CIMC Vehicles: A Talent-Driven Intelligent Manufacturing "Carrier"

In the digital age, Made in China is moving towards the upgrade of intelligent manufacturing. Opportunities At present, enterprises are also facing challenges - not only to build high technical barriers in the field of hardware, but also to build a team of high-caliber professionals in the field of software, and to cultivate high-end talents with both technology and management in the field of operations. As a leader in the global semi-trailer industry, CIMC Vehicles (Group) Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “CIMC Vehicles”) embarked on the road of exploration for the transformation of automated production as early as 2014. In just a few years, it has achieved Admirable results.

"Without challenges and opportunities, there will be no motivation for enterprise change. This challenge is the same for everyone, but the solution is different, and the opportunities for future development are different. In 'Made in China 2025' 'Under this general trend, many Chinese companies, including CIMC Vehicles, have two main challenges: one is the outdated production line, and the other is the outdated organization. Therefore, what we need to do is to upgrade the production line and reorganize the organization. plastic." Li Guiping, CEO and President of CIMC Vehicles, said in an interview with "CEConline".

“Lighthouse "Factory" has achieved initial results

At the end of 2014, CIMC Vehicles forward-lookingly proposed the "Lighthouse Factory" project plan, which aims to upgrade the original traditional manufacturing factory into an automated, digital and information-based factory . It is understood that, in order to build a modern "lighthouse factory", CIMC Vehicles has carried out intelligent upgrades from three aspects: production line, product and ecosystem.

From the perspective of production lines, CIMC Vehicles mainly completes intelligent upgrades by introducing advanced equipment with interconnected functions for automatic cutting, loading and unloading, welding and other processes. These devices can receive information instructions, complete a series of production actions, and timely feedback production status.

In order to connect the design and production equipment, the information notification system is an important link. This information system is mainly composed of PLM (Product Life Cycle Management System), MES (Manufacturing Execution System), WEMS (Warehouse Management System) ) and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning System).

Li Guiping believes that the development sequence of these subsystems is very important and cannot be reversed. "Many companies feel that the organization is very backward, so they first build an ERP system, thinking that it can unify management, but in fact, the production line is not connected, the data is not released, and the ERP system does not work at all."

After two Years of planning and construction, in mid-2016, the first lighthouse factory in Dongguan City, Guangdong Province was officially mass-produced. At present, 4 factories of CIMC Vehicles are being upgraded to lighthouse factories, the automatic IoT equipment is in the "climbing debugging and optimization stage", and 5 factories are under planning.

It is understood that the lighthouse factory can replace about 45% of labor, the production efficiency can be increased by 66%, the logistics efficiency can be increased by 90%, the average annual investment return exceeds 25%, and the cost can be recovered within four years. "Under the general trend of 'Made in China 2025', 25 companies under CIMC Vehicles plan to fully upgrade to lighthouse factories in the next 3-5 years." Li Guiping said.

On the other hand, the intelligent development of CIMC vehicle products is also ahead of its peers. For example, multiple sensors are mounted on key positions of the semi-trailer, and the collected data is transmitted to a terminal, so that customers can monitor the whole process. For example, when the semi-trailer is to transport food, the temperature has a certain influence on the quality of such products, so it is necessary to carry sensors that can measure the temperature, which can transmit data every 5 minutes for effective management and full monitoring.

In addition to intelligent production lines and products, if they want to seize the market high ground, enterprises should do more than their competitors, such as realizing the intelligentization of business ecosystems that are very important to enterprises. Li Guiping said that the ecosystem of CIMC Vehicles mainly includes the relationship between enterprises and customers. In order to provide customers with digital solutions, CIMC Vehicles optimizes the application of big data collected by sensors. "This is also the greatest commercial value of loaded sensors. In this regard, CIMC Vehicles has just started, and the road is still long, but our direction is always to create value and quality services for customers." Li Guiping added.

Organizational innovation and reform

With the implementation of the lighthouse factory, a large number of digital application technologies and automated manufacturing technologies are forcing the organizational management reform of CIMC Vehicles. Not suitable for the current scene. To this end, CIMC Vehicles promotes a comprehensive reform of the organization and re-establishes a new type of organization that conforms to the digital production process.

