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    What is Smart Manufacturing? What challenges we should face?

    Smart manufacturing is an important trend in the development of the manufacturing industry and a direction to enhance competitiveness. Many companies are prone to rush transformation without understanding its practical. Before the transformation, they need to understand the basics and what difficulties they may encounter at first, and then plan suitable solutions for the company. In the end, the transformation plan can maximize the benefits.

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    What is Smart Manufacturing?

    "Smart manufacturing" is a keyword in recent years. In the generation of Industry 4.0, the combination of various technologies has made smart transformation one of the topics in the manufacturing industry. Smart manufacturing is mainly on the basis of data and constructing smart process production, equipment and management, cascade design, production and service, so as to reduce costs, improve manufacturing efficiency, optimize quality and experience, and promote the advancement of the industrial environment.

    【Read more】What is the definition of Industry 4.0? How does it affect us?

    Why do we need smart manufacturing?

    With the advancement of technology and the continuous growth of enterprises, no matter it is in which industry, experience will be used to solve problems or make decisions, however, this is difficult to systematize, and it takes a lot of time. Even though most decisions are based on feelings, there aren’t too many rules to refer to and support these decisions. If you can convert your work experience into data and save it as a basis for future analysis, you can improve the deficiencies.

    In terms of marketing, in the past, when advertising was placed, it was impossible to know whether it was effective without data, or what results it reached, and even the source of the order was unknown, but nowadays it has been able to achieve precise marketing and present detailed information. This is the benefit of digitization.

    At present, small and medium manufacturing industries have mostly imported automatic equipment, but there less data collection and applications, and even rely on manual operations, so that data cannot realize its value. The process of digital transformation may need the consideration of time and money, but if you can evaluate your own business earlier and make changes in time, it is believed that you can have a strong competitiveness.

    Four essential factors of smart manufacturing

    If you can know the trend of smart manufacturing in the industry, it will be quite helpful to the transformation and even become the leader of Industry 4.0. Understanding the following four factors and building a good foundation can speed up the practice of smart manufacturing.

    • Element 1: Import automation equipment

    Although automatic equipment is one of the foundations of smart manufacturing and can replace some labor-based jobs, the most important thing is to match and optimize all aspects of design, production, and service in order to have a high-efficiency and low-cost process. If we only focus on implement automatic equipment, it may just spend a lot of money without getting any benefits.


    • Element 2: Equipment connection and data integration

    After the automatic equipment is imported, the next step is to connect the equipment. Through the technology of the Internet of Things, the data of each equipment can be integrated, and the manufacturing process can be optimized.


    • Element 3: Remote Monitoring

    Smart manufacturing has replaced some labor work; therefore, people can perform more decision-making and technical work which assist operators follow up the status of equipment at any time through remote monitoring to adjust manufacturing schedules in real time, and reduce equipment downtime without warning, and increase productivity and extend equipment life.


    • Element 4: Combining AI technology

    The final goal of smart manufacturing is to combine Artificial Intelligence, which is also one of the most important trends at present. AI can allow equipment to upgrade, and it can collect various information to continuously optimize the process through self-learning.

    Present challenges

    Facing of the digital transformation brought by Industry 4.0, not only the manufacturing industry, but also the government wants to accelerate the intelligentization of the industry, in fact, many manufacturing industries will think that Industry 4.0 is only a technological innovation and an automatic unmanned factory that’s why a large amount of money has been invested but did not receive a corresponding return.


    There are several difficulties which are generally encountered in the process of transformation. For example, the integration of the automatic equipment production line mentioned above requires planning and design of a complete production line to create maximum benefits. Today's technology has gradually matured, however, enterprises are lack of the application and combination of high economic benefits, they cannot afford the cost frequently, resulting in the inability to implement smart manufacturing; there will be a period of manpower and system to integrate and adjust during the transformation, in addition to the transfer of data, internal training or recruitment of talents are also required. This period can be arranged in advance and tracked regularly to speed up the time for adaptation.


    Many companies are eager to carry out industrial transformation, thinking that they will be overtaken by other competitors if they don’t carry out it, however, we suggest evaluating the situation within the company before carrying out the transformation.

    Understanding the factors and challenges mentioned above, planning for possible problems, having a more complete integrated structure will make the follow-up transformation smooth and bring greater benefits.


    Main photo by IoT World

    Source: DFKI

    Reference Site College

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