Manufacturing companies accelerate the realization of intelligent manufacturing by replacing people with machines

In 2020, under the influence of the epidemic, many companies are facing the situation of no one available after resuming work. The labor shortage phenomenon further stimulates and promotes manufacturing companies to increase their awareness of replacing people with machines and improve the digitalization level of enterprises. Industrial robots not only serve as the "labor force" with priority for resuming work on the production lines of manufacturing companies, but also are widely used in various scenarios during the epidemic, becoming "service providers" on the front line. Machine replacement is being promoted by more and more industries, and unmanned applications are also being gradually promoted in various factories.

The Chinese market is the world's largest market for industrial robots, accounting for more than 30% of the total global sales of industrial robots, and the market size reached 40 billion in 2019. However, the density of industrial robots in China is only 140 units per 10,000 people, lagging behind other industrial countries. If it reaches the level of 327 units per 10,000 people in Japan, it will be a market with an annual market size of 100 billion. In the future, against the background of the disappearance of the demographic dividend and the rise in labor costs, China will enter a stage of steady growth in the industrial robot industry, with a CAGR of 22% in the next three years.

Various manufacturing companies have expressed that the positive impact of the epidemic is to accelerate the development of "machines replacing people". If factories can achieve a high degree of automation, they can effectively cope with the labor shortage.

Based on the experience of serving 460,000 industrial enterprises, UFIDA has summarized that there are roughly three mainstream paths for industrial enterprises to move towards the Industrial Internet: the first is to improve production efficiency by replacing people with machines; the other two are to improve collaborative efficiency by running errands over the Internet and to improve decision-making efficiency by replacing brains with algorithms.

So what else do manufacturing companies need to consider when replacing people with machines to solve the labor shortage and realize industrial interconnection and intelligent manufacturing?

Replacing people with machines to improve production efficiency

The increase in labor costs, the impact of the rapid development of artificial intelligence, and the increase in market options have forced manufacturing companies to transform and upgrade, and realize automation to adapt to market competition. The combination of artificial intelligence and machine production brings both opportunities and challenges: while industrial robots replace low-end labor, they also create new employment opportunities; this is a good time for industrial workers to transform themselves, and it also points out the development direction and future prospects for manufacturing companies. This is what we see, the significance of "machine replacement" for manufacturing companies.

"Replacing people with machines" can improve production efficiency mainly in the following four aspects:

1. Replace the production and processing links with industrial robots and other automated production equipment to improve processing efficiency

The demographic dividend is weakening, and the cost gap formed by the increase in the average wage of manufacturing employees and the decrease in the average price of robots is gradually widening, forcing companies to accelerate automation transformation. According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, China's aging population aged 16-69 continued to decrease from 2013 to 2018, decreasing by 0.6 percentage points year-on-year in 2018, and the total amount and proportion have continued to decline for five consecutive years. In contrast, the wages of employees in the manufacturing industry have maintained rapid growth. From 2008 to 2018, the average wage of employees in China's manufacturing industry increased from 24,400 yuan/year to 72,100 yuan/year, with an annual increase of 11%.

As the economic impetus brought by the demographic dividend gradually disappears, coupled with the gradual maturity of industrial robot technology and the gradual reduction of costs due to the localization of core components, companies are gradually strengthening their willingness and cost-effectiveness in carrying out automation transformation.

Traditional manufacturing companies often need to spend a lot of manpower to carry out handling and turnover during the production process, especially those using machine tools. In the past, when processing workpieces, one machine tool was often equipped with one worker to load and unload materials. This not only had low processing efficiency, but also easily resulted in damage to the machine tool or injuries to personnel due to improper operation by workers. By implementing "machine replacement", companies can not only significantly improve production efficiency, save a lot of labor costs and equipment footprint, but also reduce logistics time between processes and secondary damage during workpiece turnover.

Time is money. The implementation of "replacing people with machines" not only greatly improves the production efficiency of enterprises, but also significantly reduces the labor costs and production cycles of enterprises.

