The other side of beauty

20 18- 10, Midea celebrated its 50th anniversary in Shunde, Guangdong.

Every year, Midea supplies more than 400 million home appliances to users around the world. At the age of 50, it claims that the future is far more than home appliances. Midea predicts that man-machine will have a deeper and more integrated cooperative relationship and enter the "new generation of man-machine", while Midea defines itself by scientific and technological groups, which opens the prelude to the transformation to industrial digitalization.

Low-key beauty has always paid attention to "still water is deep." The practice of its internal industrial internet has been quietly carried out for three years, achieving a global collaborative production platform of "one beauty, one system and one standard" and building a software system supporting the operation of the whole value chain. Now, it exports this ability, which is a completely strange side of beauty.

Internal access

According to the statistics of consulting firm IoT Analytics, it is estimated that the scale of industrial Internet platform will reach US$ 6543.8+US$ 644.4 million in 20021year. Compared with the consumer side, it is much more complicated to realize internetization in the manufacturing field. Where is the breakthrough point of beauty when home appliances start?

"Internally, we have established several benchmark factories. Magnetron factory and some washing machine production lines have adopted their own industrial internet platform. Guangzhou Nansha Factory has just become a model project for the industrial Internet pilot in Guangdong Province. " Zhang Xiaoyi, vice president and chief information officer of Midea, said that the forging of Midea's industrial Internet capability began with "intelligent manufacturing" promoted internally three years ago.

"When I started this project in the IT department, I didn't want to publicize or serve. I will do my own thing first. In the process of promotion, we found that its benefits are enormous. Whether it is efficiency, certainty or quality, the level of internal manufacturing and product research and development has undergone earth-shaking changes, and the entire value chain of R&D, production and sales has changed. " Zhang Xiaoyu said.

In the past, most processes in the manufacturing field, such as R&D, supply chain, production, logistics, sales and after-sales, were separated from consumers, while intelligent manufacturing was based on the analysis and opening of big data, making all businesses interconnected.

Taking Midea's "T+3" business model as an example, retailers can quickly and accurately reflect market demand, thus guiding raw material stocking, factory production and delivery sales. Specifically, taking customer orders as the starting date "t", "T+ 1" as the raw materials, "T+2" as the finished product manufacturing and "T+3" as the logistics distribution, the original reserve production is changed to customer order production, which not only realizes "on-demand production", but also forces all links in the value chain to meet the needs of consumers. "T+3 has completely changed the way of dealing with customers, and users and customers command the entire background production." Zhang Xiaoying commented.

Based on its own practice, Midea has gradually built a complete industrial Internet platform, M.IoT Its product series includes industrial APP and SaaS, industrial cloud platform, SCADA online platform and edge computing, as well as robots and automation. The increase in capacity also comes from the demand of internal scenes.

Three years ago, in order to promote intelligent manufacturing, Zhang Xiaoyi's team made a survey of all factories, and found that there are more than 90 key components connecting information and equipment in the system, involving major brands around the world. "Most of them have their own devices. We can't develop more than 90 interfaces to connect, so it's very painful. We are determined to conduct research and development. First, we built our own SCADA platform, prefabricated all the most mainstream protocols on the SCADA platform, and solved the problems of security and compatibility. Zhang Xiaoyu recalled.

The M.IoT platform plays a very direct role in the internal "small test". Taking the common "injection molding" link in electrical appliance manufacturing as an example, after a series of industrial internet transformations, the inventory of raw materials has decreased by 80%; Intelligent equipment improves the overall production efficiency17%; After optimizing the intelligent predictive maintenance of equipment, the failure response time is reduced by 80%, the failure rate is reduced by 36%, the downtime is shortened by 57%, and the quality is effectively improved. Applying artificial intelligence to quality inspection can reduce the inspection cost by 55% and improve the accuracy of appearance inspection by 80%. In the past, dryers, color sorters and other equipment that needed manual monitoring for 24 hours were changed into intelligent early warning, which shortened the abnormal response time by 75% and effectively reduced the black spot rate and color difference rate. ...

M.IoT has been successfully piloted in the United States and prepared for export. Its core competence largely comes from the practice of Midea's own manufacturing scene, such as Midea's management and manufacturing experience, especially the management changes in recent years, such as T+3, MBS (Midea Business System), CDOC tools (concept, design, optimization, capacity mass production), and self-developed software and capabilities.

Soft-hard combination

KUKA Robot and Meiyun Intelligent Number constitute two key capabilities of Midea's industrial Internet-the former represents hardware and the latter represents software.

KUKA is an old German robot company. In 20 16, midea won 95% of the shares for 29.2 billion yuan, which was a sensation. In the tender offer report, Midea once described the purpose of getting involved in robot manufacturing, "relying on KUKA's technical advantages in industrial robots and automated production to improve the company's production efficiency and promote the upgrading of the company's manufacturing industry".

In the same year, Midea established Meiyun Zhishu, whose predecessor was born out of the Group's Information Technology Department, providing full value chain cloud services based on technologies such as intelligent manufacturing, Internet of Things, big data, cloud computing and mobile Internet. Regarding its positioning, Gu Yunsong, assistant to the president of Midea Group and general manager of Meiyun Zhishu, told 2 1CBR: "In the whole industrial Internet chain, Meiyun Zhishu is the carrier of Midea's industrial Internet export service, providing intelligent manufacturing software and digital solutions."

Focusing on intelligent manufacturing and enterprise digital transformation, Meiyun Zhishu has built a complete product group. Gu said: "According to the value chain, we provide digital planning big data products at the end, intelligent manufacturing kits at the manufacturing end, and digital marketing kits at the marketing end, management channels and user operations. At the same time, we also provide an overall solution with artificial intelligence technology and a number of patented big data suites, as well as the overall industrial Internet. These products and services are more popular with customers. "

Most cloud service providers only provide software services. Why does Midea insist on the combination of software and hardware?

