On June 5, 2021, the “New Energy Intelligent Automobile Summit” was held in Changxing, Huzhou. The conference was attended by not only well-known domestic and foreign OEM executives, but also experts and scholars from the automotive industry, as well as representatives from relevant government departments.
During the conference, Tong Zhiyuan, Vice President of Geely Group, gave a speech on Geely’s intelligent transformation in the automotive industry.
The key points of his speech are as follows:
Today, on behalf of our team, I would like to report to you the work Geely has done in Changxing since 2015, especially in the past three years. First, let me introduce the Geely Changxing project. Geely Changxing project was signed with the Changxing government on February 11, 2018. The equipment has been installed and commissioned, and small-scale production is already underway. Mass production will be achieved in July and the product will be launched on the market in August.
The Changxing plant is Geely’s newest plant, the first plant built according to the Industry 4.0 standard, and an important part of Geely’s digital transformation. This factory is committed to achieving four transformations based on the 4.0 standard. The first is intelligentization, and the second is flexibility, which means producing multiple platforms and models on a single production line.
As you know, the Zhejiang Provincial Party Committee and Provincial Government began to replace humans with machines a few years ago, so the automation level of the factory is quite high. Our painting automation is close to 100%, and the automation level of assembly is the highest in the industry. Another transformation is lean, which provides customers with better value to meet their high-cost performance requirements. When we designed the factory, we aimed to design the eight links of product development, test verification, factory construction, process development, equipment manufacturing, quality management, sales and after-sales, and logistics, and connected customer data, product data, process data, quality data, and equipment energy consumption data.
Over the past three years of plant construction, we have achieved good results by connecting data. We have improved our product development cycle by more than 15% within three years, and we have reduced the cost of equipment by reducing our factory process from 5-8% to 1-2%. Therefore, the cost of equipment has been greatly reduced. The entire Changxing plant was built in less than two years, creating a new industry speed. All of this is thanks to digital transformation and practice.
Any automaker that embraces technological change and the new round of technological revolution will promote the digital transformation of the automotive industry. We believe that the competitiveness of future car companies will be in new energy, information and intelligence. This morning, many experts talked about new energy from several perspectives: reducing carbon dioxide emissions from a human perspective, reducing greenhouse effects, reducing our dependence on petrochemical fuels and oil from a national strategy perspective, and focusing on low-carbon and green living from a personal perspective. From the perspective of enterprises, I think it is important to satisfy regulatory and cost needs.Since the implementation of the Dual Credit System, many car companies have realized that the cost of one credit has increased from 2,000 to 3,000 yuan, which means that if you save one liter of gas, you can earn 3,000 yuan in credit. Increasing the gasoline consumption by 2.1 liters can increase the profitability by 300 yuan. If the company fails to meet the government requirements, they will be fined. On the other hand, if they do meet the requirements, they can save money. Thus, this aspect is very important.
As market demand becomes increasingly individualized and the product life cycle becomes shorter, the market environment is becoming more uncertain. With the recent pandemic and unprecedented changes, the uncertainty of the market environment and the individualized demand have led to the development of new manufacturing models and products. These new models and products must be able to solve problems through intelligence and interconnection, which has also resulted in new business models and services.
These changes have provided new impetus for enterprise development. It is clear that digital transformation has gone through many stages and has now reached the fifth stage of industrial internet. Therefore, it is important to change the concept from a product-centered to a customer-centered approach. The core of a product should no longer be what we think the customer needs. Instead, the customer should participate in product design and evaluation. This change in mindset is essential for a successful digital transformation. If this change of mindset does not occur, digital transformation will be discounted.
The technical support for digital transformation is also crucial. To achieve this, a platform-based architecture for digital enterprises must be established. Who can provide this? It is the industrial internet. Traditional car companies have focused on offline business with the goal of empowering the business. However, for digital transformation, the focus must shift from offline to online. As Geely is implementing this strategy, they are devoting a significant amount of resources to online infrastructure, with online orders increasing and offline orders decreasing. The focus of offline business must shift to customer experience and test drives, and many transactions must be done online.
The key to achieving technical support for digital transformation is the industrial internet. Through the industrial internet, research and development, marketing, and supply chain management must all become synchronized, including both upstream and downstream partners in the supply chain. This is not just a concept for the relationship between the main factory and the supplier. In fact, many suppliers have assembly relationships with other suppliers, so it must be the concept of the entire industry.Development is not only about conducting research and development on our own, but also involving the supply chain and customers to achieve collaborative development. The greatest feature of such large-scale development is cooperation. The same applies to the manufacturing process. Our ability to significantly reduce design changes is achieved through synchronous engineering during the research and development phase. Our ability to ensure good manufacturing quality and low labor intensity through easy assembly and the use of robots is an example of our collaborative production. This is a crucial aspect of our work, as we seek to realize full life-cycle management of products, given that product life cycles are becoming increasingly shorter.
