Quality Alchemist (品質煉金術師): HKSQ Seminar on Industry 4.0

2016年12月12日星期一

HKSQ Seminar on Industry 4.0 – Taiwan Experience

The HKSQ seminar named “Industry 4.0 – Taiwan Experience” co-organized by Hong Kong Society for Quality (HKSQ) and System Engineering and Engineering Management (SEEM) Department, CityU on 12 Dec 2016. Industry 4.0 is the trend of future manufacturing. Taiwan is one of the first movers on Industry 4.0 research and application in Asia Pacific, and enterprises adopted the result and prepared for the new wave of smart manufacturing. Since there are many common features of Taiwan and Hong Kong manufacturing industry in terms of geographic operations, management systems and customer scope, this is an opportunity to Quality Professionals to learn from their experience of the development roadmap. After HKSQ Study Mission for Industry 4.0 in Taiwan from 16 to 20 Nov 2016, we invited Prof. Ching-Chow Yang (楊錦洲教授) to share his view on Industry 4.0 through his professional consultancy experience. Before the talk, I took a photo with Prof. Yang for memory.

In the beginning, Prof. Yang briefed the development of Industry 4.0 that Germany stated in 2011, USA proposed “Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP)” in 2013, Japan and Korea promoted “Robotic Development Plan” in 2014, Taiwan’s “Productivity 4.0” and China issued “Made in China 2025” in 2015.

Then Prof. Yang briefed the Industry from 3.0 to 4.0 and separated into Automation Manufacturing (3.0 to 3.2), Flexible Process Manufacturing (3.2 to 3.4), Customer modulation (3.4 to 3.6), Predictive equipment / facility (3.6 to 3.8) and Intelligent Manufacturing (3.8 to 4.0).

The separation from Industry 3.0 to 4.0 was shown as following diagrams. Then Prof. Yang said there were three stages to develop the Industry 4.0. The first stage was Automation (Vertical Integration: M2M & M2B) and the second stage was Intelligent Manufacturing (Horizontal Integration: Business-to-business, B2B). Final stage was Cloud-based New Business Model (Peer-to-peer, P2P).

Intelligent Manufacturing or Servicing used Cyber Physical System (CPS) which included Sensor system, AI, IoT, Robotic and Internet.

After that Prof. Yang introduced some applications on Industry 4.0 such as intelligent Hospital (iHospital), iFactory, iLogistic, iEnMgt, iTraffic and Smart City.

Finally, Prof. Yang shared several companies in Taiwan employed Industry 4.0 such as Mitsubishi (三菱) e-F@ctory, Siemen (西門子) Electronic Works Amberg (EWA), Solomon Technology Corp, NCR accounting system. In addition, Prof. Yang pointed out some challenges Taiwan faced and they were Quality in complex product, Market change to uncertain, Order to be small amount but large variation, high requirement on supply chain transparent, etc.