the labor cost is reduced by more than 30%, the production capacity is increased by more than 10%, and the implementation time of the entire project is reduced by more than 30%. The success of this project is due to Rockwell Automation’s leading product solutions and accumulated industry experience and knowledge in the automotive industry.

Before the start of the project, Chery Automobile’s various production bases and processes have multiple sets of factory-side IoT platforms, but these platform architectures are not unified, there are differences in technical architecture and functional architecture, and stability cannot be guaranteed. It is urgent to unify the platform architecture in the subsequent construction of the new factory IoT platform, and gradually promote it to the old factory. ThingWorx in Rockwell Automation FactoryTalk InnovationSuite became Chery’s first choice for its superior connectivity and stability.

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Because automobile manufacturing involves tens of thousands of parts, assembly and production process is very complex, there is a need for a large number of robots, CNC machine tools and customized various types of special equipment to complete automated production, these devices are numerous heterogeneous data, data timing is also very different, but also to process data and production data are unified collection to a single data source. It’s very difficult to connect what used to be independent. ThingWorx has more than 20 years of history of Kepware industrial connectivity software, with more than 200 drivers built in, not only covers all international manufacturers PLC, not only supports common OPC UA, MQTT, REST, EFM, ODBC or SNMP and other common protocols. It also supports many proprietary protocols such as GE NIO, SuiteLink/FastDDE and Splunk, making data collection and device interconnection no longer a problem.

Agile development is also an important reason why ThingWorx can complete the implementation of the project in such a short time. On the one hand, ThingWorx is already a proven iot platform with many successful cases, and its maturity and stability are very high. On the other hand, because ThingWorx itself comes with a common software interface that allows custom development to be done with no code or low code by dragging and dropping, ThingWorx can be quickly verified and deployed in less than a week for work that would otherwise take months.

Of course, not only the platform itself, but more importantly, Rockwell Automation’s experienced team of “smart build” project implementation experts in the automotive industry provides the human guarantee for the success of the project. Rockwell Automation is a company with a deep understanding of automation and information technology and rich practical experience. It began to do MES projects in the automotive industry 30 years ago, familiar with the pain points and needs of automotive manufacturing, and has successful project implementation experience in many automotive manufacturing plants.

From “manufacturing” to “intelligent manufacturing”, it is the only way for the manufacturing industry to develop with high quality. For the automobile manufacturing industry, high-quality development does not wait for me. The intelligent connected Gigafactory built by Chery Automobile has set a benchmark of “intelligent manufacturing” for the entire automobile industry, and Rockwell Automation’s FactoryTalk InnovationSuite digital innovation solution is undoubtedly the accelerator of the road to “intelligent manufacturing”.