Delta Smart Manufacturing Plans and Opportunities

To report on the strategy and development direction of Delta’s industrial automation, we started the column “About DSM” last year to share Delta’s progress from different perspectives with our colleagues. This year we will begin sharing notable cases from the Smart Manufacturing Solutions Business Division (SMSBD), which was established in 2017 to expand and promote Delta’s smart manufacturing business. We interviewed Lear Li, Director of the SMSBD, to discuss Delta’s smart manufacturing and plans to enter the market. In addition, the 23th Quality Diagnosis Meeting (QD23) was held at Delta’s Dongguan and Wujiang Plant in December last year and we have live reports.

Smart Manufacturing for Resolving the“Manpower”Issue
In addition to shorter product life cycles, shortages of raw materials, rising costs, and customer demand for hi-variety, low-volume manufacturing, another challenge presently faced by global industry is a serious labor shortage caused by falling demographics. To cope with these challenges, governments and enterprises around the world are exploring the topic of Industry 4.0, and expect it to become the strategic policy of a new-generation manufacturing industry. Automation equipment and automated assembly has been continuously introduced in recent years. The development of industrial IoT-related technologies also promotes big data collection and data analysis, so that artificial intelligence is widely applied in the continuous optimization of production. Today, production that integrates operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT) has extended to the full life cycle management of product R&D, design, manufacturing and sales service to provide a dynamic response to customer demand. In the past, the production line determined the form of products, but in the future products will decide the appearance of the production line. Smart manufacturing has become the key for an enterprise to provide more flexible production and more rapidly cope with consumption pattern changes and lower manpower requirements.

Self-monitoring, Self-adjustment and Self-learning
“Opportunities are where there is demand”. Delta Smart Manufacturing is based on information system backbones such as PLM-ERP-MES-WMS and comprehensively integrates production techniques, manufacturing processes and management indexes within the enterprise by means of digital planning (IT) and automatic manufacturing (OT). A digital enterprise analyzes personnel, equipment, products, environment and big data generated during production. It automatically establishes intelligent production with artificial intelligence by means of a knowledge base and an expert base, and offers optimum conditions for production resources and autonomous feedback between equipment, while optimizing production technique and business flow and creating smart manufacturing solutions capable of self-monitoring, self-adjustment and self-learning.

Smart Manufacturing Architecture.

Cyber Physical System from Top to Bottom
The smart manufacturing hierarchy system described by the International Society of Automation (ISA) from top to bottom is as follows:
Level-0 is the physical device layer, namely the production or detection machine in the factory.
Level-1 is the sensing and motion control layer, such as PLC, Robot, SCARA, visual sense and sensor.
Level-2 is the equipment control layer, such as SCADA and DCS (Distributed Control System).
Level-3 is the site management layer, such as MES (Manufacturing Execution System).
Level-4 is the business operation layer, such as ERP / PLM.
At present, Delta has comprehensive products or integration solutions for different layers.

ISA Smart Manufacturing Hierarchy System

Smart manufacturing emphasizes the integration of industrialization with informatization, which means that in addition to the provision of complete functions, products of aforesaid layers can interconnect with different layers by means of networking and timely data collection. To cope with the changes from the demand side (customers) and supply side (raw materials or machines), it can adopt real-time provisioning and optimum production as the total solution to make products value-added. Therefore, the vertical integration among products at different layers is more important.

In the past, the greatest difficulty encountered by the manufacturing industry came from numerous models of machines and controllers and different communication protocols. In view of this, how to integrate the communication among different machines and equipment and make customers more easily obtain equipment information by means of standard protocols and simple configuration to realize the first step of smart manufacturing becomes very important. In terms of the integration of physical device layer with motion control layer, DIALink is used as the gateway of information collection and conversion to capture the machine (e.g., CNC, PLC and Robot) information immediately, which is converted into common data format and then provided to DIAView system at the equipment monitoring layer for real-time monitoring of production site (SCADA), so as to make the equipment and production data between production lines transparent and visualized and feed back the real-time production performance. Concerning fully automatic production line and workshop planning, DIABC (Block controller) plays an intermediary role in real-time provisioning of WMS/MES resources and horizontal interconnection among equipment inside the production line, so as to realize lean production. The production system of cyber physical system is the total solution corresponding to smart manufacturing demands when facing customers.

Industrial Interconnection and Cyber Physical System

Take Advantage of Early Layout, Enjoy Success within Five Years

The 23th Quality Diagnosis Meeting was held in Dongguan and Wujiang Plant in late December last year, which summarized the work effectiveness of quality diagnosis in the past five years and guaranteed the consistency of the whole process connected from NPI (New Product Introduction) to GTC (Go To Customer) and TQA (Total Quality Assurance). Take Wujiang ICT/EIS Plant and IABG Plant as the example. NPI, GTC and TQA processes have their own characteristics and the cooperative series connection of NPI and GTC brings its maximum superiority into full play. The R&D team participates in the market operation to fully understand customer demands, application environment and analysis for competitive products and segment the products. TQA activity is constantly improved and enhanced, so as to challenge the objective of both the testing and manufacturing achieving 100% yield rate on the basis of DSM steadiness.

Dongguan plant 2 general product manager introducing MPBG's second generation production line

Man-machine Coordination and Plan Optimal Production Disposition with A Machine Instead of Human

The quality diagnosis meeting in Southern China checks and accepts the achievements of Delta Smart Manufacturing (DSM), works on TQA (Total Quality Assurance) diagnosis and emphasizes on viewing DSM Smart single-machine level, continuously enhancing automatic demonstration line and perfecting TQA system.

After one year’s effort, the number of automatic demonstration lines in Southern China has risen to several dozens, with nearly one thousand Smart single machines deployed, which saves a lot of direct manpower. After continuous improvement, the pause interval has exceeded the basic requirements of 2 hours and the production line balance has been improved constantly. At present, it has started to plan the connection among all software systems of the whole automatic production line ranging from smart monitoring to production management, warehousing management and task assignment, emphasizing the important role of RD in Design For Automation. In the face of the change of the macro-environment, the production mode of low labor cost will be adopted in the future and smart manufacturing is the only way for factories.

Introducing the improvement on the Wujiang plant SMT Feeder

Assist Customers in Diagnosing Factory Problems

Besides the internal promotion of smart manufacturing, Delta will send teams to customers’ factories in the form of consultancy service according to their actual demands, investigate the current situation of the production line, understand existing equipment, technologies and process flow, diagnose the material management and existing software management platform and prepare the analysis report. Moreover, it will propose improvement suggestions on the bottleneck problems encountered by enterprises presently and even future planning and partially transform the pain points and problems of the factories or production lines by means of experts’ interpretation and analysis, thus activating existing equipment and saving unnecessary extra expenses.

To promote the upgrading of enterprise smart devices and facilitate manufacturing-related construction, Suzhou City in China plans to implement Smart Manufacturing “Ten, Hundred and Thousand”Project, namely selecting 100 out of 1000 factories in Suzhou to provide smart manufacturing consultancy and diagnosis service and 10 out of these 100 factories to introduce smart manufacturing. It is aimed to foster over 300 emerging industry enterprises with the annual revenue more than 1 billion dollars in 2020 and build ten major high-end industry clusters with the annual output exceeding 100 billion dollars. Delta will provide the selected enterprises with consultancy, diagnosis, smart manufacturing solutions and import service according to its own professional expertise. There will be more case reports to be shared with you later.