2023-08-15
In less than three months, the production pace has increased from 15JPH to 50JPH, and in just one minute, a brand new vehicle has been taken off the production line. Fuel powered and electric vehicles are produced together, supporting personalized customization for customers, 100% automated production, with "zero" defects in production quality, "zero" inventory in short processes, and low energy consumption and "zero" emissions throughout the entire process... This is not a future automotive factory, but a reflection of the Chery Intelligent Connected Super Factory that has officially been put into operation.
In this factory, mass customization has become a reality, and the digitalization of the entire process has been implemented. Manufacturing intelligence and transparent management continue to create more benefits. In the process of building this super factory, Rockwell Automation's digital innovation solution, FactoryTalk InnovationSuite, played a central role, enabling the industrial internet to truly empower the automotive industry to go deeper and deeper.
Building a Super Factory Industrial IoT Platform
With the arrival of a new round of technological revolution and consumer upgrading, the automotive industry is facing disruptive changes. Many car companies are launching new models at an increasingly fast pace, with shorter launch cycles and stricter control over manufacturing costs. They are responding more quickly to consumer personalized customization and other needs. Manufacturing technology has become one of the core competitiveness of automotive enterprises.
As a benchmark enterprise for domestic car companies, Chery Automobile has actively implemented the core strategy of "Digital Chery" in recent years, and has built intelligent connected "super factories" in two bases in Wuhu and Qingdao, Anhui. It has comprehensively upgraded its existing production scale, manufacturing technology, management processes, and accelerated the transformation from "traditional cars" to "smart cars", thereby improving its core competitiveness.
A reporter from China Industry Daily learned that intelligence and internet connectivity are two major features of Chery's super factory. Specifically, the super factory has achieved intelligent production, intelligent quality control, digital management, and transparent operation. It not only has the characteristics of high intelligence, high quality, and efficiency, but also introduces an industrial internet platform and establishes a new production method of large-scale personalized customization.
It is understood that the key to the implementation of intelligence and networking lies in connecting the data between the underlying devices, control and monitoring layers on the operational technology (OT) side, the manufacturing execution system (MES), and enterprise resource planning (ERP) layers on the information technology (IT) side, and connecting the assets of the factory to all things, achieving visualization, transparency, and efficient collaboration of the factory. And it is none other than industrial IoT platforms that can undertake this task. After conducting thorough market research, Chery Automobile ultimately chose Rockwell Automation's digital innovation solution, FactoryTalk InnovationSuite platform technology, to build an industrial IoT platform for super factories.
According to data, FactoryTalk InnovationSuite is one of the leading comprehensive digital transformation software suites in the industry, providing widely integrated industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), edge to cloud analysis, MES, and augmented reality (AR) capabilities. In the Chery Intelligent Connected Super Factory, as part of the FactoryTalk InnovationSuite, the ThingWorx industrial IoT platform connects different devices, applications, and data sources in the factory, providing a single source for collecting, summarizing, and securely accessing operational data of on-site equipment and production lines. It adopts an intuitive user interface design to connect, manage, and Monitor and control various automation devices and software applications.
The ThingWorx system, as a core component of the "Industrial Internet" project in the super factory, provides more effective data and in-depth information to enterprises by creating a unified system architecture and IoT data format data center, empowering various departments of the factory, connecting various production and operation links, visualizing equipment inspection, production monitoring, production process, and HSE, making operation and system status clear at a glance, In order to achieve business data-driven, innovative applications can be quickly implemented, helping enterprises optimize industrial operations and improve production efficiency.
Not only that, ThingWorx, as an industrial IoT platform that runs through the underlying devices and upper management systems, provides support and functional expansion for various business systems in factories through flowing data. For example, through the control and monitoring of underlying equipment data, process data, and production data, ThingWorx has created a core tool for lean manufacturing execution, the Andon (safety lighting) system. The management of production processes in all factory workshops has been visualized, information transmission has been fast, process transparency has been achieved, and changes and iterations in production processes can be made quickly through ThingWorx. At the same time, ThingWorx also integrates the factory's energy management system, not only achieving energy consumption monitoring of various production equipment, but also optimizing energy management through big data analysis.
In addition, Rockwell Automation not only provides FactoryTalk InnovationSuite, but also utilizes FactoryTalk ProductionCentre to further expand the factory's existing MES system. By connecting various industrial equipment production data and various business systems, it coordinates and manages the company's personnel, equipment, materials, and energy resources, becoming a MOM (Manufacturing Operations Management) system that covers the entire factory. The dual platform architecture and original factory delivery implementation engineering team of FactoryTalk InnovationSuite and FactoryTalk ProductionCentre have greatly improved the production efficiency of the super factory, shortened the production time, and smoothly climbed the production pace from 15JPH to 50JPH in less than 3 months.
Empowering "Intelligent Car Manufacturing" with EPC Role
Currently, the launch cycle of new cars is becoming shorter, the models are iterating at a high speed, and the demand for personalization is becoming stronger. This forces car production to shift from "manufacturing" to "intelligent manufacturing". New production lines not only need to be able to quickly launch, but also support flexible manufacturing, agile manufacturing, and intelligent manufacturing.
In the Chery Intelligent Connected Super Factory, Rockwell Automation serves as the general contractor (EPC) for industrial IoT projects, providing Chery with full lifecycle services from consulting, project research, system blueprint design, target system functional design, as well as project implementation, system development, online debugging and acceptance. Through the implementation of industrial IoT projects, not only has paperless and transparent production been achieved for the entire factory, reducing labor costs by more than 30% and increasing production capacity by more than 10%, but the implementation time of the entire project has also been reduced by more than 30%.
Before the start of the project, there were multiple factory side IoT platforms in Chery Automobile's production bases and processes. However, these platforms had inconsistent architectures, differences in technical and functional architectures, and stability could not be guaranteed. It is urgent to unify the platform architecture in the subsequent construction of new factory IoT platforms and gradually promote them to old factories. ThingWorx in Rockwell Automation FactoryTalk Innovation Suite has become Chery's top choice due to its strong connectivity and stability.
Due to the involvement of tens of thousands of components in automobile manufacturing, assembly and production processes are very complex, requiring a large number of robots, CNC machine tools, and customized various specialized equipment to complete automated production. These equipment have numerous heterogeneous data, and the data timing is also greatly different. Moreover, it is difficult to unify the collection of process data and production data into a single data source, connecting them to what was originally independent of each other. ThingWorx has a history of over 20 years in Kepware industrial connectivity software, with over 200 built-in drivers that not only cover PLCs from all international major factories, but also support common protocols such as OPC UA, MQTT, REST, EFM, ODBC, or SNMP. It also supports numerous proprietary protocols such as GE NIO, SuiteLink/FastDDE, and Splunk, making data collection and device interconnection no longer a challenge.
Flexible and agile development is also an important reason why ThingWorx can complete project implementation in such a short time. On the one hand, thanks to ThingWorx being a proven IoT platform with many successful cases, its maturity and stability are very high. On the other hand, due to the commonly used software interfaces that ThingWorx comes with, custom development can be completed through drag and drop without the need for code or low code. Therefore, for tasks that would have taken several months to complete, ThingWorx can complete rapid validation and deployment in less than a week.
From "manufacturing" to "intelligent manufacturing", Chery Automobile's intelligent connected super factory has set a benchmark for the entire automotive industry, and Rockwell Automation's FactoryTalk InnovationSuite digital innovation solution is also expected to become an accelerator for the automotive industry to move towards "intelligent manufacturing".
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