At present, China's manufacturing industry is facing extremely severe challenges. Under this background, how can manufacturing enterprises achieve transformation and upgrading? Promoting intelligent manufacturing has become an important way. However, Chinese manufacturing enterprises are facing many difficult problems in the process of promoting intelligent manufacturing.
1. There are a lot of concepts and technologies
Starting from the upsurge of "industry 4.0", concepts such as intelligent manufacturing, CPS, industrial Internet (platform), enterprise cloud, industrial app, artificial intelligence, industrial big data, digital factory, digital economy, digital transformation, C2B (c2m) have followed. For most manufacturing enterprises, they are dazzled and at a loss.
Intelligent manufacturing involves many technologies, such as cloud computing, edge computing, RFID, industrial robot, machine vision, three-dimensional warehouse, AGV, virtual reality / augmented reality, 3D printing / additive manufacturing, industrial security, TSN (time sensitive network), deep learning, digital twin, MBD, predictive maintenance Make the enterprise dizzying. These technologies look beautiful, but how to apply them and how to achieve practical results? Many enterprises are still unknown.
2. Feel the stones to cross the river
Enterprises lack relevant technical experience in the process of promoting intelligent manufacturing. At present, manufacturing enterprises have three types of islands, namely, information islands, automation islands, and islands between information systems and automation systems. In addition, many enterprises lack a unified department to systematically plan and promote the enterprise intelligent manufacturing process. In the process of actually promoting intelligent manufacturing, enterprises still have a headache and lack of rules.
3. The ideal is full, and the reality is skinny
Promoting intelligent manufacturing has a bright future. However, the vast majority of manufacturing enterprises have low profit margins and lack of independent capital investment. Some state-owned enterprises and large private enterprises can get financial support from governments at all levels, but most small and medium-sized enterprises can only "watch fire from a distance" and rely on themselves. In the process of intelligent transformation and upgrading of enterprises, a large screen command center is necessary, an automated production line with a large number of robots must be built, and an MES system is even more essential. However, as for whether the actual effect can be achieved, only the enterprise "knows whether it is warm or cold".
4. Automation, digitalization or intelligence?
In the process of promoting intelligent manufacturing, many enterprises are eager to establish artificial free factories and black light factories, and believe that these are intelligent factories. In fact, high automation is the concept of "industry 3.0".
For mass-produced products, excellent foreign enterprises have already realized unmanned factories. For example, the FANUC fully automatic assembly servo motor in Japan can produce a product in 40 seconds, but the premise is that the products produced need to be standardized and serialized, and have a design for automatic assembly. The structure that needs to be inserted with cables is changed to a socket structure.
From the perspective of technology and management, there are five difficulties in the transformation from made in China to intelligent manufacturing in China:
1 ? intelligent manufacturing is based on the deep integration of digital technologies such as new Internet of things, big data, cloud computing and advanced manufacturing technologies, and runs through the manufacturing, operation and management links of the whole supply chain, such as design, supply, production and manufacturing, and service. Therefore, intelligent manufacturing includes two systems engineering, one is the system engineering of Intelligent Manufacturing Technology (manufacturing technology and information technology) integration, and the other is the system engineering of management. At present, these two systems engineering problems are not only faced by Chinese enterprises, but also by European and American enterprises.
2 ? the equipment manufacturing industry is still the bottleneck, unable to keep up with the requirements of the development of intelligent manufacturing. Intelligent manufacturing will eventually fall into manufacturing technology and equipment. Although China is in a dominant position in digital technologies such as Internet of things, big data, cloud computing and 5g in-depth application, there is still a big gap between China and Europe, America and Japan in terms of manufacturing execution unit - machine tools.
3 ? the in-depth development of the basic data platform is not under control. To realize intelligent manufacturing, enterprises need two basic system platforms, such as MES and ERP. However, there is no relevant independently developed software platform in China, and the system platform depends on Europe and the United States, so it is limited in the deep customization development.
4 ? algorithm development. Intelligent manufacturing needs to realize self-determination, self-management and self-learning based on data and fully mining data value. From data source collection, data presentation, data analysis to self diagnosis, automatic feedback and automatic adjustment control, the process cannot be separated from algorithm development. Algorithm development is a multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary work, which requires both in-depth understanding of business and it technology thinking. At present, there is still a big gap in the resources of algorithm development in China.
5 ? management and organizational change. On the one hand, intelligent manufacturing can realize end-to-end, full information sharing and management platform based on data, breaking the original pyramid management system structure of enterprises. Therefore, there will be great resistance to change from the owners of the original power structure. They often have the decision-making power, resulting in inadequate resource investment in intelligent manufacturing. On the other hand, the management mode will change due to the information platform, and the self-management and self decision-making mechanism of individuals and task teams will become more and more common. However, at present, there is no better organization management mode and organization culture.
Based on the above reasons, intelligent manufacturing still has a long way to go. There are three points in urgent need of innovation and Breakthrough:
First, we need independent research and development in technology, break through the bottleneck of assembly and software technology, and pay attention to the core technologies in the whole ecological chain.
Second, it is necessary to promote organizational and management changes in management to adapt to the management changes brought about by information technology.
Third, it is necessary to introduce system engineering and top-level design on the intelligent road, so as to realize the deep integration of manufacturing technology, information technology and organization management.
