The manufacturing supply chain crisis continues, and Schneider Electric hopes to achieve the industrial chain "passing on the help"

Southern Finance and Economics all-media reporter Jiang Yue Wuhan reported that in the global supply chain in 2021, "black swans" took off frequently, and "shortage" and "broken chain" became hot and high-frequency words in the industry. Energy supply, manufacturing are typical industries with tight supply chains, and a production line "remodeling" is quietly underway.

Located in Wuhan, Hubei Province, the Schneider Electric plant in France is an important manufacturing base for circuit breakers, contactors, industrial control and signal components. On October 27, a reporter from Southern Finance visited the factory and learned about some aspects of the current manufacturing industry to reshape the industrial chain. However, the promotion of the Industrial Internet of Things and the introduction of artificial intelligence automation processes are not the advantages of advanced large factories. At present, it is imperative to assist private enterprises and small and medium-sized enterprises in the upstream and downstream of the supply chain to achieve an overall level of automation.

"Private enterprises and SMEs are our key suppliers, and we will make it our top strategy for next year to help them improve their automation capabilities in the hope of achieving a more stable supply chain." Mao Feifei, head of digital solutions for Schneider Electric's global supply chain in China, told reporters. Li Cong, general manager of Schneider Electric Manufacturing (Wuhan), told reporters that this year's global supply chain crisis continues, and manufacturing companies need to carry out better budget management, production expectation management, and supplier management.

Earlier, Liu Yingqiu, chairman of the Private Economic Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, also proposed that in the modernization of the industrial chain and supply chain, private enterprises need to do more to achieve a smooth capital chain, talent chain, technology chain and circulation chain in the entire economy.

<h4>Artificial intelligence modified product detection production line</h4>

Schneider Electric's Wuhan factory operates day and night, and workers implement an assembly line arrangement of 8 hours per shift and three shifts per day. There were originally 15 workers working around the clock on the module inspection production line, and since the launch of the "AI Industrial Vision Inspection Platform", the number of personnel has been reduced by 66%. "Not only the manual reduction, the false detection rate is reduced to less than 0.5%, and the missed detection rate is zero, which is a very big improvement." Fei Fei is introduced.

AI (Artificial Intelligence) is driving industrial smart manufacturing forward. AI is essentially the process of using a lot of sensors and vision processors to convert natural perception into data. In Schneider Electric's module inspection line, AI replaces the worker's eyes and hands to check the appearance defects of the product, a module is photographed from various angles by multiple industrial cameras, and the inference calculation is performed by the AI model on the edge device, and the analysis results are compared with the standard pattern. There are ten kinds of defects are signs of unqualified products, including unqualified enameled wires, multi-wire heads, broken skeletons, coil tin tips, etc. Once ai identifies the above errors, it will identify unqualified products with serial numbers.

"Such a position was originally prone to missed inspections and misinspectives due to visual fatigue, and now people can be transferred out of this position." Schneider Electric plant technicians introduced to reporters that this is an example of lean management in the manufacturing industry. At present, this new AI detection platform can be comparable to the speed of workers, and the entire detection link of a module can be completed within 800 milliseconds (8 seconds), which is similar to the time-consuming time of the whole manual process.

The concept of introducing artificial intelligence into industrial intelligent manufacturing has been proposed for a long time, but it is often criticized for being "not smart enough", and the "crux" is still at the technical level. "The efficiency and accuracy of AI detection depends on the read speed of the GPU (graphics processing unit) server, and also on the hard disk space of the server." Introduction to Fei Fei.

However, to achieve a high level of artificial intelligence, it will involve a "sunk cost". In the past, enterprises needed to build their own servers, hire professional teams, and often needed to invest in research and development in terms of model construction and framework design, which once hindered the promotion of artificial intelligence in the industrial field.

