As a manufacturing power, the integration of automation, intelligence and information technology will become the basic force to promote the fourth industrial Revolution, so the demand for machinery manufacturing and automation is long-term and stable.

Nowadays, mechanical manufacturing and its automation affect all aspects of human life: from machinery equipment such as aerospace, shipbuilding and mining to daily necessities such as refrigerator, washing machine and mobile phone, mechanical manufacturing and its automation are everywhere.

After years of efforts and precipitation, China's manufacturing industry is shifting from low-end labor-intensive to high-end intelligent manufacturing.
However, the manufacturing industry still has a big pain point to face. Nowadays, young people prefer to deliver food rather than go to work in factories. The traditional manufacturing industry has suffered a significant blow, which has affected the development of the whole manufacturing industry.
The brain drain, the scarcity of labor is having an impact on the market, but it also sees a bright future for mechanical automation.
It is true that China has a long way to go in a few advanced countries in the field of high-end equipment manufacturing -- but when it comes to controlling these devices, and producing whole parts, China has a huge advantage.
I believe that in the foreseeable future, China's mechanical automation will become a high-precision manufacturing power.



1. Integration of automation and informatization

In the future, enterprises need to adjust production capacity flexibly according to market demand, realize personalized customization and produce intelligent products.

This can't be achieved only by relying on automation technology, but also by relying on information technology to solve problems at the business level, instill wisdom in factories, and provide basis and support for market decision-making, data analysis, judgment, regulation, quality control and after-sales service.
Automation must be combined with information technology in order to give full play to its effect, otherwise pure automation is meaningless.

2. Improve the intelligence of equipment

Manufacturing equipment has experienced mechanical equipment to CNC equipment, and is gradually developing into intelligent equipment.
Intelligent equipment has detection function, which can realize in-machine detection, so as to compensate machining error, improve machining accuracy, and compensate thermal deformation.

In the past, some precision equipment had high requirements on the environment, but now the closed-loop detection and compensation can reduce the requirements on the environment.
One of the most basic requirements of intelligent equipment is to provide an open data interface capable of supporting device networking.

3. Improve the intelligence of the production line

The application of intelligent production line in China's manufacturing enterprises is still in its infancy, but it is bound to be the direction of development.

The features of the intelligent production line are:

In the process of production and assembly, data collection can be automatically carried out through sensors or RFID, and real-time production status can be displayed through electronic Kanban;
Through machine vision and various sensors to carry out quality detection, automatically eliminate unqualified products, and SPC analysis of collected quality data to find out the causes of quality problems;
Can support the production and assembly of a variety of similar products, flexible adjustment of the process, adapt to the small batch, variety of production mode;
Flexible, if there is equipment failure on the production line, can be adjusted to other equipment production;
For manual operation of the station, can give intelligent tips.

4. Make the factory more intelligent

As a smart factory, not only should the production process be automated, transparent, visible and lean, but also product detection, quality inspection and analysis, and production logistics should be closed-loop integrated with the production process.
Information sharing, on-time delivery and collaborative work should be realized among multiple workshops in a factory.

Some discrete manufacturing enterprises have also set up production command centers similar to those of process manufacturing enterprises to command and dispatch the entire factory and timely find and solve unexpected problems, which is also an important symbol of smart factories.
Smart factories must rely on the support of seamless integrated information systems, including PLM, ERP, CRM, SCM and MES five core systems.
Intelligent factories of large enterprises need to use ERP system to make production plans for multiple workshops, and MES system will make detailed production scheduling according to the production plans of each workshop.
A workshop usually has multiple production lines, which either produce similar parts or products, or have upstream and downstream assembly relationships.
To realize the intellectualization of the workshop, real-time collection and analysis of production status, equipment status, energy consumption, production quality, material consumption and other information are needed to carry out efficient production scheduling and reasonable shift scheduling, so as to significantly improve the equipment utilization rate (OEE).

Therefore, no matter what manufacturing industry, manufacturing execution system (MES) has become the inevitable choice of enterprises.
MES is a workshop level integrated management system, which can help enterprises significantly improve equipment utilization rate, improve product quality, achieve production process traceability and fault prevention, and improve production efficiency.