In the context of the rapid development of the digital economy, the "digital transformation and intelligent upgrading" of China's manufacturing industry is no longer a "choice question", but a "must-answer question" related to survival and long-term development. The just-concluded 2021 Central Economic Work Conference proposed to accelerate digital transformation and promote the upgrading of traditional industries, which will bring the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry to a very urgent critical stage.
As a technology manufacturing enterprise with nearly 37 years of deep roots in China, Lenovo held the theme salon of "New Lenovo New Intelligent Manufacturing" on December 17, where the relevant responsible persons of Lenovo's digital transformation, artificial intelligence, new IT infrastructure, environmental engineering and other intelligent manufacturing business discussed the latest progress and future trends in the field of intelligent manufacturing from all perspectives and audiences, and also shared Lenovo's technical reserves and high-quality endogenous externalization capabilities in leading China's intelligent manufacturing field.
Practice internal skills with senior endogenous and technical practice to achieve intelligent upgrading
Intelligent transformation is not achieved overnight, and enterprises that complete intelligent transformation must not only have deep accumulation in the manufacturing industry, but also have full practice in the process of intelligence. The reason why Lenovo Intelligent Manufacturing has achieved good results is inseparable from the intelligent supply chain it has built.
"Digital and intelligent transformation requires hard work and return to fundamentals." As the opening guest, Cai Hong, head of Lenovo's LME Digital Transformation Office, shared Lenovo's transformation practices and thoughts on intelligent supply chain. He said that digital and intelligent transformation requires hard work and return to fundamentals. Lenovo Intelligent Supply Chain adheres to the value of "three highs and one excellent" with high flexibility, high agility, high efficiency and excellent cost, and uses eighteen martial arts to create capacity building. Today, Lenovo Intelligent Supply Chain has achieved gartner's top 25 global supply chain rankings, ranked second in the Asia-Pacific region, and ranked fifth in the global ranking of high-tech companies.
It is reported that Hefei Lianbao Factory is an intelligent manufacturing carrier and endogenous practice model represented by Lenovo's intelligent supply chain. As the largest export enterprise in Anhui Province, the Lianbao factory with an annual output of 30 million Lenovo computers has two intelligent production lines of Nezha Line and Mercury Line independently developed, which can handle 5,000 orders per day, and more than 80% of them are personalized customization of less than 5 units per unit, under the blessing of Lenovo Intelligent Supply Chain Advanced Planning and Scheduling System, the scheduling time has been greatly shortened from 6 hours to 1.5 minutes, the production efficiency has increased by 16%, and the order fulfillment rate is on average 15% faster than the industry standard.
At present, Lenovo is in a critical period of intelligent transformation, and its 3S strategy is making itself an intelligent leader and enabler, and Lenovo AI is the real giver of 3S vitality. At the event site, Dr. Fan Jianping, vice president of Lenovo Group and head of the artificial intelligence laboratory of Lenovo Research Institute, delivered a keynote speech on "Lenovo Brain Empowers New Lenovo & New Manufacturing", he believes that the business scene is the protagonist, artificial intelligence is a supporting role, and the protagonist and supporting roles can play on the same stage. Lenovo's AI technology layout includes a platform, that is, the "Lenovo Brain Artificial Intelligence Platform" and six core technologies, which can be said to be the soul of Lenovo's 3S transformation. Lenovo Brain can activate Lenovo's infrastructure to make it more vital, empower smart solutions upwards, and support smart IoT devices downwards. At present, Lenovo Brain has won the TOP AI application case of the Cyberspace Administration of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the top 10 artificial intelligence solutions in the 2021 Qubit China Annual Artificial Intelligence Award. The advanced planning and scheduling system supported by Lenovo Brain helped Lenovo win important honors such as the Franz Edelman Award, the highest award in international operations research, and the solving engine for intelligent production decision-making won the 2021 China Computer Society Science and Technology Award and the Science and Technology Progress Excellence Award.
The case landed to release its own digital capabilities and empower the industry to win-win
As an enabler of intelligent manufacturing, Lenovo will internalize the technical capabilities, solutions and industry know-how in the manufacturing field based on DynaSky Engine, forming a replicable and modular application scenario to escort the realization of intelligent manufacturing in thousands of industries.
"The future of manufacturing is the integration and iterative regeneration of new technologies and enterprise value chains." At the event site, Song Tao, director of lenovo intelligent architecture solution group's large manufacturing industry, took "New IT Intelligent Computing Practice Sharing" as the theme of his speech, and focused on Lenovo's externalization achievements in the field of intelligent manufacturing from the perspective of "computing". He said that AI in the entire intelligent manufacturing can empower the scene is very much, the digital era of intelligent manufacturing and traditional manufacturing, the main difference is more model algorithms, digital era of intelligent manufacturing is a lot of calculations.
Among the many cases shared by Song Tao, the intelligent computing platform of China Steel Research Group is a representative case of Lenovo's cooperation with the manufacturing R&D department in the intelligent research and development of new materials. China Iron and Steel Research Institute is a think tank in the industry in the research and development simulation of steel materials, and there is an urgent need for a unified computing pool mixed with multiple architectures such as high-performance computing, artificial intelligence and big data. Lenovo is a digital scientific research public service platform for materials and processes, testing and research and development work built by China Steel Research And Technology Group Co., Ltd., which can meet the hardware, network and storage requirements required for more than 10 multi-node large-scale computing tasks at the same time.
