In the Post-Pandemic Era, the Construction of Smart Printing Factories May Accelerate

An accurate interpretation of the printed smart factory

A printed smart factory is a new type of production unit that has emerged in response to the times and technological development. It refers to a printing factory that, on the basis of digitalization and supported by industrial big data and the internet, possesses the main characteristics of smart design, smart production, smart management, smart logistics and integrated optimization.

According to the reference model, the printed smart factory can be broken down into 22 areas: product design, process design, material procurement, planning and scheduling, production operations, quality control, safety and environmental protection, warehousing and transport, logistics management, sales management, product service, customer service, equipment control, communication control, system control, manufacturing execution systems, system integration management, information management, data management and modeling, data mining and analysis, cognitive decision-making and collaborative manufacturing. It is both the execution center of printed product manufacturing and the information connection hub of the printing industry chain, as well as the foundation for the printing industry to achieve smart manufacturing.

A printed smart factory is not an unmanned printing plant, nor is it robots operating equipment; rather, it is an enterprise using “information” to drive the work procedures or production processes of each department. It is an important vehicle for achieving smart manufacturing, mainly realizing the intelligence of the production process by building intelligent production systems and network-distributed production facilities. A printed smart factory has autonomous capabilities and can collect, analyze, judge and plan different types of information. Each component of the system has the characteristics of coordination, reorganization and expansion, as well as the machine's ability to self-learn and self-maintain. The smart factory realizes coordinated cooperation between people and machines, and its essence is human-machine interaction.

In the new era, promoting the construction of printed smart factories and accelerating the development of smart manufacturing in the printing industry has important strategic significance for advancing the supply-side structural reform of China's printing manufacturing, promoting printing manufacturing toward the mid-to-high end, seizing the commanding heights of a new round of industrial competition, creating new competitive advantages for China's printing industry and building a strong printing nation.

Printed smart factories, current state of development

After going through the stages of breaking ground, exploration and initial startup, the intelligent development of the printing industry is now gradually entering a stage of continuous exploration. As a brand-new subject, the construction of printed smart factories is forward-looking and uncharted, and there is no fully mature general solution that can be copied and applied directly. Over the past year, the printing industry has carried out a series of discussions and exploratory work around intelligent construction. It is worth noting that printing enterprises no longer follow blindly or act blindly, but instead discard the superficial for the real and look before they leap.

Through a deeper understanding of smart manufacturing and intelligent construction, printing enterprises no longer simply equate a smart factory with introducing advanced production lines, installing a few sets of informatization software, building a high-bay warehouse and buying a few AGVs... Instead, they have begun to treat intelligent construction rationally, recognizing that intelligent construction is a complex systems engineering effort based on advanced printing processes and lean production management, with hardware and software construction as important content. It requires fully analyzing the enterprise's own production characteristics and current state of development, setting plans along the development path of digitalization, networking and intelligence on the basis of standardization, and implementing them step by step, in stages and at different levels. It requires a correct view of the long-term and arduous nature of the construction process, a full understanding of the spiral-upward characteristics of intelligent construction, and firm belief that the direction is right and the goals are achievable.

The different attributes of printing enterprises determine that there is no general model in intelligent construction that can be copied and applied directly, and the emphases and specific implementation plans of intelligent construction vary. It is necessary to obtain the corresponding needs through investigation and analysis, and to find a distinctive transformation path for each enterprise.

Anhui Xinhua Printing Co., Ltd. builds a printed smart factory in multiple dimensions with a “three-dimensional intelligent system”, vigorously advancing integrated innovation, with notable results in textbook printing, quality management, ERP collaborative production and the construction of an intelligent fire monitoring platform. Through organizational change, process reengineering, technological transformation and standardization, it focuses on establishing a digital workflow control system in four aspects: the prepress system, production processes, quality management and equipment management. In response to the production process, process flow and process parameter specifications of books and textbooks, it has established quality inspection standards such as quality control standards; by adding a standardized graphic and text visual inspection system to equipment, it has realized mobile quality inspection and other capabilities, initially achieving intelligent management and control through direct equipment connection, intelligent production scheduling and energy management.

Kunshan Kewang Rapid Printing Co., Ltd. takes single-card boxes, fine mounted boxes, paper handbags, corrugated color boxes and instruction leaflets as its main business. Drawing on the solid automation professional background of its leaders, the company dares to be first, using top-of-the-line equipment to achieve inline operation and, through the collaborative work of a large number of industrial robots, realizing automated flow of in-plant logistics on the production site. Through the interconnection of the production site, IT systems, logistics systems, customers, products and production equipment, it realizes intelligent production, networked collaboration of all systems, automated logistics and personalized customization for customers, forming a fast and efficient closed-loop model of intelligent production. Through the industrial internet it connects the smart factory, smart high-bay warehouse and smart production. Its prepress model uses a mobile phone 3D real-scene experience to convert offline physical sample-viewing and discussion into online simulated real-scene confirmation of results, thereby achieving the integration of people, products, information, equipment and services.

