Five trends revealed in China Intelligent Manufacturing Forum
Last Thursday, the annual grand event—China Intelligent Manufacturing Summit Forum and the 19th Chinese Manufacturing IT Application Appraisal & Award Ceremony successfully kicked off in Hangzhou.
Focusing on “The way of intelligent manufacturing under goals of peak carbon emissions and carbon neutrality", the two-day event brings together as many as 500 participants, including authoritative experts, manufacturing CIOs, and solution suppliers. Together they discussed the digital transformation strategy in Chinese manufacturing enterprises and the road map of intelligent manufacturing.
Mr. Lipo Shan, Director of China Center for Promotion of SME Development, delivered an enthusiastic speech of welcome. “Under the multiple challenges of global economy and the uncertainty and instability brought by the pandemic, small and medium-sized enterprises are facing a lot of difficulties. Therefore, digital transformation has become an inevitable choice for China's manufacturing enterprises, especially the SMEs to elevate the core competitiveness,” said Mr. Shan.
Mr. Lipo Shan, Director of China Center for Promotion of SME Development
Prof. Peigen Li, Fellow of the Chinese Academy of Engineering has released the "Top 10 Hot Spots in China's manufacturing and Intelligent Manufacturing". He stressed that “China now attaches great importance to strengthen the key competitiveness of manufacturing. Despite the lasting impacts of the pandemic and serious challenges, such as chip shortage, logistics disruptions, and labor shortage, the industry leaders are still actively promoting intelligent manufacturing and digital transformation. On the one hand, the boom of digital economy has injected vitality into the development of manufacturing industry. On the other hand, under this megatrend to be green and low-carbon, it is an inevitable choice and also an ecodevelopment requirement for manufacturing enterprises to optimize resource utilization and reduce energy consumption through digital technology.”
Prof. Peigen Li, Fellow of the Chinese Academy of Engineering
This conference also invited intelligent manufacturing experts to share their cutting-edge observations and insights on digital transformation and key technologies.
Dr. Pei Huang, e-works CEO, in his speech of "digital transformation of manufacturing industry and cutting-edge trends of intelligent manufacturing" reviewed current challenges faced by Chinese manufacturing industry and presented seven models of manufacturing digital transformations. He shared his views from professional perspective on the pitfalls and difficulties in promoting intelligent manufacturing in enterprises. He also gave advice to manufacturers on how to actively cope with economic uncertainties.
Dr. Pei Huang, e-works CEO
Prof. Fei Tao, PhD Director of Beihang University, shared the thinking and practice of equipment digitalization, and explained in detail the operation and maintenance management and application of digital twins of complex equipment. “Digital twin equipment is a kind of future intelligent equipment composed of five parts: physical equipment, digital equipment, twin data, software services and interactions. In the epidemic era, a series of new situations, new demands and new challenges are accelerating the transformation of equipment to be digital and intelligent,” said Tao. He also shared several industrial application cases of digital twin.
Prof. Fei Tao, PhD Director of Beihang University
Ms. Zhiying Xu, General Manager of e-works Media and Knowledge Service, shared her in-depth observations on the digital transformation leaders in China, including their backgrounds, current status of digital transformation, and survey findings. She said that “the digital transformation of industrial enterprises has always been a difficult and remarkable journey. The paths maybe vary in different industries, there are still some common rules to follow for success: lean management concept, production digitalization, digitalization and intelligence of the facilities, efficient logistics, exploration of new technologies, data-driven business, sustainable and stable financial, etc.”
Ms. Zhiying Xu, General Manager of e-works Media and Knowledge Service
The practical experience of benchmarking enterprises has important significance in guiding other manufacturing enterprises to build intelligent factories and promote digital transformation and intelligent manufacturing. To this end, the conference has invited some leaders from smart manufacturing benchmarking and demonstration enterprises to share their practical experience, including Huaxin Cement, COSCO Shipping, SUPCON, CITIC Dicastal, Hengdian Group DMEGC, and CR Sanjiu.
The attended benchmarking enterprises representatives
The promotion of intelligent manufacturing is inseparable from digital solutions. In this meeting, representatives from hardware and software product/solution suppliers, such as IBM, Shell, SAP, EPLAN, Atlas, Amazon Cloud, Circle Point, Hoteam Software, SHARETEK, Fujitsu, COSMOPlat, are invited to demonstrate their technology, solution and applications focusing on the needs, pain points and difficulties in manufacturing enterprises.
The attended software product/solution suppliers
During the awarding ceremony, Prof. Li announced the winners for the Outstanding CEOs and Outstanding CIOs/CDOs of the Year. Besides, the event also unveiled the winners for the Best Practice, Best Applications, Outstanding and Excellent Suppliers, and Digital Transformation Leaders of the Year.
Winners of Outstanding CEOs of the Year
The meeting fully presented the new concepts, emerging digital technologies and solutions, and application cases in the field of intelligent manufacturing for manufacturers to promote digital transformation and intelligent manufacturing in the future. The event also revealed 5 trends of intelligent manufacturing:
- Low-carbon manufacturing has become a new trend. The main ways for industrial enterprises to achieve carbon emission reduction include investments in infrastructures, digital technologies, additive manufacturing and system management. Taking digital technologies as an example, the application of digital technologies can shorten the R&D cycle thus reduce the carbon emissions related with the R&D process. In the stage of production, the application of information system can be used to optimize the allocation of resources and reduce the waste of unnecessary repetition and inventory occupation. In addition, additive manufacturing and green remanufacturing can be used to realize material recycling thus reduce carbon emissions in the production process.
- Manufacturing companies are increasingly valuing data. Data is the foundation of digitalization. The quality and quantity of data directly determines the ability, the depth, and breadth of digitalization. More and more manufacturing enterprises increase the leveraging of data, and gradually analyze, manage, make decisions, and innovate based on data.
- Improve supply chain resilience and strengthen supply chain collaboration. Uncertainties still exist in the global industrial and supply chains. Particularly due to the impact of the pandemic, the supply of some raw materials and key components in the upstream and downstream supply chains has been largely affected. To build a decentralized, safe and reliable supply chain system is still an arduous and urgent task that we must complete for a long time to come.
- Strengthen industrial safety. The frequent production accidents have made the topic a growing concern. Enterprises should strengthen equipment maintenance and should avoid safety accidents caused by untimely maintenance, the leakage and venting, or the overloading through detecting, identifying, and monitoring risks and hazards.
- The digital twin has been widely applied in complex equipment industry, for example, in satellite assembly, textile workshop, aviation composite material processing and other scenarios. digital twin technology can help realize equipment integration and multidisciplinary collaborative optimization design, intelligent manufacturing and digital delivery, and intelligent operation and maintenance, so as to achieve the goals of expanding the equipment functions and enhancing equipment performance and value.
