Rockwell Automation Helps Chery Automobile Build an Intelligent Connected Super Factory

Relying on Rockwell Automation Digital Innovation Solution FactoryTalk ® InnovationSuite ™， Empowering the automotive industry to move from "manufacturing" to "intelligent manufacturing"

As one of the world's leading enterprises in the fields of industrial automation, informatization, and digital transformation, Rockwell Automation, with its professional digital technology and innovative solutions, has once again helped companies successfully build safer, environmentally friendly, energy-saving, and efficient super factories, accelerating product launch speed, enhancing global competitiveness, and promoting the digital and intelligent manufacturing transformation development of the new energy industry.

In less than three months, the production pace has increased from 15JPH to 50JPH, and in just one minute, a brand new vehicle has been taken off the production line. Fuel powered and electric vehicles are produced together, supporting personalized customization for customers, 100% automated production, with "zero" defects in production quality, "zero" inventory in short processes, and low energy consumption and "zero" emissions throughout the entire process... This is not a future automotive factory, but a reflection of the Chery Intelligent Connected Super Factory that has officially been put into operation.

In this factory, mass customization has become a reality, full process digitization has been implemented, and manufacturing intelligence and transparent management have created benefits. In the process of building this super factory, Rockwell Automation's digital innovation solution, FactoryTalk InnovationSuite, played a central role, enabling the industrial internet to truly empower the automotive industry towards high-quality development.

In the era of change, manufacturing technology forges the core competitiveness of automotive enterprises

With the arrival of a new round of technological revolution and consumer upgrading, the automotive industry with a history of over 140 years is facing disruptive changes. The "new four modernizations" of automobiles, with "electrification, intelligence, networking, and sharing" as the core, have emerged. In order to actively embrace the changes of the times, traditional car companies have begun to comprehensively layout "new growth points" such as new energy, intelligent internet connectivity, and mobile transportation. On the other hand, with the advancement of globalization and continuous innovation of technology, consumers have more and more choices, and they attach greater importance to the quality, performance, and personalization of cars. The competition in the entire automotive manufacturing industry has become increasingly fierce.

In response to the challenges of the era of change and fierce market competition, all car companies are launching new models at an increasingly fast pace, with shorter launch cycles, stricter control over manufacturing costs, and faster response to consumer personalized customization and other needs. The implementation of all of this requires not only a highly resilient supply chain, but also more advanced automotive manufacturing technology. Production and manufacturing technology will be one of the core competitiveness of future automotive companies.

As a benchmark enterprise for domestic car companies, Chery Automobile has actively implemented the core strategy of "Digital Chery" in recent years, and has built intelligent connected "super factories" in two bases in Wuhu and Qingdao, Anhui. It has comprehensively upgraded its existing production scale, manufacturing technology, management processes, and accelerated the transformation from "traditional cars" to "smart cars", thereby improving its core competitiveness.

FactoryTalk InnovationSuite Helps Intelligent Connected Super Factory

Intelligence and internet connectivity are two major characteristics of Chery's super factory. Specifically, the super factory has achieved intelligent production, intelligent quality control, digital management, and transparent operation. It not only has high intelligence, high quality, and high efficiency, but also introduces an industrial internet platform and establishes a new production method of large-scale personalized customization.

The key to achieving intelligence and network connectivity lies in connecting the data between the underlying devices, control and monitoring layers on the operational technology (OT) side, and the manufacturing execution system (MES) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) layers on the information technology (IT) side, connecting the assets of the factory to all things, and achieving visualization, transparency, and efficient collaboration of the factory. And it is none other than industrial IoT platforms that can undertake this task. After conducting thorough market research, Chery Automobile ultimately chose Rockwell Automation's digital innovation solution, FactoryTalk InnovationSuite platform technology, to build an industrial IoT platform for super factories.

FactoryTalk InnovationSuite is one of the leading comprehensive digital transformation software suites in the industry, providing widely integrated industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), edge to cloud analysis, MES, and augmented reality (AR) capabilities. In the Chery Intelligent Connected Super Factory, as part of the FactoryTalk InnovationSuite, the ThingWorx industrial IoT platform connects different devices, applications, and data sources in the factory, providing a single source for collecting, summarizing, and securely accessing operational data of on-site equipment and production lines. It adopts an intuitive user interface design to connect, manage, and Monitor and control various automation devices and software applications.

The ThingWorx system, as a core component of the "Industrial Internet" project in the super factory, provides more effective data and in-depth information to enterprises by creating a unified system architecture and IoT data format data center, empowering various departments of the factory, connecting various production and operation links, visualizing equipment inspection, production monitoring, production process, and HSE, making operation and system status clear at a glance, In order to achieve business data-driven, innovative applications can be quickly implemented, helping enterprises optimize industrial operations and improve production efficiency.

Not only that, ThingWorx, as an industrial IoT platform that runs through the underlying devices and upper management systems, provides support and functional expansion for various business systems in factories through flowing data. For example, through the control and monitoring of underlying equipment data, process data, and production data, ThingWorx has created a core tool for lean manufacturing execution, the Andon (safety lighting) system. The management of production processes in all factory workshops has been visualized, information transmission has been fast, process transparency has been achieved, and changes and iterations in production processes can be made quickly through ThingWorx. At the same time, ThingWorx also integrates the factory's energy management system, not only achieving energy consumption monitoring of various production equipment, but also optimizing energy management through big data analysis.