I believe that a critical aspect of digital transformation is continuously expanding the boundaries of our business by expanding the experiences of cars, people, and life. Within digital transformation, I consider development to be important. This morning, Academician Tan talked about research and development. This is the architecture diagram of Geely Intelligent R&D and verification. We have achieved very good results with this architecture in the production of Changxing cars. This architecture is not only used in Geely and Changxing, but also in other edge architectures. I think the effect is very good.
What is the purpose of digitalization? In the past, we have done a lot of digital work in Geely. Information technology was implemented more than a decade ago simply for the sake of information technology or digitalization. The core of digitalization is to improve quality and efficiency, and to reduce costs to fundamentally provide better services. If we cannot achieve this, I believe that top management will not support it and capitalists will not invest in it. I think there are three critical points: we must achieve full value chain, and the difficulty lies in full supply chain. Supply chains are difficult because different companies and different car models have different supply chains. The level of intelligentization, data format, and communication interface are different, so many problems need to be solved. The next critical point is full domain, especially global competition where the uncertain epidemic and surrounding environment still exist. The final critical point is parallelism and real-time. If it is not real-time, all our data will be lagging and have no value. In smart manufacturing, data is the blood. If you don’t follow the trend, the data is unhealthy. Only accurate and good data can achieve automation and agile response through deep learning technology.
How do we implement this in the factory? We believe that the core is digital manufacturing, which is our current operating architecture. The key is to fully tap the value of factory sales data, establish an IOT service platform, and realize digital intelligent manufacturing. I want to emphasize the relationship between three levels in digital manufacturing, namely, the decision-making level, the management level, and the supply level. If the top-level design is not well thought out, digital manufacturing will be greatly discounted. This is a crucial lesson we have learned from more than three years of practice. Therefore, the division of levels and the authority of management must be clear.数据有了，智能制造核心是大数据应用，大数据应用就是从关注产品的资产关注到数据的资产，数据在智能制造的血液，怎么样让血液健康呢？其实很重要的就要解决研发制造、营销和供应链之间数据的实施问题，现在遇到很大的问题，其实不同的供应商数据跟我们结构不一样，所以花很大的精力解决数据通讯问题，包括不失真，我们很大的任务就是行业摸索出一套方式和方法，包括算法和数据格式怎么样来实现整合，所以这是我们现在做的工作。
我这里还想分享一下数据追溯很重要，因为现在客户越来越重视追溯，有了追溯系统，原来追溯是质量系统的追溯，现在讲的追溯不光质量信息还包括所有设备运营信息和工艺参数，包括怎么样把数据跟客户分享成为了提高客户体验。因为客户体验不光是使用体验决定购买之前其实就是体验的问题，下定单让他知道你这个车生产到哪一个工业了，他想看看喷漆了没有，总装装哪一个零件，你的车用什么工具运的什么时候到 4S 店，什么时候提车。如果没有良好可追溯的数据是做不到的。
这是我们吉利长兴工业互联网规划图，这个图里我想内容很多，重点讲两个，一个是安全管理，数据安全越来越重要，2 月 8 日我们正在调试系统，我们遇到最大问题就是数据安全问题，因为不同的数据包括机器人，有些进口的可能里面有一些病毒进来了，供应商进来安装设备的时候没有身份认证没有确定访问的控制就会造成安全性的问题。安全问题是最重要的，核心就是身份认证。
这是我想跟大家汇报一下车要下线工业互联网到什么程度，去年 5 月份到 6 月份到现在，我们已经建设七大细分行业，按照工信部的要求这个我们已经完成了十个领域的十五个场景实施已经完成了，所以可以实现跨行业跨领域的产业信息的互联互通，制约整合协同。未来一年我们还要持续改进架构和功能，在明年 10 月份的时候完善整个测试环境，我们还要出三个标准为行业发展工业互联网和数据赋能提供我们吉利的贡献。
祝大家参加会保证好心情，欢迎大家明天到长兴工厂去参观，明天你看到的将是硬件部分，它的灵魂就是我今天讲的内容，谢谢大家！
以上就是本次发言的全部内容。
🔗信息来源：新能源智能汽车峰会现场
This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.