As the proverb goes, "those who are good at competing are always master graspers of the overall situation and trend.” Currently, the center stage of the digital economy is increasingly shifting from the consumer end to the industrial end. Adapting to this general trend, Shanghai is stepping up the digital transformation of its industrial end. In particular, the city has taken intelligent factories as the key platform to strengthen its innovation capabilities, cultivate core technologies and enhance the competitiveness of its real economy.

Not long ago, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released the fifth batch of national "intelligent manufacturing benchmark enterprises". In all, 11 enterprises stood out from more than 8,000 applicants across China. Two enterprises in Shanghai have won this special honor, making Shanghai the city with the largest number of intelligent manufacturing benchmark enterprises in the country.

Shanghai has long been a highland of manufacturing in China. The application of 5G, big data, industrial Internet and AI has added new brilliance to "Intelligent Manufacturing in Shanghai". According to the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization, Shanghai will complete the cultivation and designation of 100 intelligent factories by the end of this year. This will lead to the formation of an intelligent manufacturing echelon in the city. By 2025, Shanghai’s high-end equipment industry represented by intelligent equipment is expected to exceed RMB700 billion, with new strides made in the innovation level and supply capacity of "Intelligent Manufacturing in Shanghai".

Forming a “community” of intelligent manufacturing

As experts see it, smart factories are now the main battlefield and track of digital economic transformation. Unlike traditional factories, intelligent factories thoroughly integrate digital technology and intelligent equipment and take data as an important factor of production for building up special competitiveness.

In 2020, six government department including the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization jointly issued an action plan, calling for the establishment of 100 intelligent factories, 10 benchmark intelligent factories, 10 first-class intelligent manufacturing system integrators and 10 vertical industrial Internet platforms within three years. As the action plan enters its final tear in 2022, its results have already emerged.

Shanghai Huayi New Materials Co., Ltd., which has been recently named a national-level intelligent manufacturing benchmark enterprise, has continuously promoted intelligentization in production, logistics, environmental protection and supply chain management. With the help of the "vision" and "smell" provided by sensors, Huayi's intelligent factory can "see" those operations that break safety rules and "smell" any minimum pollution leakage in the pipe network, thus building a high-level green and safety net. Huayi New Materials has also established a production control center that carries out decision-making, implementation and adaptation on its own. Intelligent operations have helped the company to increase operational efficiency by 6.5% and reduces cost by 7.5%.

SAIC MOTOR’s smart factory has also been named a "national-level intelligent manufacturing benchmark". Its vehicle body workshop in the Lingang New Area is now the first unmanned demonstration production line and "no-light factory" in the automobile field in China, realizing 100% unmanned welding and fully automated gluing. Moreover, SAIC MOTOR has extended the application of digital solutions to its R&D process and follow-up marketing services with the intelligent factory as the core. This has enabled the company to adapt to the new model of "consumer-defined vehicle" in the digital economy.

In addition to these two benchmark enterprises at the top of the “Intelligent Manufacturing Pyramid”, five national-level intelligent manufacturing demonstration factories including SAIC Yanfeng have also emerged in Shanghai. Together with the 60 enterprises that have been or will be designated as municipal-level intelligent factories, Shanghai has already formed a large-scale, dynamic and multi-level community of intelligent manufacturing innovators.

Driving industrial chain upgrading

High-end manufacturing has long been Shanghai’s advantageous industry. Driven by innovation and digitization, manufacturing is increasingly seen as a main industrial platform that carries hard technologies and supports key technologies. Smart factories not only mean the innovation and upgrading of individual enterprises, but also carry with them a broad radiative and driving effect.