Henan Shengda Color Printing Co., Ltd. started with gang printing and occupies the geographical advantage of the junction of Henan and Anhui. Internet technology and convenient logistics have brought it a wider coverage, and massive orders and huge production capacity have created economies of scale, making Shengda pay great attention to the construction of a smart factory. Based on a unified visualization platform, cross-departmental collaborative control of the entire production process of products can be achieved, advancing the integration of production management; an enterprise information system is built to realize an information-driven smart printing workshop; the integration of core business systems such as manufacturing and operations management and procurement and sales is deepened, promoting the integration and sharing of internal resources and information; supply chain collaboration is advanced, improving the operating efficiency of the supply chain inside and outside the factory...

Printed smart factories, existing problems

For printing enterprises, the exploration of smart factory construction is a long and arduous process, which enhances production efficiency on the basis of the popularization of standardization and the strengthening of digitalization and networking. Moreover, intelligent transformation is not an independent process; it must be supported by the upstream and downstream of the supply chain. We cannot pursue intelligence for its own sake, but must truly solve the pain points and difficulties currently encountered by enterprises through intelligent transformation. Judging from the current state of the enterprises surveyed, very few enterprises in China's printing industry have achieved a smart factory in the true sense. Large enterprises with a relatively high level of intelligence have, in practice, developed a set of decision-making and control solutions or operational management informatization solutions suited to their development; printing enterprises whose transformation is less satisfactory mostly rely on imports or solution providers for software and hardware, and their application levels vary greatly, each going its own way, with integration yet to be strengthened. Specifically, there are mainly the following five problems.

1. Intelligent management is “out of control”. This is the biggest problem facing printing enterprises today, namely that the upper level makes decisions but the lower level does not execute them, or execution fails to meet requirements. For example, if the system schedules production but the machines do not execute according to the schedule and materials are not delivered according to the scheduling requirements, it amounts to empty scheduling, wasting time, manpower and material resources and achieving nothing.
2. It is difficult to popularize systems such as MES and ERP. Workers in small and medium-sized printing enterprises generally have a low level of education, and their ability to accept and operate new things and new machines is limited.
3. The interconnection of prepress, printing and post-press equipment is not smooth. At present, manual work is still needed to bridge the intermediate links, and at the same time the integration of design, production, warehousing and logistics is not high, with the problem of “information islands” being relatively serious.
4. The degree of automation is not high. Whether large enterprises or small and medium-sized enterprises, the design and construction of production lines and assembly lines have not achieved full automation, and cannot support mixed-line production and assembly of multiple varieties.
5. The degree of informatization of printing equipment is not high. First, the data and information generated by printing equipment during production operations are difficult to obtain: sensors and the like can only obtain relatively shallow data, and more valuable equipment data can only be obtained through technical decryption or purchased from equipment manufacturers, increasing the economic pressure and technical difficulty for enterprises. Second, some small and medium-sized printing enterprises lack systematic equipment information records, and equipment production information records rely on manual measurement. Product information is not recorded systematically and comprehensively, lacking authenticity, accuracy and timeliness, and cannot provide effective data for improving production efficiency, making it difficult to meet equipment management needs.

As far as the industry is concerned, many common problems in the intelligent construction of the printing industry remain to be further solved, such as factory layout plans, equipment interconnection plans, in-plant logistics plans, high-bay warehousing plans, data collection plans and data modeling plans suited to specific printing enterprises. In addition, the lack of sufficient national-level attention to the printing industry has led to a shortage of theoretical research on intelligent construction in this industry, and there is an urgent need for special national-level funds to support systematic research on technology and theory. Furthermore, in intelligent construction, a few printing enterprises trust mature solutions from fields such as machine tools more and tend to cooperate with enterprises and colleges belonging to other fields. In fact, such a choice is of no benefit to either the enterprise's smart factory construction or the industry's intelligent construction. The scale of the industry limits the enthusiasm of intelligent solution providers from other fields to invest in sustained R&D, and at the same time it cannot cultivate suppliers and R&D forces within the industry, which is not conducive to the healthy and orderly development of the industry.

The sudden arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the shortcomings of traditional manufacturing enterprises. As a discrete manufacturing industry, the printing industry's partly labor-intensive processes, posts that rely excessively on employee skills, and traditional management models became the key constraints on resuming work and production. Through this round of epidemic prevention and control, the basic understanding of “machines replacing people” has been widely accepted, and printing enterprises may accelerate the pace of intelligent construction.

The printing industry should actively follow the trend of the new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation, accurately grasp the new changes in the development environment, strengthen its technological foundation and technological innovation capacity, accelerate the construction of new infrastructure such as artificial intelligence, digital twins, the industrial internet and the Internet of Things, enrich profit models, build competitive advantages and promote the orderly construction of new business forms.

(The authors are Liu Linlin, Liu Shengjie, Xie Yixue, Han Xuelin and Zhao Tao, of Xi'an University of Technology)

——This article is reprinted from China Packaging Network (pack.cn), original link: http://news.pack.cn/show-356354.html