Industry 4.0 will usher in an unprecedented era of intelligent manufacturing, but it will not cause the entire industrial system to change overnight. Intelligent manufacturing is actually a "soft transition", or a continuous innovation and evolution process towards "soft manufacturing".
Softness, also known as "flexibility", is the opposite of "rigidity". Nowadays, there is a misconception in China about "Industry 4.0" or "Made in China 2025", which is that when it comes to this, it must be a highly automated assembly line that can be seen. It is believed that intelligent manufacturing refers to the large-scale application of advanced equipment such as industrial robots, CNC machine tools, and intelligent sensors.
Little did they know, the more this happened, the more they fell into another bigger dilemma: the rigid automation dilemma, and there was a trend of getting deeper and deeper.
The dilemma of rigid automation not only fails to achieve "Industry 4.0", but is exactly the opposite. The more investment in automation equipment, the stronger the rigidity, and the more difficult it is to adapt to market changes, which is mainly reflected in the three aspects of technology, management and supply chain:
Technical rigidity: In fact, the concept of the Industrial 2.0 era, that is, large-scale investment in the transformation of factory assembly lines, in the 3.0 era, the integration of automation and information technology into the production line will greatly reduce the possible quality problems and achieve precise control of costs. (This part, most of my country's manufacturing companies currently need to make up for it, but there is no need to follow the old path of Europe and the United States). Because when the 3.0 era solves the two major problems of cost and quality, another more important problem emerges: that is, the lack of softness in production. The automated line only produces standard products. When a production line is fully automated, the flexibility is lost. Once the market demand and product types change, the cost of hardware replacement (including the associated tooling, fixtures, measuring tools, process files, etc.) is very high. In today's era when personalization is accelerating and becoming a trend, "rigid automation" is increasingly difficult to adapt to the ever-shortening product life cycle.
Management rigidity: Why do some Chinese factories still lag behind in production efficiency and market adaptability when their automation level is not inferior to that of their European and American counterparts? This is more of a management problem. The professional division of labor in Chinese factories is very detailed, even down to the process, and the determining factor has become proficiency rather than professional level. A large number of Chinese industrial enterprises have streamlined and limited personnel organization while the automation level is constantly improving. Many Chinese factories have too many management levels, and the management level is determined by the number of people. Chinese factories have a large number of personnel, and the functional departments have detailed division of labor, and each department has a manager. The finer the division of labor, the more management personnel are needed to coordinate. European and American factories are basically managed by one layer, or the manager is one person. In European and American countries, factories with several people are very common. European and American factories pay attention to "process management", and the advantage of stable processes is efficiency and order; while Chinese factories are mostly "process management", and many people are busy. It is always the production line that adapts to the product and the market, rather than the product and the market adapting to the production line. Once the market demand changes and the product design changes greatly, Chinese factories will have to mobilize a large number of people to adjust a large number of processes, while European and American factories only need to coordinate a small number of people to adjust the corresponding processes. Often, technical rigidity is not the most difficult to overcome, but management rigidity is the most difficult to solve, because it will touch the interests of insiders.
Supply chain rigidity: Even the assembly of the most technically unsophisticated products will involve very complex supply chain management. You should know that a mobile phone has about 100 parts, while a car has more than 7,000 parts, excluding screws and nuts. The difficulty of supply chain management poses a great challenge to manufacturers. The bigger challenge is how to keep the supply chain running at the same speed as the changes in the market situation. There is a famous "beer game" in supply chain management, which says that small changes in market terminal demand will be amplified by chains, and will eventually be reflected in the supply chain and the inventory of manufacturers like dominoes. Retailers, wholesalers and manufacturers, all have good intentions and want to meet market demand, keep products flowing smoothly in the system and avoid losses. However, due to the layers of barriers between manufacturers and consumers, the transmission of market information to the production link is slow and scattered, and manufacturers often cannot see changes in consumer demand from orders until several months later.
Prior to this, in order not to lose the opportunity to sell products, manufacturers had to stock up on major raw materials and parts. The rapid increase in product costs inevitably led to a sharp increase in product prices. As a result, sales plummeted and product prices began to fall rapidly like a roller coaster. However, the production cycle often could not be adjusted overnight, which inevitably led to an inventory backlog of finished products and raw materials and parts, and these inventories were all high-cost. As a result of the sharp drop in market prices, profits fell sharply. To make matters worse, inventory occupied cash, turnover slowed down, and the company's liquidity crisis ensued.
Supply chain rigidity was very serious in the era of Industry 2.0. The large-scale, large-scale, and fixed-process assembly line production method always faced a major risk - market demand fluctuated more and more along the supply chain, sales speed and production speed were seriously out of touch, and inventory backlogs and liquidity depletion became manufacturers' lingering nightmares. Therefore, industrial entrepreneurs are all striving to pursue soft manufacturing (or flexible manufacturing, agile manufacturing) to achieve synchronization between production speed and sales speed.
Soft manufacturing has become a necessity for the manufacturing industry to achieve upgrading and transformation and supply-side reform in the present and future.