In terms of organization and management, CIMC Vehicles has established a professional digital manufacturing technical team: a technical director's office has been established at the headquarters of CIMC Vehicles, and three centers have been established—digital model design center, automated production technology Center, and Digital Management Technology Center.

"One office and three centers" is the standard of the lighthouse factory organization, and it is also an indispensable part of CIMC Vehicles' future digital factory. "When many companies are doing digital transformation, they do not classify their specialties, which will lead to many general-purpose experts, but no specialists in specialized subdivisions. In this way, there are often problems with the things they make, such as there may be a lack of A certain function, etc." Li Guiping said.

In order to implement the "Lighthouse Factory" project, CIMC Vehicles specially set up a "Teaching Group". According to Li Guiping, the teaching group has about 3-5 members, and the head of the group is designated by the headquarters. As the general manager, he must be a compound talent with strong leadership. Then, the head of the group came to "form a cabinet" to teach the group, and then formed a downward camp, mainly based on the three aspects of digital and analog design, automated production line and digital management to form a talent team.

"There are three battalions in one regiment, and the organizational model of the teaching regiment is the same, with one office and three centers." Li Guiping added, "For example, to build a lighthouse factory in Yangzhou, the teaching regiment we set up consists of 2 As the head and deputy head, Dr. Ge combined three other professional and technical experts from the headquarters and sent them to Yangzhou to form a digital design team, an automated manufacturing team, and a digital management team."

It is understood that in October 2016, The teaching group entered the factory from scratch, built the production line step by step, and the application development of system and digital model design. Until the middle of the second year, the teaching group led the subordinate team to implement the basic plan of the lighthouse factory. In 2018, the lighthouse factory has started trial production.

"The name of the teaching group is very military. This is because each project is formed to fight a war where the outcome is uncertain." Li Guiping said.

Building a digital talent team

In the situation of shortage of digital talents, it is urgent for enterprises to transform the original talents into the required talents and find suitable majors for enterprise development talent. To this end, CIMC Vehicles mainly adopts the dual-track mode of "internal training" and "external recruitment".

Li Guiping said: "We will first open to internal talents and welcome competition for employment; after internal recruitment, there are still vacancies, and we will openly recruit externally. Whether it is technical personnel or management personnel, as long as their own conditions are compared Suitable and more willing employees will do. However, if some employees are not suitable for any position under this new organization, then we will convert them into service-oriented positions, such as aftermarket, customer service, maintenance, etc. We will do more diversion in this regard. In fact, these talents have decades of experience and are very suitable for such positions, with certain advantages."

Li Guiping believes that for management talents The most difficult thing is not the skills, but the concepts.

Digital factory requires thinking from recursive mode to recursive mode, from forward mode to reverse mode, and from micro-thinking to macro-thinking. "In response to this, CIMC Vehicles adopts the method of curriculum training to accelerate the evolution of talent thinking." Li Guiping added.

In addition, once a new project is established, CIMC Vehicles will select professionals to form a "teaching group". The members of the teaching group will work around a specific task to accomplish different types of goals. For example, the automated production team needs to complete the detailed transformation and upgrade of the production line engineering, including graphic design, core machinery and equipment of the production line, etc.

Before this step, the digital model team is required to define the boundaries of the production line, that is, what products can and cannot be produced by the automated production line. After this step is completed, the digital system can be superimposed on this basis.

"Automated production lines do not have as much flexibility as human beings. The more categories that can be accommodated on the production line, the more and more complex equipment, etc., the investment cost is relatively high." Li Guiping said.

Finally, it is understood that in order to recruit suitable external talents, CIMC Vehicle Group signed a cooperation agreement with Antai School of Economics and Management of Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, officially becoming the "China Global Operation Leader ( CLGO)” MBA program partner company.

The project was founded by Shanghai Jiaotong University Antai College of Economics and Management and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, aiming to cultivate compound high-end operation talents suitable for the era of intelligent manufacturing. As a cooperative enterprise of this project, CIMC Vehicles Group can interview potential MBA students of this project as a reviewer; take advantage of the opportunity of students to go to the company for internship to solve corporate problems; and give priority to recruiting outstanding graduates.

“It is hoped that by 2025, the lighthouse factory of CIMC Vehicles will be fully implemented, and the digital manufacturing technical team will not only have 4, but 14 organizations. , to support our 25 global manufacturing companies." Li Guiping said.

Picture/ CIMC Vehicles Group