Foreword
With the release of "Made in China 2025," automation, informatization, and intelligentization have become frequently mentioned keywords in today's socio-economic life, and the construction of smart factories has become a hot topic. Amidst this surge of interest, we must not only pay close attention and study diligently, but also think rationally and implement these concepts systematically.
1. Without lean automation and information technology, there will be enormous waste.
To cope with rising labor costs, businesses are eager to replace manual labor with machines as quickly as possible, especially when they see large numbers of assembly line workers. Faced with market demand, some automation companies have begun to boldly accept orders, making all sorts of promises. The result is that after signing contracts and paying the initial deposit, the automation companies begin trial production (constantly making mistakes), and in many cases, they fail to deliver reliable automated equipment or production lines as promised. Ultimately, the two parties part ways acrimoniously or are even plagued by disputes.
A small home appliance company hired a service provider to automate its assembly line. The contract stipulated a five-month completion time, but after more than a year, delivery was still impossible. According to our understanding, the main reasons for the failure to deliver the automated production line were insufficient product processes and inadequate precision of components. Of course, the automation company also bears some responsibility for its lack of prior research or experience in accepting such an order prematurely. For this assembly line to be successfully automated, a complete redesign of the product and processes is necessary, along with improvements to the precision of component processing—in other words, a comprehensive lean manufacturing improvement. Even so, not all operations need or can be automated; each case must be analyzed individually.
On the other hand, driven by the trend, enterprise informatization is booming, but the low efficiency of its implementation is alarming. Many companies spend huge sums of money to introduce ERP systems, only to find that they cannot even perform production planning. Without production planning, procurement plans cannot be generated; without production planning, material outbound or delivery plans cannot be generated; without production planning, production scheduling and management cannot be carried out; without production planning, there is no way to alarm or control material or order delivery... Therefore, an ERP that cannot realize production planning functions is not an ERP at all.
Besides ERP systems, companies may purchase or develop internal systems such as financial management, human resource management, customer relationship management, mold management, equipment management, order management, and OA (Office Automation). These systems are, at best, merely tools for recording, querying, and communication; they rarely achieve the functions of statistics, analysis, reporting, alarms, error correction and prevention, visual monitoring, and functional collaboration—all aimed at improving the level of intelligent management.
In addition, there are many instances of blindly following trends and putting on a show in automation and information technology, resulting in enormous waste of resources. Therefore, how to implement automation and information technology is a topic that enterprise managers need to seriously study.
2. What kind of automation and information technology is needed to move towards a smart factory?
To correctly understand and systematically promote the construction of smart factories, based on extensive consulting experience, the author has created a structured path for smart factories, as shown in the diagram. This path clearly illustrates the relationship between enterprise operations and automation, lean manufacturing, informatization, and intelligentization, providing significant guidance for smart factory construction. Through this structured path, we can gain a comprehensive and holistic understanding of the vision, goals, strategies, and architectural foundations advocated by smart factories from a top-down perspective.
The first step is to build a vision: to install a data brain that helps us achieve efficient operations. This data brain is the nerve center of the enterprise, responsible for thinking, judging, and issuing instructions. It acquires valuable information from all areas of the enterprise's operations, and through classification and processing, derives various effective conclusions or instructions to efficiently manage the enterprise's operations. Imagine a "central control room" where we can instantly see various operational charts and data, key KPIs and the efforts made to achieve them, and the progress of key strategies or projects, ensuring we have a clear understanding of the situation.
Secondly, there are two construction goals (or principles): one is automation or intelligence, and the other is just-in-time or customization. These two goals were originally proposed by Toyota Motor Corporation as two major lean principles of the Toyota Production System, and they still have important practical significance today. In other words, the construction of a smart factory must conform to the principle of "automation," enabling the production or management system to possess human intelligence, with the ability to make judgments, alarms, error prevention and correction, and automatic shutdown (not automation in the general sense), which in today's terms is called intelligence. The goal is to pursue zero defects and labor savings. The construction of a smart factory must also conform to the principle of "just-in-time," enabling the production or management system to have sufficient flexibility to respond quickly to market demands without increasing or reducing costs, meet customers' personalized needs, and ultimately achieve the goal of "customized" production.
Thirdly, there are three strategic pillars: lean manufacturing, automation, and information technology. Lean manufacturing refers to ensuring that the core value-added processes and systems (R&D, production, sales, etc.) closely related to product or service delivery conform to lean principles and are optimized to guarantee that these processes and systems can deliver products and services efficiently, quickly, and stably. Automation means having machines do the work for humans, with the aim of improving efficiency (higher than human labor), ensuring quality (more stable and reliable than human labor), mitigating safety risks (not afraid of accidents), and reducing labor intensity (not afraid of hardship). Information technology involves using IT and internet technologies to replace tasks such as recording, statistics, analysis, reporting, early warning, judgment, instruction, and collaboration.
It is clear that automation (intelligentization) and just-in-time (customization) are two goals, while lean management, automation, and information technology are the means to achieve these two goals. The relationship between goals and means must be clarified, and intelligentization, just-in-time, and the other three are not confused.
Fourth are the four foundations of lean management: standardized management, lean improvement mechanisms, learning of improvement tools and methods, and profit management mechanisms.
The first foundation is standardized management, which essentially involves two things: First, defining standard operating procedures (SOPs), meaning standardizing the steps and actions required for all tasks to ensure efficiency and repeatability. Second, developing work standards, which means creating clear and concise work standards that meet the requirements of SOPs, enabling training, practice, and comparison checks for workers.
The second foundation is the implementation of lean improvement mechanisms to encourage company-wide participation in lean improvement and continuously enhance business performance. The consulting firm I work for actively promotes three major lean improvement mechanisms: employee micro-innovation (employee proposals), on-site progress improvement (self-management), and major performance projects, to encourage broad employee participation.
The third foundation is the learning and application of improvement tools and methods, including IE, new and old QC tools, VSM, 6Sigma and other methodologies for discovering, analyzing and solving problems.
The fourth foundation is the profit management mechanism, which is the ultimate management tool that senior management must master. It starts with defining the business philosophy and business strategy, and achieves business goals such as increasing profits through a series of specific business actions such as formulating and implementing annual business plans.
These four fundamental aspects are not optional for building a smart factory, but rather a very important component.
Over the past 30 years, domestic manufacturing enterprises have achieved rapid growth in scale, but weak management foundations have remained a major problem. Furthermore, the haphazard implementation of IT and automation upgrades within these enterprises in recent years has resulted in extremely low investment efficiency. Enterprises can refer to the structured path for building a smart factory, taking a long-term perspective, planning scientifically, and implementing lean manufacturing, automation, and IT in stages to gradually improve the factory's intelligence level and ultimately build a highly efficient smart factory.
