At present, China's manufacturing industry is in an important transition period. In order to keep up with the trend of the development of the world's manufacturing industry, China urgently needs to improve the level of automation and reduce the cost of labor.
In the development of foreign manufacturing industry, industrial automation plays an important role in its production. The ratio of industrial robots per unit far exceeds the international standard of 55, but the application of domestic manufacturing automation is far behind this standard. China has a long way to go in industrial automation.
Automation transformation, the general trend
What can automation transformation bring to the enterprise?
● improve productivity
● reduce labor costs
● energy saving and emission reduction
● reduced labor intensity of workers
● improve product quality and stability
● shorten production cycle
Don't go into five mistakes of automation transformation
① the introduction of robots is to upgrade automation
The application of robot is one of the most representative aspects of automatic upgrading. But it doesn't mean that we can solve all problems. Pneumatic hydraulic control and non-standard equipment automation are also very important means to achieve automation.
Especially for some special applications, robot can not solve, non-standard automation equipment is the answer. In the process of automatic upgrading, we must not only focus on robots, but also on multiple channels.
② robots can be used when they are bought
As an intelligent device, robot is not easy to install and debug. If we ignore the development (or secondary development) and application of robots, many robots will not be able to use or use them properly. Take robots and sportsmen as an analogy. A group of good athletes (robots) and a good coach (system integrator) are the key to win the whole team (enterprise).
③ automation upgrading can be put in place in one step
The real automatic upgrading is not a simple work station or machine replacement, but an extremely complex system engineering. The automation transformation needs to be carried out according to our ability. It starts from the relatively mature automation technology, and starts from the parts of the factory that are in urgent need of upgrading and transformation. It must not be carried out in one step.
④ any process can be replaced by automatic equipment
The products produced by the automatic production line shall have enough large output; the product design and process shall be advanced, stable and reliable, and remain basically unchanged for a long time. Not all processes are suitable for automation transformation. It has remarkable economic benefits to adopt automatic line in mass production.
⑤ to realize automation transformation is to realize industry 4.0
Recently, the concept of industry 4.0 and made in China 2025 is so hot that many enterprises blindly follow the trend. Manufacturing enterprises should pay more attention to the actual technology and problem solutions. When it develops to the general management automation with information as the core technology, the era of industry 4.0 will also emerge.
Ways and means of automation transformation
1. Integration of automation and informatization
In the future, enterprises need to adjust production capacity flexibly according to market demand, realize personalized customization and manufacture intelligent products.
This can not only be achieved by automation technology, but also by information technology to solve business problems, give wisdom to the factory, and provide basis and support for market decision-making, data analysis, judgment, regulation, quality control, after-sales service, etc. Automation must be combined with information technology to be able to play the maximum effect, otherwise simple automation is meaningless.
2. Improve the intelligence of equipment
Manufacturing equipment has experienced from mechanical equipment to numerical control equipment, and is gradually developing into intelligent equipment. Intelligent equipment has the function of detection, which can realize on-site detection, so as to compensate the processing error, improve the processing accuracy, and compensate the thermal deformation.
Yumi, a dual arm robot launched by ABB, is a model of intelligent industrial robots.
In the past, some precision equipments have high requirements for the environment. Now, because of the closed-loop detection and compensation, the requirements for the environment can be reduced. One of the most basic requirements of intelligent equipment is to provide an open data interface to support device networking.
3. Improve the intelligence of production line
The application of intelligent production line in China's manufacturing enterprises is still in its infancy, but it must be the direction of development.
The characteristics of intelligent production line are as follows:
In the process of production and assembly, it can automatically collect data through sensors or RFID, and display real-time production status through electronic Kanban; it can detect quality through machine vision and a variety of sensors, automatically remove unqualified products, and carry out SPC analysis on the collected quality data to find out the causes of quality problems; it can support mixed production of many similar products and Assembly, flexible adjustment of process, to adapt to small batch, multi varieties of production mode; flexible, if there is equipment failure in the production line, it can be adjusted to other equipment production; for the manual operation of the station, it can give intelligent prompt.
4. Improve the intelligence of the workshop
A workshop usually has multiple production lines, which either produce similar parts or products, or have upstream and downstream assembly relationships. In order to realize the intelligent workshop, it is necessary to collect and analyze the production status, equipment status, energy consumption, production quality, material consumption and other information in real time, arrange production efficiently and reasonably, and significantly improve the equipment utilization rate (OEE).
Therefore, no matter what manufacturing industry, manufacturing execution system (MES) has become an inevitable choice for enterprises. MES is a workshop level integrated management system, which can help enterprises significantly improve the utilization rate of equipment, improve product quality, realize the traceability of production process, prevent wrong feeding, and improve production efficiency.
5. Improve the intelligence of the factory
It's not an intelligent factory with only automated production lines and a lot of robots. As an intelligent factory, not only the production process should be automated, transparent, visualized and lean, but also the 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 operation should be realized among multiple workshops in a factory.
Some discrete manufacturing enterprises also set up production command centers similar to process manufacturing enterprises to command and dispatch the whole factory and find and solve unexpected problems in time, which is also an important sign of intelligent factory. Intelligent factory must rely on seamless integrated information system support, including PLM, ERP, CRM, SCM and MES five core systems. The intelligent factory of large-scale enterprise needs to use ERP system to make the production plan of multiple workshops, and MES system makes detailed production scheduling according to the production plan of each workshop.
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