The 13th Five Year Plan period is a crucial period for improving the quality and efficiency of China's manufacturing industry, and for it to become stronger. Intelligent transformation is the key to building a strong manufacturing country. Achieving "digital, networked, and intelligent" manufacturing is a new trend in the development of the manufacturing industry, as well as the core of a new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation. The current intelligent manufacturing industry in China is still in its early stages of development, with most enterprises in the initial stage. Taking the electronics industry as an example, EMS company Foxconn has gradually accelerated the pace of "machine replacement" since 2015, and home appliance manufacturing companies such as Hisense and Gree have also made efforts in automated production lines. Such as this, the intelligent manufacturing of most enterprises is still in its early stages, but the cost-effectiveness it brings is obvious.

At present, domestic manufacturing enterprises are vigorously promoting the construction of intelligent manufacturing, gradually starting to try to promote related applications in seven aspects: "intelligent research and development", "intelligent logistics", "intelligent production", "intelligent management", "intelligent services", "intelligent products", and "intelligent equipment". Some enterprises focus on "transformation and upgrading", while others focus on "improving quality and efficiency".

Through the official website of the National Bureau of Statistics, I saw that in 2016, industrial enterprises above designated size in China achieved a total profit of 6880.32 billion yuan, an increase of 8.5% compared to the previous year. From January to April 2017, the total profit of industrial enterprises above designated size increased by 24.4% year-on-year, a slowdown of 3.9 percentage points compared to January March; Among them, profits increased by 14% in April. The slowdown in industrial profit growth is a reasonable return after the previous high growth. Overall, industrial profits are still maintaining a good growth trend. This should also be the application effect of most enterprises currently promoting intelligent manufacturing. It also enhances confidence for enterprises that are currently observing or waiting.

The purpose of manufacturing enterprises to promote "quality and efficiency improvement" is to effectively control various costs, improve production efficiency, enhance technology, quality, and service levels, innovate development space, and enhance market competitiveness. To this end, manufacturing enterprises should establish relevant promotion teams and mechanisms, guide various departments of the enterprise to reduce costs and increase efficiency, innovate production and operation models to increase efficiency, market development to increase efficiency, strategic transformation to increase efficiency, manage and control production and operation costs, actively extend the industrial chain, expand new development space, transform production and operation models, accelerate entrepreneurship and innovation, improve strategic adaptability and risk prevention capabilities, and promote and ensure the improvement of enterprise quality and efficiency. Based on our own actual situation, identify the shortcomings and bottlenecks that constrain quality and efficiency improvement, actively benchmark with domestic and foreign enterprises, clarify gaps and improvement directions, formulate targeted main paths for breakthroughs, and effectively improve the quality of development and increase efficiency. However, it is important to be clear that path planning must be clear and not overly ambitious. It should be implemented step by step and broken down one by one. Everyone should be well aware that the six elements (human, machine, material, method, environment, and measurement) and six objectives (efficiency, quality, cost, delivery time, soil gas, and safety) of the production process are the focus of management work, and improving quality and efficiency still revolves around the six elements and six objectives.

1. Improving quality

The influencing factors of product quality run through the entire lifecycle of the product, and it is necessary to collect, monitor, and analyze quality information throughout the entire product cycle, including research and development, procurement, manufacturing, quality assurance, sales, and customer service. Manufacturing enterprises must establish an effective quality data collection mechanism, collect quality related information from the six elements throughout the entire process, ensure the timeliness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness of quality data to the greatest extent possible, and build a product quality data center. More importantly, it is important to make good use of the data in the product quality data center, explore its value, not only by simply conducting an analysis, but also by identifying problems through analysis, formulating regulatory and improvement measures, and organizing their implementation. Next, we enter a new round of PDCA cycle: quality data collection, data analysis, problem identification, development of improvement measures, and organization of implementation, all in a cycle. In repeated cycles, enterprises continuously strengthen the supervision and management of quality issues, effectively achieving continuous improvement of product quality.

From product research and development design to the entire production process and even market use, a comprehensive digital product archive can not only ensure the integrity of product data, but also achieve integrated design and manufacturing on this basis, realizing a quality control system that focuses on prevention, monitoring as a supplement, and analysis and improvement as an effective means in the manufacturing process.

In addition, do not let the existing quality engineering and management system of the enterprise become a document on the document server, but rather a guiding document to guide the enterprise in improving product quality, realizing the functional transformation of quality personnel from "post remedial" to "pre preventive", thereby enhancing the core competitiveness of the enterprise itself.

2. Efficiency enhancement rate

To improve production efficiency in the production process, we still analyze the problems that exist in the production process from the six essential factors:

People: Employees have low work skills (lagging employee skill assessment mechanisms) and lack effective skill training; The team leader's management ability is insufficient, and they have not been able to apply materials according to their needs, resulting in a lack of supervision function; Lack of a reasonable incentive mechanism, low team work enthusiasm, low morale, lack of responsibility, and weak efficiency awareness.