Zhang Xiaoyi explained: "Industrial Internet is a multi-level technology platform, including big data and cloud computing. But it still needs to be combined with the scene and user practice. Many domestic manufacturing enterprises start from raw materials step by step. The industrial chain is long, and only one cloud platform can solve business problems. Only by providing some software and hardware products in a down-to-earth manner can we build a good platform. " Among them, Meiyun Zhishu is the only platform to promote the industrial Internet. By docking and identifying customer needs, we can recommend KUKA's industrial solutions.

"The collaboration and integration of software and hardware is a pain point for many enterprises. If you only sell KUKA products, customers will ask, how to install robots and how to cooperate with existing machines? Need to find another integrator. No need for a beautiful liberation plan. There are both platforms and robots that can be integrated. This is our simplest starting point and a one-stop solution to these problems. " Zhang Xiaoyu said. KUKA has the world's top intelligent gateway technology, and the intelligent gateway is the core connection key in the industrial Internet. Midea has developed and upgraded on its basis, forming an intelligent gateway for Meiyun intelligent data and enhancing the competitiveness of Midea's industrial Internet platform.

KUKA's accumulation in Industry 4.0 is not limited to robots and automation, but also enriches Meiyun intelligent digital solutions at the software level. For example, KUKA's visual component simulation software is one of the top simulation software in the world, which has been fully applied in the United States. It can transform the process of product development, production and use into digital mirror image, and greatly improve product innovation, manufacturing efficiency and effect through virtual life cycle testing and management.

Manufacturing accumulation

20 18,65438 February, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced the list of industrial internet pilot and demonstration projects in 2018, and Midea was selected together with well-known enterprises such as Alibaba Cloud, Huawei Cloud and Foxconn. People often ask Zhang Xiaoyi, what's the difference between beauty and other homes? His answer is: accumulate.

Midea's M.IoT platform is characterized by the trinity of "manufacturing knowledge, software and hardware", among which "manufacturing knowledge" is the biggest difference between Midea and other manufacturers-from raw material processing and core parts production to key links such as electronics, injection molding, sheet metal and assembly, Midea has a profound accumulation of 50 years of full-process manufacturing.

"Smart manufacturing will eventually return to manufacturing, not just pure IT technology. Most of us have complementary business relationships with other manufacturers. At present, Alibaba mainly provides IaaS and PaaS, and Meiyun Zhishu and Alibaba Cloud also established a cooperative relationship at the Yun Qi Conference. " Gu told 2 1CBR.

If Alibaba Cloud provides the infrastructure of cloud services, then Meiyun Intelligent Digital is an engineer. The most competitive part of Meiyun intelligent digital products focuses on intelligent manufacturing and related SaaS fields.

"Management software needs to be precipitated from management practice and operation. Simple software companies rely too much on the business relationship between Party A and Party B and lack practical experience. It is difficult for Party B to fully understand Party A's business, let alone meet Party A's progress and iteratively improve products. Need to spend more energy and time in Party A to understand more detailed requirements. We provide a solution that is implemented on the ground, not the "PPT" of the solution, so customers can see the actual scenes and effects of beauty and accept it more easily. " Gu said.

Different types of manufacturing enterprises have different pain points and development paths when embracing the industrial Internet. Large enterprises often have complex internal and external systems, complex industrial scenes and difficult technical research; Small and medium-sized enterprises may be discouraged from the industrial Internet because of the high cost of accessing the cloud and the high investment of equipment talents. Therefore, in view of the complex digital transformation needs of large enterprises, the United States will be realized through integrated customized solutions; For small and medium-sized enterprises, provide a mature package of solutions to help them realize the platform on the cloud at a more economical cost.

At present, the implementation scheme of Midea Industrial Internet gives priority to scenes with poor operating environment and easy replacement by machines. For example, the injection workshop has high temperature, bad smell and poor working environment for workers. Also check whether the product is qualified. It is very hard for people to watch the lights for 8 hours repeatedly, and the quality cannot be guaranteed. After the transformation of industrial internet, workers only need to adjust the parameters on the computer and upload them to the equipment. After picking up the parts, KUKA robot uses the camera to detect them, which improves the quality, reduces a lot of manpower input, liberates workers from boring and harsh environment, and is also feasible in business input and output.

Dr. Hu Zheng, director of visual research of Midea Group, once shared a solution using AI technology: in the assembly workshop of central air conditioning, all the screws on the top surface were detected by a camera. AI technology can be used to detect all kinds of screws in the factory environment, which is suitable for different materials, different edges, different lighting and shooting angles, and its return on investment is very high. According to Hu Zheng, once the screws have quality problems, customers and dealers will complain, and the factory will be fined after the complaint, ranging from 5,000 yuan to 1000 yuan at a time. In the past, the factory may have a dozen such fines a month. After the inspection quality is improved, the factory can save a lot of money and finish the project in two months.

Zhang Xiaoyi believes that in the final analysis, to meet the typical challenges of traditional manufacturing industry is to improve the agility and lean level of enterprises through technical means. Industrial Internet connects entities, information, business processes and people. With the help of data analysis and optimal decision-making, it can reduce costs, improve efficiency and ensure quality. Therefore, Midea has spared no effort in cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), big data and blockchain, and set up research centers in Silicon Valley and other places. The investment related to digitalization is as high as hundreds of millions every year, in order to combine the actual scenes of technology and manufacturing.

Fang Hongbo, chairman of Midea, described digitalization as a ray of light for traditional manufacturing. "We are actively exploring the best degree of digitalization within the enterprise." In the future, Midea will also have the opportunity to become an important driving force for the digital upgrading and transformation of China manufacturing.