| Industry is the dominance of the national economy, a country's technology and economic development is decided a lot by its industrial development. In the history of human industrial development, starting from the 18 th century till 70's of 20 th century, there were total 3 industry revolutions, which brought the huge contribution to the human industrial development, production progressed from the original manual working through batch assembly production till current automated production. However, in recent years, due to times change, human consumption behavior change as well as the big competition in the market, manufacturing companies are facing more and more new challenges and problems, including: increasing production cost, low productivity, customized products demand, unbalance between demand and supply, shorter product lifecycle et ct. all these challenges require a new solution to fit the new time requirement.Since 2010, with the quite fast development of Internet and Internet of Things technology, intelligent manufacturing becomes possible. Since Mar 2013 Germany government officially included Industry 4.0 into its national “High-tech Strategy 2010”, intelligent production and 4th Industrial Revolution is becoming hot topics in manufacturing and software areas, Industrial 4.0 becomes the model of every country industrial development strategy, it is considered as the perfect solution to solve almost all existing challenges which are being faced by manufacturing companies. From government leaders to manufacturing company leaders, all are considering the corresponding strategy and looking for suitable solutions to keep itself competitive in the new industry era, e. g., should we start the transform, how to find the right route…. Afterwards, since May 2015, China government published Chinese version “smart production”, called “China Manufacturing 2025”.The author of this article is working in BSS Company, the main business of BSS Company is automotive products research and development, production as well as sales. In recent years, company is facing various problems, like: operation cost increasing every year, new competitors come into the market, sales price is pushed to continue reducing, quality can't achieve target, non-transparent production data for decision making, low equipment OEE, unbalance between demand and supply, high customized demand and shorter product lifecycle and so on. In order to solve these problems to secure its leading position in the automotive production industry, since early 2013, BSS Company decided to start seeking for an in-depth solution, author of this article joined the project team as a member of it. After a period of research and decision, transforming project team reached an agreement: managing to transform to smart factory is the best way to solve all these problems.Within nearly 3 years of transforming period of BSS company, many of problems were solved, an average 15%-30% production cost reduction was achieved; a lot of equipment failure and product quality problems were unexpectedly detected from the big data analysis which avoided a lot of company loss; and a lot of improvement areas were found out; at the same time, the Company got a lot of invaluable management theory and practice knowledge and experience, this generates the main research, and this research mainly include the following contents:1. Introduced the subject background, research value, and the current smart factory research situation all over the world.2. Systematically lists the definition, structure, application value as well as main management components of smart factory.3. Analyzed BSS company current status and existing problems. From problems analysis and internal/external environment analysis, managing the transforming to smart factory is the solution to BSS company existing problems, and it's the most crucial factor to decide the success of the transforming. SWOT analysis tool is used in this part to prove the transforming direction and decision.4. Described the smart factory transforming management process and implementation, as well as the implementation achievements.5. Shared practice learnings and notices got from management of BSS Company's transforming to smart factory, forecasted the upcoming challenges and solutions.In the end it's a summary of the complete article. |
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