2. Replace the logistics and transportation links with automated logistics equipment such as AVG and WMS to improve logistics efficiency

With the changes in market demand and the transformation of manufacturing models, in order to better complete order delivery and optimize customer service experience, manufacturing companies continue to improve and enhance factory logistics execution efficiency. From the perspective of resource occupation and operating costs, the picking operation has always been a bottleneck for improving logistics efficiency. Picking operations in traditional factories consume many workers, the picking area occupies a large area, the operation intensity is high and the efficiency is low. Against this background, intelligent warehousing and logistics solutions are increasingly favored by manufacturing companies.

Traditional forklift and trailer operations require human drivers. Forklift or trailer drivers need to eat, drink, and rest during work, and may also slack off, which affects work efficiency. In addition, forklifts and trailers need to be driven to the charging room for charging after a certain period of work, resulting in the actual workload being less than 70%. AGV, as an automated material handling equipment, can be charged online and operate at full capacity 24 hours a day, which has advantages that manual operations cannot match.

Manufacturing companies effectively use AGV robots to replace people in the logistics and distribution links of the manufacturing industry. At the same time, combined with WMS warehouse logistics integrated management and with the help of MES information management platform, they can complete logistics handling tasks efficiently, accurately and flexibly, thereby improving production logistics efficiency and corporate competitiveness.

3. Replace the quality inspection process with automated inspection equipment such as automatic image inspection to improve inspection efficiency

Globally, industrial product appearance inspection instruments are a huge market with a scale of about 300 billion. This market is almost blank in China. Currently, only one or two large manufacturing companies are using related products, and most companies still rely on manual labor.

In the industrial manufacturing process, the last step for products on the production line is to check whether they are qualified. This work must be completed by experienced employees who are very familiar with the products, so there is a shortage of manpower and low efficiency.

According to the persons in charge of several mobile phone manufacturers, "taking the production of mobile phones as an example, workers at Foxconn, which manufactures for them, have to check the appearance of each finished mobile phone one by one, and it takes 7-8 seconds to inspect each mobile phone. If the inspection work is handed over to machines, then seven or eight mobile phones can be inspected in one second." After the realization of "machines replacing people", not only manpower is saved and the inspection efficiency is doubled, but the detection rate of manual inspection can be increased from more than 90% to more than 99%.

4. Install IoT boxes and other remote control devices in the field service process to improve service efficiency

At present, more and more manufacturing companies regard service as an important means to gain market competitiveness, increase the value of their core products by improving the quality of customer service, and expand the economic and social benefits of the company. Service-oriented manufacturing, as a new type of industrial form, has become an inevitable trend in the development of the manufacturing industry.

In theory, equipment manufacturers are the preferred units for equipment maintenance. However, due to problems such as untimely maintenance information, long service distances, and high maintenance costs, they cannot obtain income from later maintenance. In addition, part of the maintenance income is often controlled by small repair companies around the production plants. For equipment manufacturers, the after-sales market for equipment maintenance is a deep pain. Inadequate daily maintenance leads to high failure rates, insufficient operation and maintenance skills, and other maintenance status quos are also the problems that affect the production safety and economic benefits of manufacturing companies.

For example, traditional distributed photovoltaic power stations are generally located in remote areas and are far away. The operation and maintenance method is to ensure the normal operation of the photovoltaic power station through customer feedback or regular on-site inspections by service engineers. This will result in high operation and maintenance costs, customer complaints due to untimely problem handling, and even safety hazards due to untimely handling. Photovoltaic companies use UFIDA's "Manufacturing Cloud-Equipment Service" to install IoT boxes on site, combine IoT services, and achieve remote online monitoring of equipment, thereby achieving real-time control of the entire life cycle of the focused equipment. Distributed photovoltaic power stations have achieved unmanned, mobile, remote, and intelligent operation. Through on-site installation and delivery, IoT services, operation data monitoring, intelligent diagnosis and prediction, after-sales service, and other comprehensive closed-loop management and data precipitation, integrating AI and intelligent algorithm capabilities, photovoltaic companies can achieve the transformation of manufacturing companies into service-oriented companies and improve service efficiency.