“Cost down, efficiency up”, digital, intelligent is changing the face of Chinese manufacturing. Recently, intelligent manufacturing industry projects are accelerating the pace of construction, a number of smart factories, unmanned workshops continue to emerge.

The reporter learned in many places that the majority of manufacturing enterprises are actively using new technologies and products such as 5G, digital twins, and industrial robots to read the “transformation” and stimulate the internal power of enterprise development.

“Cost down, efficiency up”

In the 12,000-square-meter 5G smart factory of Micronet Union Technology (Chengdu) Co., LTD., automatic chip placement machines, automatic optical detectors, and robotic arms operate 24 hours a day, and 60,000 network communication devices are offline here.

On June 16, the Microgrid Union 5G fully connected factory automation production line was launched for trial operation. “The production of communication terminal products is highly standardized and refined, with higher production efficiency, which means that it occupies more market share in the industry.” Huang Chunsheng, general manager of the company’s manufacturing center, told reporters that the production efficiency has been increased by 40% compared with the traditional process, the accuracy rate of product quality inspection has been increased to more than 99.5%, and the production line wiring cost has been reduced by more than 1 million yuan.

“As costs go down and efficiency goes up, companies have more ability to open up new market space.” Huang Chunsheng said that the company is currently investing 50 million yuan in China Mobile to build a “5G fully connected factory”, the second phase of the project is expected to be officially put into production in September, and a network communication terminal product can be completed in only 15 minutes from the expected shipment.

The reporter learned that many industrial enterprises are grasping the opportunity of a new round of technological change, upgrading new technologies, building digital production lines, and saving development advantages in transformation and upgrading.

According to data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, as of March this year, China has built more than 2,100 high-level digital workshops and smart factories, of which 209 are demonstration benchmark factories. “We analyzed the effectiveness of these 209 enterprises before and after the intelligent transformation, and found that after the transformation, the product development cycle of these factories was shortened by 20.7 percent, the production efficiency was increased by 34.8 percent, the rate of defective products was reduced by 27.4 percent, and carbon emissions were reduced by 21.2 percent.” Vice Minister of Industry and Information Technology Xin Guobin introduced.

Zhu Minghao, executive director of the China High-end Manufacturing Research Center at Beijing Jiaotong University, said that through the intelligent manufacturing investment layout, enterprises will not only improve production efficiency, continue to improve product quality, but also drive the rapid development of new technologies and new equipment, and give birth to new industrial forms.

Digitalization is expanding to the whole industrial chain

As the effect of improving quality, increasing efficiency and reducing cost continues to emerge, digital intelligent transformation is also extending to the whole chain of enterprise production.

The reporter saw in the high-end electrical smart factory of Shanghai Nuoyak Electric Co., LTD., located in Songjiang Economic development District, Shanghai, that from the material “onto” the production line to the product “into” the finished product warehouse, the intelligent unmanned production of a low-voltage electrical product was completed in one go.

“Supplemented by the application of new technologies such as 5G and industrial Internet, the output of the factory has increased from about 60 units to 100 units per eight hours, the offline pass rate has reached 100%, and all products are traceable.” The head of the Marketing Department of Noyak told reporters that at present, the enterprise is extending the digital application to the whole production chain, and this year, the smart factory will also start the construction of the second phase of the project, when the production process such as feeding, equipment and packaging will be fully automated.

Gu Wenlei, deputy secretary of the Party Working Committee of Shanghai Songjiang Economic Development District, said that the economic development District is actively carrying out the construction of industrial Internet infrastructure, 5G network distribution, etc., around the projects such as the CEC Information Port and Tencent Cloud, and started to create a digital innovation industrial park, driving upstream and downstream enterprises in the industrial chain to “number” forward.

From product design, raw material management, to product processing, logistics… More and more manufacturing enterprises are integrating digital intelligence into the whole chain of production management.

Taking the application of the industrial Internet as an example, Yu Xiaohui, president of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, said that the application depth of the industrial Internet has been expanded from the informatization of the production auxiliary links to the data analysis and optimization of the core production links.

“At present, the application of the industrial Internet in 8 scenarios such as visual quality inspection, intelligent warehousing, quality traceability, intelligent production scheduling, lean production accounts for more than 50%, and the use of modeling analysis scenarios such as optimization process, equipment fault diagnosis and prediction has greatly increased, covering the scope from leading enterprises to the whole industry.” Yu Xiaohui said.

Carry out multi-level application promotion

Complementary to the acceleration of digital and intelligent development of enterprises is the continuous enhancement of the supply capacity of key products such as intelligent manufacturing equipment and industrial software.

This can be seen from the growth trend of industrial robots and industrial software. According to the statistics of the International Federation of Robotics 2022, since 2013, China has become the world’s largest industrial robot market for nine consecutive years, accounting for 51.9% of the global robot market share. Revenue from industrial software products rose 13.1 percent year-on-year from January to May, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

According to the “14th Five-Year Plan” intelligent manufacturing Development Plan deployment, by 2025, 70% of manufacturing enterprises above designated size will basically realize digital networking, and more than 500 intelligent manufacturing demonstration factories will be built to lead the development of the industry, and the market satisfaction rate of intelligent manufacturing equipment and industrial software will exceed 70% and 50% respectively.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said that the next step will be to study and formulate policies and measures to promote the development of digital equipment, with intelligent equipment innovation, to support the construction of digital China. At the same time, we will accelerate breakthroughs in convergent technological innovation, intensify research on manufacturing technologies such as complex designs and advanced processes, and accelerate large-scale deployment and application of 5G and industrial Internet.

“We will carry out multi-level application promotion.” The relevant person in charge of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said that it will build a number of world-class smart factories and smart supply chains for key industries. For small and medium-sized enterprises, large-scale implementation of targeted solutions such as process optimization, lean management and process reengineering, to intelligently reshape the manufacturing industry model and enterprise form.