For many companies in the electronics industry, the process of product production often has a ripple effect, and production data between different processes and functions needs to be quickly transmitted in order to improve production efficiency.

Faced with the rapidly developing economy today, the existing production mode is obviously insufficient to support the current development needs. It has become particularly important to improve production efficiency while reducing costs and improving production quality for enterprises.

The electronics industry has moved towards digital development

When it comes to digital factories, it means that the entire production process of products from research and development, production to market is realized in a digital environment. For enterprise managers, they will no longer be limited by time and space. In the office, during business trips, or even at any time and place, they can use IT systems to intuitively understand the details of product production and make decisions quickly.

At TCL Electronics Factory in Huizhou, Guangdong, equipment and machines are busy one by one. TCL Electronics, widely known, is an enterprise in the television industry with nearly 40 years of experience in research and development, production, and sales of consumer electronics products. For TCL Electronics, building a digital factory is to promote the development of TCL Electronics' intelligent manufacturing. It can enable TCL Electronics to systematically and comprehensively plan the digital factory. Building a digital factory and deepening the application of intelligent manufacturing are necessary guarantees for maintaining its products.

However, the existing IT systems are no longer able to meet the needs of the new generation of digital factory management. For traditional manufacturing industries, digital reforms include building an IoT platform to collect critical equipment operation data downwards, providing data support for higher-level application systems upwards, and fully implementing Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) applications; By analyzing accumulated equipment data, modeling and predicting key equipment and TOP faults are completed to achieve intelligent equipment management.

02 Device networking makes information no longer isolated islands, and device maintenance no longer experiential

The discrete manufacturing model in the electronics industry has led to the problem of information silos for most enterprises.

On the one hand, the process data at the production site is independent and lacks transparency, relying on manual collection, processing, and reporting. On the other hand, "the equipment operation and maintenance work in the factory is generally carried out offline and cannot be quantified

Throughout, TCL Electronics' IT project manager Ye Bo and business manager Li Yesheng have closely followed the company's digital transformation strategy, responsible for the implementation and execution of TCL Electronics' digital factory planning.

In factories in the home appliance manufacturing industry, many devices are non-standard. When factories introduce new equipment, the initial failure rate of the equipment is often very high. Without a good maintenance plan to quickly solve the problem and reduce the failure rate, it will greatly affect production capacity. This is a very critical pain point

Li Yesheng found in daily management that the lack of equipment maintenance data statistics makes it difficult for the company to calculate the production capacity loss caused by equipment. Moreover, the maintenance of equipment highly relies on the personal experience of maintenance engineers, and the methods and experience of fault handling are not systematically managed. When encountering the next fault problem, manual discussion and handling methods are needed, which will also result in a significant waste of production capacity.

Based on this, TCL Electronics has chosen to pilot the construction of a digital factory in its injection molding factory, TV factory, and movement factory in Huizhou, Guangdong, and will promote the successful experience to other factories for application.

The LCD industrial park in Huizhou is the main production base, with three factories: injection molding factory, movement factory, and TV factory, which have very good representativeness and demonstration significance. ”Ye Bo stated that as of now, 600 devices in the factory have been connected to the system, and these three factories have basically achieved digitalization of key equipment management and comprehensive promotion of TPM.

The injection molding factory, TV factory, and movement factory in Huizhou have achieved unified management of equipment operation and maintenance personnel, and the workload and performance of operation and maintenance personnel can also be managed online. ”Ye Bo said that the introduction of Gechuang Dongzhi (an innovative industrial Internet company with practical experience in various types of manufacturing industries) equipment interconnection platform reduced the non operating hours and capacity losses caused by equipment abnormalities, and saved a lot of costs.

Through device networking, preventive maintenance and upkeep can be carried out to reduce sudden equipment failures, which is also the overall layout of the project. If a platform is used to manage the maintenance records of devices uniformly, it is like taking notes and accumulating online operation and maintenance experience. The device interconnection project will build a platform for device management and automatic collection, covering all production equipment, making device management unified, production transparent, and achieving abnormal warning.