Machine: The production equipment and fixtures lack standardized maintenance and upkeep requirements, and there is no dedicated person responsible for management. Basic information such as ledger, status, usage records, inspection and maintenance records, and repair records are missing. Some equipment and fixtures lack operation guidance, resulting in improper operation by employees and seriously affecting production efficiency.

Material: No clear and feasible management system for material procurement, warehousing, transportation, quality inspection, etc. has been established; No batch or sequence management has been carried out for purchased raw materials, semi-finished products, and finished products; Failure to establish effective control measures for suspicious and non-conforming products during the process; The collection of material information during the production process relies on paper documents, which is inefficient and not conducive to material traceability.

Method: Some products have unreasonable production process design and operation methods, resulting in discontinuous production processes and low efficiency; SOP lacks practicality and employee operation methods are not standardized; New products and products that have not been produced for a long time lack engineering and technical guidance, resulting in many abnormalities, untimely handling, and a large amount of labor costs for rework; The production arrangement and wiring are unreasonable, resulting in significant loss of balance and excessive waiting and waste.

Environment: The production site planning is chaotic, 5S management is outdated, materials and tools are not properly managed, and there is a lack of visual inspection on site, resulting in wasted time for employees to search for and retrieve materials and tools.

Measurement: In response to the low standardization of inspection standards, there is a large amount of manual filling in content. The testing report needs to be manually organized. Whether it is self inspection, mutual inspection, or specialized inspection, they are only recorded according to standards and do not realize the true value of inspection.

The efficiency improvement in these six aspects requires improving management, introducing information systems to cooperate with management, and implementing lean production planning and improvement.

3. Cost reduction

I believe that many enterprises have already promoted comprehensive budgeting, strategic cost concepts, target cost management, capital turnover management, strengthened cost accounting, established cost responsibility systems, and other comprehensive cost management and control systems. However, to solve the problem of high costs from a technical perspective, it is still necessary to find cost increase points that can be optimized.

The cost source of manufacturing enterprises is the sum of various expenses incurred in manufacturing a certain type of product and quantity. Cost factors run through the entire lifecycle of manufacturing activities. Production costs are divided into direct costs (raw material costs, worker wages, etc.) and indirect costs (management expenses, depreciation expenses, maintenance expenses, machine and material consumption expenses, etc.). In addition, it also includes a quality cost, which is a tangible cost structure that can be data-driven and analyzed.

Direct cost is usually achieved by improving product design and production processes to reduce consumption quotas and lower costs.

Indirect costs, as a convention, involve strengthening budget management of expenses and improving the granularity of expense control in each unit to reduce costs.

Quality cost is usually strictly controlled from three aspects: product raw materials, process, and process to reduce the quality cost that causes defects.

For manufacturing enterprises, whether it is process improvement, machine replacement, or increasing control granularity, it is an important issue, such as:

In casting enterprises, during the melting process, equipment is modified to improve the combustion utilization rate of gas and reduce consumption quotas.

In the equipment control process, by collecting equipment status data and analyzing big data, optimize the frequency of equipment maintenance and the service life of spare parts, and reduce costs.

For employee salaries, analyzing low technical content and high operating frequency can replace human work positions with machines, optimizing personnel structure, improving work efficiency and accuracy, and thereby reducing costs.

Enterprises that adopt piece rate wages should monitor the rationality of their plans, the authenticity and timeliness of piece rate reporting data, and account for costs with optimal tasks and accurate data.

In the spraying workshop, optimize the scheduling of spraying and delivery plans to minimize paint and labor waste, and reduce costs.

Taking relay production as an example, we will replace traditional manual operations with one-time automated assembly, testing, and packaging equipment to establish an "unmanned factory" to cope with the increasing labor costs in China;

By means of equipment data collection and quality data analysis, real-time monitoring of product production process parameters can reduce the occurrence of defective products.

By utilizing digital management methods in the production process, we can reduce labor and time costs in the production process.

The essence of intelligent manufacturing is to organically connect intelligent equipment (including but not limited to robots, CNC machine tools, automated integrated equipment, 3D printing, etc.) through communication technology, achieve production process automation, optimize production processes, and improve production efficiency; And collect various data during the production process through various perception technologies (sensors, RFID, machine vision, etc.), upload them to industrial servers through communication methods such as industrial Ethernet, process and analyze data under the management of MES software system, and interface with enterprise resource management software (ERP) to provide optimized production plans or customized production, achieving intelligent production; Developing innovative intelligent products to create new business models and establish new business value growth points for enterprises in the new market environment. Make the path of improving quality and efficiency clearer, execution more transparent, decision-making more scientific, and the effect more obvious.