In addition, the cooperation between Lenovo and Tongkun Group is also a typical case that Lenovo has to mention in many externalization cases in the field of intelligent manufacturing. The sharer of this case is one of the heavy guests of this event- Zhou Ying, chief architect of intelligent manufacturing of Lenovo Data Intelligence Business Group. He believes that the essence of digital transformation is to achieve digital business operations. Digital business operation is not a simple data analysis, enterprises need comprehensive data to achieve the overall digital operation management of the business. Therefore, Lenovo proposed to build a "data intelligent operation center" to help enterprises achieve the goal of digital business operations.
Taking the digital transformation of the process chemical company Tongkun Group as an example, after years of development, the customer's business has developed rapidly, and various data of the enterprise have exploded, making the complexity of the management process change exponentially, and it is urgent to digitally control it. Lenovo's "Data Intelligent Operation Center" helps Tongkun Group achieve full static and dynamic data access, integration and intelligent data analysis, combined with the understanding of enterprise production, operation and business, to fully realize the digital management and intelligent decision-making of enterprises. It can be seen that Lenovo's rich experience in digital transformation is also a reference for other enterprises, which is also one of the empowerment directions of Lenovo's "endogenous externalization".
"Five-dimensional one platform" + full-life cycle ecological design to be a "carbon roadman" for low-carbon transformation practice
As one of the eight key tasks in 2021 determined by the Central Economic Work Conference, carbon peaking and carbon neutrality have always been the focus of social attention. The importance of green manufacturing as the most important component to achieve the double carbon target can be seen.
"ESG is an important consideration in redefining a good company." Lenovo Group Quality Standards and Environmental Affairs Director Liu Wei said that Lenovo has continued to pay attention to the topic of sustainable development since 2006, at present, Lenovo has gradually established a perfect green management framework covering five dimensions of "green production + supplier management + green logistics + green recycling + green packaging" and a "green information disclosure platform", and from the whole life cycle of product design, technology, recycling and other green manufacturing top-level system construction, and achieved certain results.
Liu Wei also mentioned that from the perspective of green products, Lenovo implemented the concept of "full life cycle ecological design" from the conceptual stage at the beginning of the product life cycle. Lenovo considers not only "from cradle to grave", but also recycles and reuses products, so that products can return to the cradle again, forming a whole process management of "from cradle to cradle".
According to reports, in terms of green production, Lenovo's self-developed "low-temperature solder paste" green manufacturing process in 2017 reduces the temperature by 70 degrees during welding, which not only accelerates the welding speed, increases production capacity, but also improves computer reliability and reduces electricity costs. Practice has proved that the low-temperature solder paste process can reduce the energy consumption and carbon emissions of the printed circuit board assembly process by 35%, and achieve an annual carbon saving of 1087 tons. Last year alone, Lenovo shipped 22.7 million laptops made using the low-temperature solder paste process, reducing carbon emissions by a total of 4,740 tons. At the same time, Lenovo's Advanced Production Dispatch System (LAPS) saves more than 2,696 MWh of electricity per year by improving production efficiency and reducing idle production lines, which can reduce more than 2,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions, equivalent to planting 110,000 trees per year.
At the end of the product lifecycle, Lenovo also provides consumer and commercial customers around the world with intelligent recycling services for products, packaging and batteries, giving products the opportunity to return to product design at the end of the life cycle. These customer-facing projects allowed Lenovo to collect more than 31,795 metric tons of product for recycling and reuse in 2020.
Not only that, Lenovo also continues to promote green packaging. Since 2008, Lenovo has reduced the use of packaging materials by 3,240 tons through technological innovations such as degradable bamboo and sugarcane fiber packaging, and in the 2020/21 fiscal year alone, the consumption of packaging materials has been reduced by 140 tons. At the same time, the use of self-locking bottom structure packaging instead of plastic tape sealing can reduce the use of plastic tape by about 200,000 kilometers per year, which is equivalent to 5 circles around the earth. Since 2007, Lenovo has also begun to apply waste plastic recycling technology to Lenovo desktops, notebooks, monitors, servers and other products, reducing carbon emissions by about 60,000 tons in total, equivalent to planting more than 3 million trees.
Referring to the future development trend of the manufacturing industry, Song Tao, director of the large manufacturing industry of Lenovo Intelligent Architecture Solution Group, believes that based on the complex attributes of the manufacturing industry itself, the future manufacturing data will be externalized through endogenous capacity spillover to empower more enterprises, rather than to traditional giant manufacturing enterprises. In the course of 37 years of development, Lenovo's own growth experience has become a valuable asset for the digital transformation of China's manufacturing industry. In the future, Lenovo will continue to fulfill the mission of intelligent manufacturing new intelligent manufacturing, empower the manufacturing industry based on the "end edge cloud network intelligence" technology architecture, and achieve comprehensive intelligent transformation and green sustainable development of the technology, services and solutions required.