In recent years, the "sunk cost" of such an AI artificial intelligence detection platform is gradually becoming lightweight, which is mainly achieved through "cloud services". Schneider Electric currently uses Amazon Sagemaker machine learning service of Amazon Cloud Technology to achieve rapid preparation, construction, training and deployment of detection models, with Amazon Cloud Technology's cloud data storage and database, so as to avoid the purchase of local servers, and model training and iteration are actually done on Amazon Cloud Technology's platform, in other words, "sunk costs" are transferred from factory use to external third parties.

<h4>Supply chains need to be "mutually reinforcing"</h4>

However, in the face of strong growth on the demand side, the "reshaping" of the supply chain is not so easy, and it has also formed a global supply chain crisis throughout 2021. The reporter learned that the leading enterprises in the supply chain in this crisis, in fact, can not "stand alone", must help the upstream and downstream, in order to achieve mutual assistance and self-help.

"This year, the 'black swan event' in the global supply chain has occurred frequently, which is a great challenge, which requires us to carry out better production expectation management, inventory management, and management of the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain." Li Cong pointed out the key to improving the current global supply chain crisis.

Under the wave of "digital economy", the market demand for electronic components and energy management remains high, which has formed greater supply chain management pressure on large manufacturing enterprises. On October 27, Schneider Electric announced that revenue for the full year is expected to grow by 11% to 13% year-on-year, which means that annual revenue will reach 28 billion to 28.5 billion euros, far better than the company's performance in any year from 2015 to 2019. In other words, global electrification demand is so strong in 2021 that more electrical management is needed, whether in data centers, automation in the oil and gas industry, or residential and industrial buildings.

Li Cong pointed out that so far this year, the output and sales revenue in China have grown faster than the global average, reaching a double-digit annual growth rate. Therefore, ensuring the smoothness of the industrial chain in China is very critical for Schneider Electric to achieve its global sales targets.

"Next year, promoting high-quality production line management to our suppliers is our top priority." Mao Feifei pointed out to reporters this new concept of "supplier relationship management". "We prefer to form a partner relationship with them, and we can help them improve the technology of their production line."

In many aspects of the manufacturing industry, private enterprises and small and medium-sized enterprises are often the protagonists, but they are often one step behind in the wave of "intelligent manufacturing". "Smart manufacturing requires the establishment of talents, infrastructure, and applications." Mao Feifei pointed out that on the one hand, the concept of digital and intelligent transformation needs to be cultivated, and not every private enterprise and small and medium-sized enterprise can quickly accept it, on the other hand, these enterprises also have many concerns about capital investment. In the face of the current global supply chain crisis, the original cold supply and demand relationship between the upstream and downstream of the production chain is due to the current "supply chain tension" crisis, which has been more cooperatively changed.

<h4>The supply chain crisis "high fever does not go away"</h4>

Since entering October, the world's large manufacturing companies have continuously released the operating results of the three quarterly reports or the latest financial quarters, which also reflect the supply chain crisis "high fever does not go away". "Tight supply chains limit output to a further boost." Similar statements appear in the earnings statements of many companies, including Schneider Electric.

GeEg, a highly representative manufacturing company covering diversified manufacturing, even saw year-on-year decline in revenue in the third quarter. The company's revenue was $18.4 billion in the first three months to the end of September, down 0.5 percent from the same period in 2020, which was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. In sharp contrast, orders for the period actually reached $22.1 billion, up 44% year-on-year, indicating that the demand for the company's products in the aviation, medical, renewable energy, and power sectors is very urgent.

Even the electronics industry has suffered from "broken chains" in the supply chain. In October, there was market news that Apple's sales of the iPhone 13 series in the fourth quarter of this year would have to cut by 10 million units due to supply shortages. The company's best-selling mobile phones and tablets have been delivered in the official channel for more than 4 weeks.

"This year, different factors, including widespread commodity price increases, labor shortages, tight shipping capacity or accidents, have created a strained supply chain." Li Cong analyzed. He believes that a higher degree of automation of production lines through AI artificial intelligence will help alleviate the current supply chain crisis.

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