Industrial Tablet PC Smart Manufacturing Transformation Step: Install Sensors?
Today's automation industry is really "the tree wants to be quiet but the wind does not stop". The tide of industrial robots has just passed. General Secretary Xi Jinping, the leader of the "World Internet Conference" held in Wuzhen, Hangzhou, delivered an important speech, which is enough to see the impact of technological innovation and reform. Pay attention and vigorously support. The "strong wind of the Internet industry" blows waves after waves. Who can lead the trend of the times? Let's look at today. Today, let's talk about the vigorous promotion of Internet technology to industrial technology. Everyone knows that "Industry 4.0" is coming. Whether it is international giants or industry elites, they are busy transforming and upgrading factories one step ahead. See what has changed in factories transformed with Industry 4.0 technology?
An incremental transformation of Industry 4.0 is underway. This Suzhou factory is Bosch's larger factory outside Europe. Its two most well-known products are the electronic control units for automotive ABS (anti-lock braking system) and ESP (body electronic stability system). The factory produces more than 12 million pieces per year.
On December 10, Wang Bo led more than a dozen reporters to visit this model factory. Not long ago, he just completed the wheel Industry 4.0 transformation of the ABS electronic control unit production line in the factory. Wang Bo is now the department manager of Production System Planning and Industry 4.0 of the Automotive Electronics Division, which was established by the Suzhou factory in February this year.
Although the factory that Bosch put into use in 2004 has a high degree of automation, there are still a considerable number of processes that require manual participation. In the production line of the ABS electronic control unit, the placement machine is a key piece of equipment. It is responsible for assembling capacitors, inductors and other components on the blank integrated circuit board to realize various functions of the ABS controller. The placement machine can automatically complete the assembly of components, but it is still necessary to manually replenish capacitors, inductors and other materials to these machines to ensure the normal operation of the machine.
In an ABS controller production line, there are usually four to five placement machines, with two operators per shift. They are responsible for equipment inspection, observe when the capacitors, inductors and other materials assembled by these machines will be used up, and request the warehouse to pick up the goods in advance. After the goods in the warehouse are in place, the operators also need to manually replenish the rolls of electronic component materials for the placement machine. These two tasks account for 30% and 70% of the operator's total daily workload, respectively.
Wang Bo used to be the department manager in charge of this process, and he has been thinking about how to improve the work efficiency of the operators. Since the operation of feeding materials requires considerable skills, it is temporarily impossible to replace automation with industrial robots. However, the work of inspecting the placement machine can be transformed by means of Industry 4.0.
The method is to connect the production line and the material warehouse, which were previously independent systems, and the information communication between them was done manually. this information. Wang Bo's vision is to build a bridge between the two systems to directly connect the information between the machines. This is also quite in line with the concept of Industry 4.0. Compared with the automation emphasized by Industry 3.0, the focus of Industry 4.0 is to realize the information interconnection between machines.
At the beginning of 2014, the Suzhou factory began to develop a set of software for collecting the operation data of the placement machine and automatically sending instructions to the warehouse when the material needs to be replenished. It was named the automatic material ordering system. Trials of the system began in June last year on an ABS electronic control unit production line at the factory. When the system is running, once the materials of the placement machine are about to run out, the warehouse on the second floor of the workshop will automatically receive instructions to send the materials to the first floor through the elevator, and send them to the designated production line by the unmanned trolley. After the operator picks up the goods Complete the feeding process.
As a result, operators no longer need to perform routine inspections on the production line. Wang Bo told Jiemian News that after implementing the independent material ordering system after the transformation of Industry 4.0, an ABS electronic control unit surface mount production line running 24 hours can save 20% of manpower input. At the same time, because the placement machine has better estimates of how much material will be needed at what time, the material inventory used for this has also been reduced by 50%. At the beginning of this year, all ABS electronic control unit production lines of Bosch Suzhou plant began to adopt the automatic material ordering system, and gradually promoted it to other automotive electronic production lines under Bosch.
After being appointed as the manager of the production system planning and industry 4.0 department, Wang Bo also began to try to transform the factory with more industry 4.0 concepts, such as loading sensors on the equipment of the production line to collect various data in real time. Based on the machine operating parameters collected by these sensors and data analysis, it can determine which of the large number of machines in the factory will be abnormal, so as to make targeted predictive maintenance to reduce equipment downtime. In the past, the regular inspections with weak purpose or the maintenance after the failure of the machine was carried out.
Although it has become Bosch's industrial 4.0 model factory in China, Wang Bo said that for now, the factory is still in the process of industrial 4.0 transformation.
Piloting Industry 4.0 in its factories is just a step planned by Bosch. It is its longer-term goal to become a service provider and export Industry 4.0 to Chinese manufacturing enterprises in batches. When the concept of Industry 4.0 is more and more known and mentioned by the Chinese industry, Bosch naturally does not want to miss this vast potential market. The sensor equipment that is being pilot-installed in the Suzhou factory is expected to be sold to manufacturing customers in need of Industry 4.0 next year, all of which are developed and produced by Bosch itself.
Like Bosch, many manufacturing giants from Germany are continuing to export Industry 4.0 to China, a concept proposed by Germany in 2013. In October 2015, German SAP signed a contract with Xugong Group to jointly carry out the overall improvement project of Industry 4.0. The amount involved in this cooperation is 50 million yuan; Siemens also signed contracts with Shenyang City, Liaoning Province and Jiangmen City, Guangdong Province this year to develop Industry 4.0. cooperate.
Regarding Industry 4.0, there was a saying that although 99% of people have heard of Industry 4.0, 99% of them do not know what it is. For German manufacturing giants such as Bosch and Siemens, becoming the leader in the 1% is undoubtedly their goal. However, at present, Industry 4.0 is not yet fully mature, and how much changes it can bring to factories is still in the exploratory stage.