Despite the adverse impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, intelligent factories in Shanghai have actually entered a booming period, injecting strong resilience into “Made in Shanghai”. Statistics show a rapid increase in new investment in Shanghai’s manufacturing industry in the past two years, with intelligent upgrading receiving a much higher proportion of investment than land, factory and other traditional factors of production. The construction of smart factories not only props up Shanghai's industrial investment, but also helps enterprises reduce their dependence on labor. In fact, leading smart factories in Shanghai are also the first enterprises to resume work and production during the Covid-10 pandemic. At the same time, increased intelligence, expanded output and reduced labor consumption have helped these enterprises significantly raise their per person output in spite of the adverse impact of the pandemic. In the past two years, the output efficiency of intelligent factories in Shanghai has risen by about 30% on average, with even bigger increases in robotics and automation logistics industries

Besides, because intelligent factories are mostly at the core of their respective industrial chains, they have become a testing ground for numerous new intelligent equipment and technologies, thus playing a pivotal role in driving technological progress at both upstream and downstream. While exploring ways of “making robots by robots", STEP Robotics has also developed its own power reducers, servo motors and drivers, which are the three essential components of robots. Concurrent of accelerating the construction of its intelligent factories, SAIC has helped Anji Logistics to become a leader in intelligent warehousing in China and win many big orders. Overall, some 200 “first” intelligent projects (equipment sets) have emerged in Shanghai in the past few years. And, this number is expected to hit 300 during the 14th Five-Year Plan period. At the same time, as local competitive intelligent manufacturing integrators and service providers go global and become the backbone of intelligent factory construction, the "Shanghai Model" of intelligent manufacturing has also begun to be replicated overseas.

Advancing to the forefront of innovation

There is every reason to turn the surging momentum into a driving force for greater strides ahead. Setting sight on planning new development tracks, stimulating new growth drivers and creating new terminals, Shanghai will redouble its efforts to deepen the integration of digital technology and manufacturing by improving the business environment and providing better services, and bring the digital competitiveness of “Made in Shanghai” to a new level.

The year 2022 is the final year of Shanghai’s Special Three-Year Action Plan for Intelligent Factories. By providing online intelligent manufacturing test and evaluation for more than 2,000 enterprises and bringing offline expert consultations to at least 200 companies, the action plan has increased the proportion of enterprises above designated size receiving such online test and evaluation in Shanghai close to 25%, covering almost all the manufacturing enterprises above designated size. At the same time, Shanghai will also establish more than 1,000 characteristic scenarios of intelligent manufacturing in various industrial sectors. This will further boost Shanghai’s drive to build itself into a “World-class City of Intelligent Manufacturing".

The development of intelligent robots, intelligent equipment and intelligent networked vehicles is closely related to intelligent manufacturing, and Shanghai will also draw up blueprints for these sectors. According to its recently released “14th Five-Year Development Plan for High-End Equipment Industries, Shanghai will take "high-end leading and digital driving" as the main line, deepen the integrated development of new-generation information technology and high-end equipment, and form a matrix of world-class enterprises and products. In the robotics field, the city will vigorously promote the application of industrial robots in automobile, aerospace, marine engineering, consumer electronics, integrated circuits and other industries. On the other hand, it will also strive to bring service robots into the homes of ordinary people". In the fields of CNC machine tools, additive manufacturing and intelligent sensors, Shanghai will not only pay attention to leading enterprises, but also proactively support the rapid growth of a number of small giants and potential leaders. As for intelligent connected vehicles, Shanghai will encourage both the development of enterprises and the technological innovation of intelligent driving, intelligent connectivity and intelligent cockpits. In the meantime, active efforts will also be made to explore the commercial implementation of new technologies in public transport, sanitation, distribution and other fields.

In the great wave of digitalization, it is in fact entirely possible for factories to stand at the forefront of innovation, including playing an important role in the metaverse field. Once completed, the CloudMinds super robot factory currently under construction in Minhang District will not only realize robot making by robots, but also create a "metaverse" that can efficiently train robots in the virtual world through CloudMinds’s own intelligent platform. This will substantially reduce the need for thousands of trials and errors offline.

The opportunities of the era have come for intelligent factories. And, "Intelligent Manufacturing in Shanghai" looks promising and is set to deliver concrete results in the years to come!

 

Author: Zhang Yi, Wenhui Daily