From ‘Dark Factory’ to ‘Second-lever Production’,The way for traditional Factory ?
Dark factories may gradually replace most traditional factories in the future!
Using advanced digital and intelligent means, from raw materials to the final product, all processing, transport, testing processes are completed in the empty ‘Dark Factory’. There is no need for manual operation, mainly by intelligent robots or automated equipment in accordance with the instructions of the software system to complete automatically.
The ‘Dark Factory’ reduces a large amount of human cost investment and greatly improves production efficiency and production effectiveness. As a result of the use of many highly automated equipment, technology, processes, such factories in the automated production line is basically ‘year-round’, without human intervention in the production process. This significantly improves production efficiency, reduces production costs and shortens lead times.
The ‘Dark Factory’ ensures the improvement and stability of product quality. Through the accurate monitoring and control of automated equipment and sensors, the machines can independently judge and solve some problems in the production process, changing the traditional way of relying on workers to ‘see, hear and feel’, so as to achieve the dynamic detection of the equipment, automatic control of production and automatic control of energy efficiency.
By creating a ‘people rest machine does not stop’ man-machine cooperative operation mode, ‘Dark factory’ greatly reduces the labour intensity of workers, from the heavy, repetitive labour to liberate, by the machine instead of the workers to complete the high-intensity, especially hazardous labour, improve the safety coefficient of production. The safety coefficient of production has been improved.
The operation of the ‘Dark Factory’ does not mean that manual labour can be abandoned, it is based on a comprehensive consideration of production efficiency, production costs and other factors, to decide which work is done by the machine, which is done by man, this is a human-machine collaboration process.
I. Efficiency revolution: industrial fission from ‘Dark factory’ to ‘second-class intelligence’
Xiaomi’s car produce a car in76 seconds , Tesla Shanghai Super Factory single line uses 45 seconds to complete the body welding, JinkoSolar photovoltaic vertically integrated intelligent factory to achieve the whole process of unmanned, behind these figures is the industry 4.0 era of the three core changes:
1.
Production beat breaks through the physical limit: through the digital twin technology to preview the production process, AI algorithms to optimise equipment collaboration in real time, robotic arm welding accuracy of 0.02 mm level, production line switching model time compressed to 15 minutes
2.
Quantum entanglement of the supply chain: the intelligent supply chain system built by the Jingdong Yanxi model can achieve a millisecond response to the data of 200,000 suppliers, and the number of days of inventory turnover has been shortened by 70% compared with the traditional model. 3. Subversive reconstruction of energy consumption: BYD's factory rooftop photovoltaic power generation of more than 50 million kWh annually, and the CATL‘Zero-Carbon Factory’, which has a 25% reduction of energy consumption per kWh of electricity produced.
When the light of the industrial lighthouse illuminates the workshop, the traditional production mode is undergoing the cruel screening of ‘Digital Darwinism’. The Changsha plant of GAC-EAN has completed the transformation from a fuel-vehicle plant to a new-energy manufacturing base in eight months, with an equipment renewal rate of 92%, confirming the accelerated industrial reshuffling predicted by ‘Made in China 2025’.
II.Second, the life and death of traditional enterprises: transformation or demise of the two-way track
In this change, two types of enterprises are rewriting the fate of the script:
Breaker’s case: Yiwu Oukais through the rubbish bag ‘twelve constellations + celadon’ cross-border design, single product sales pushed up to 50 million .Tongxiang Heying clothing 24-year-old ‘The second generation of the factory’ with live e-commerce 3 months to clear the inventory, 1688 platform high unit price women's orders increased by 320%!
Demise Alert: A packaging factory in Anhui lost 68% of its market share in 3 years because it could not take flexible orders starting from 200 pieces.
35% of small and medium-sized auto parts companies in the Yangtze River Delta region were forced out because they couldn't keep up with the digital delivery standards of OEMs.
Digital transformation is no longer a question of choice but a question of survival. Under the State Council's special refinancing policy for equipment renewal, 473 projects in Hunan have been supported by technical transformation funds, signalling the dual-wheel drive mode of ‘state power + market mechanism’. Enterprises must establish ‘three new’ capabilities: new consumer insights (C2M reverse customisation), new organisational structure (amoeba + digital middle office), new value network (industrial meta-universe collaboration).
III. The evolutionary path of industrial workers: from screws to ‘human-machine symbiosis’
When the precision of welding robots beyond twenty- years workers, industrial workers face a triple evolutionary path:
1. Skill leap: CITIC Pacific Special Steel Group carriage worker Zhou Qing used half a year to transform the intelligent control centre master controller, with a salary increase of 140% 2. Human-machine collaboration: GAC Eian plant ‘robotic arm group dance’ scenario, the role of the workers changed to equipment monitoring and abnormal intervention experts 3. Value reshaping: 95 ‘factory two’ Stanford AI algorithms introduced into the food production line, so that the new product research and development cycle is shortened by 60%.
The government-led ‘digital craftsman’ cultivation plan is being rolled out: Shanghai has released a catalogue of 100 types of jobs in short supply for intelligent manufacturing, and Anhui has launched a training project for ‘one million robot operators’. The future factory will form a ‘1133’ talent structure: 1 AI commander, 1 digital twin engineer, 3 robot maintenance engineers, 3 cross-border creators, completely reconstructing the workshop manpower pyramid.
IV. Ecological panorama of the factory of the future: a new world of manufacturing in 2030
Based on the evolution of existing technology, we can foresee: 1. production paradigm: the rise of modular micro-factories, 50-person teams + 100 collaborative robots can achieve annual production capacity of 100,000 vehicles 32. organisational form: DAO (Distributed Autonomous Organisations) management model popularity, workers through the blockchain smart contract to get instant performance incentives 3. industrial relations: the formation of ‘super factory + satellite factory’ ecosystem. The head enterprises such as Xiaomi Automobile will integrate 3,000+ secondary suppliers into the digital collaborative network.
This change brings not only efficiency improvement, but also the reconstruction of human industrial civilisation. When the microwave oven production line in the Granz Industry 4.0 base achieves a beat of 0.5 seconds per unit, and when the Jingdong Intelligent Body Platform enables ordinary salesmen to develop AI applications, we are witnessing the path of technological realisation of Marx's ‘association of free men’ prophecy. Finding the Light of Humanity in the Roar of Machines
In the era of rapid technological development, factories are no longer cold steel jungles. In JinkoSolar's smart factory, photovoltaic panels and green plant walls reflect each other; the 95-year-old ‘second generation of factories’ uses AR technology to restore the old workshop when his father started his business. This change teaches us that it is not the workers who really need to be eliminated, but the management thinking that treats people as machines. When Made in China takes off the old crown of ‘World Factory’ and puts on the new crown of ‘Human Intelligent Manufacturing Lighthouse’, every participant will be a co-writer of this great story.