In addition, Rockwell Automation not only provides FactoryTalk InnovationSuite, but also utilizes FactoryTalk ProductionCentre to further expand the factory's existing MES system. By connecting various industrial equipment production data and various business systems, it coordinates and manages the company's personnel, equipment, materials, and energy resources, becoming a MOM (Manufacturing Operations Management) system that covers the entire factory. The dual platform architecture of FactoryTalk InnovationSuite and FactoryTalk ProductionCentre, as well as the original factory delivery implementation engineering team, greatly improved the efficiency of agile deployment for the super factory, shortened the production time, and smoothly climbed the production pace from 15JPH to 50JPH in less than 3 months.

Empowering "Intelligent Car Manufacturing" with Hard Core Strength

Automotive manufacturing has always been one of the industries with the highest level of automation. However, the new era of automobiles, where new car launch cycles are becoming shorter, vehicle models are iterating rapidly, and personalized demands are becoming stronger, is forcing automotive production to move from "manufacturing" to "intelligent manufacturing". New production lines not only need to be able to quickly go online, but also need to support flexible manufacturing, agile manufacturing, and intelligent manufacturing. Rockwell Automation, with decades of accumulated hardcore strength in the automotive manufacturing industry, has empowered the automotive industry to move from "manufacturing" to "intelligent manufacturing".

In the Chery Intelligent Connected Super Factory, Rockwell Automation serves as the general contractor (EPC) for industrial IoT projects, providing Chery with full lifecycle services from consulting, project research, system blueprint design, target system functional design, as well as project implementation, system development, online debugging and acceptance. Through the implementation of industrial IoT projects, not only has paperless and transparent production been achieved for the entire factory, reducing labor costs by more than 30% and increasing production capacity by more than 10%, but the implementation time of the entire project has also been reduced by more than 30%. The success of this project is inseparable from Rockwell Automation's leading product solutions and industry experience and knowledge accumulated in the automotive industry.

Before the start of the project, there were multiple factory side IoT platforms in Chery Automobile's various production bases and processes. However, these platforms had inconsistent architectures, differences in technical and functional architectures, and stability could not be guaranteed. It is urgent to unify the platform architecture in the subsequent construction of new factory IoT platforms and gradually promote them to old factories. ThingWorx in Rockwell Automation FactoryTalk Innovation Suite has become Chery's top choice due to its strong connectivity and stability.

Due to the involvement of tens of thousands of components in automobile manufacturing, assembly and production processes are very complex, requiring a large number of robots, CNC machine tools, and customized various specialized equipment to complete automated production. These equipment have numerous heterogeneous data, and the data timing is also greatly different. Moreover, it is difficult to unify the collection of process data and production data into a single data source, connecting them to what was originally independent of each other. ThingWorx has a history of over 20 years in Kepware industrial connectivity software, with over 200 built-in drivers that not only cover PLCs from all international major factories, but also support common protocols such as OPC UA, MQTT, REST, EFM, ODBC, or SNMP. It also supports numerous proprietary protocols such as GE NIO, SuiteLink/FastDDE, and Splunk, making data collection and device interconnection no longer a challenge.

Flexible and agile development is also an important reason why ThingWorx can complete project implementation in such a short time. On the one hand, thanks to ThingWorx being a proven IoT platform with many successful cases, its maturity and stability are very high. On the other hand, due to the commonly used software interfaces that ThingWorx comes with, custom development can be completed through drag and drop without the need for code or low code. Therefore, for tasks that would have taken several months to complete, ThingWorx can complete rapid validation and deployment in less than a week.

Of course, not only the platform itself, but more importantly, Rockwell Automation's experienced team of "intelligent manufacturing" project implementation experts in the automotive industry has provided human resources for the success of the project. Rockwell Automation is a company with a deep understanding and rich practical experience in automation and information technology. It has been working on MES projects in the automotive industry for 30 years and is familiar with the pain points and requirements in automotive manufacturing. It has successful project implementation experience in many automotive manufacturing factories.

From "manufacturing" to "intelligent manufacturing" is the necessary path for the manufacturing industry to move towards high-quality development. For the automotive manufacturing industry, high-quality development is urgently needed. Chery Automobile's intelligent connected super factory has set a benchmark for the entire automotive industry as "intelligent manufacturing", while Rockwell Automation's FactoryTalk InnovationSuite digital innovation solution is undoubtedly an accelerator for automobiles to move towards "intelligent manufacturing".

*This case has been included on the Rockwell Automation official website. Click on the link to jump to learn more information.

Rockwell Automation in China

Rockwell Automation is one of the world's leading enterprises in the fields of industrial automation, informatization, and digital transformation. We will fully unleash human imagination and the potential of technology, create more possibilities for humanity, and make the world more productive and sustainable. Rockwell Automation has a history of nearly 120 years and is headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. It has approximately 28000 employees and operates in over 100 countries and regions.

In China, Rockwell Automation has 28 sales institutions, 4 training centers, 1 R&D center, Dalian Software Development Center, Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Beijing OEM Application Development Centers, as well as 2 production bases, with over 2000 employees. The company has actively cooperated with 11 authorized channel partners and more than 70 key universities in China to provide a wide range of extraordinary products and solutions, service support, and technical training for the manufacturing industry.

As a leader in intelligent manufacturing, Rockwell Automation fully implements the SEEE (safety, energy conservation, environmental protection, and efficiency) sustainable development concept in intelligent manufacturing, aiming to deeply empower various industries through leading automation, digitization, and intelligent technologies. Relying on IT/OT integration to create new interconnected enterprise solutions, Rockwell Automation promotes the sustainable development of Chinese society and leads the future with unlimited possibilities.