Oliver Cann, Public Engagement, Tel.: +41 79 799 3405; oliver.cann@weforum.org; Muzi Li, Public Engagement, Tel.: +86 139 1046 6369; muzi.li@weforum.org
Scaling Intelligent Manufacturing: 10 Factories Leading the Way in Innovation
· The World Economic Forum welcomes 10 new factories into its global Lighthouse Network
· The “lighthouses” were chosen for their leadership in applying Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies to drive financial and operational impact
· The Lighthouse Network represents a range of industries and geographies and provides a platform for sharing knowledge and best practices for scaling up technology adoption
· For more information about the meeting, click here. Follow the conversation using #AMNC19
Dalian, People’s Republic of China, 3 July 2019 – The World Economic Forum announces the addition of 10 new factories to its global Lighthouse Network, a community of manufacturers that are showing leadership in applying Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies to drive financial and operational impact.
The factories join a network of 16 existing lighthouses across multiple geographies and industries. They serve as beacons to guide others to overcome challenges in upgrading systems and applying cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data analytics and 3D printing. The factories were selected based on their success in integrating these technologies to increase efficiency and drive innovation.
“The global Lighthouse Network offers an unrivalled opportunity not only to highlight the transformational efforts of the world’s most advanced manufacturers but also, more importantly, to create a shared learning journey that will help manufacturers around the world, across value chains and of all sizes to access and capitalize on the positive potential of the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” said Francisco Betti, Head of Advanced Manufacturing Industry, World Economic Forum.
The new lighthouses are:
Arçelik (Ulmi, Romania): This greenfield factory is a product of the Arçelik use-case laboratory, where it was designed twice as fast as previous-generation factories. Since coming into existence, automation of low-value tasks has reduced operational costs by 11%.
Ford Otosan (Kocaeli, Turkey): This site leverages digital manufacturing and advanced automation to move beyond lean, increasing its output by 6% and employee engagement by 45% without additional capital expenditure investment.
Nokia (Oulu, Finland): Nokia’s fully digitalized 5G factory focuses on bringing together design and production to introduce new products. Implementing a range of 4IR solutions, connected by a private wireless network, this site improved productivity by 30%, and now brings products to market 50% faster than before.
Petrosea (Tabang, Indonesia): Challenged by its remote location, this mining service provider deployed multiple Fourth Industrial Revolution use cases (e.g. optimized truck dispatch, real-time monitoring, drone surveys) that transformed the mine from a loss-making entity into a profitable one in just six months.
Posco (Pohang, Republic of Korea): This plant leverages artificial intelligence to drive productivity and quality improvements in the steel industry. It is building its own smart-factory platform through a collaboration with a local ecosystem of academia, SMEs and start-ups.
Groupe Renault (Cléon, France): This Renault site uses a wide range of Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies (e.g. cobots, virtual reality) to support operators, eliminate waste, reduce energy consumption and automate repetitive tasks.
SAIC Maxus (Nanjing, China): A challenging market environment drove this site to implement a new model for mass customization. Digitalizing the value chain end-to-end, from customers to suppliers, through an integrated digital thread resulted in improved sales and reduced costs.
Schneider Electric (Batam, Indonesia): One of Schneider Electric’s nine smart factories, this location developed a full spectrum of Fourth Industrial Revolution solutions (e.g., IIoT platform) that were then shared with the wider Schneider Electric community, including customers and partners, thereby improving the operations of the entire ecosystem.
Tata Steel (Kalinganagar, India): This greenfield steel plant is helping to set a new standard for the speed at which a factory can achieve full capacity from complete nascency. It also improved time-to-market by 50% thanks to significant investments in digital and analytics solutions, as well as capability-building to develop the digital skills of a relatively junior and inexperienced team.
Zymergen (Emeryville, USA): A digital native, this bio-engineering site is using robotics and artificial intelligence on processes that have traditionally been highly manual, resulting in the doubling of its innovation rate.
“The 10 new lighthouses confirm that frontrunners in the Fourth Industrial Revolution draw a competitive advantage from either innovating their production system or by innovating their entire value chains and offering new products and services that were not possible before,” said Enno de Boer, Partner and Head of McKinsey & Company’s Global Manufacturing Practice, which collaborated with the Forum on the project. “For example, Zymergen brought robotics and AI to their bio-engineering labs, doubling innovation rates and allowing product innovations that were previously unthinkable.”
One of the key elements of the Lighthouse Network is its commitment to discovering and elevating solutions that can be scaled up in cost-effective ways across companies and industries.
“What all frontrunners have in common is that they work hard to find ways to scale,” Enno de Boer said. “For example, Tata not only cracked the code on how to bring predictive maintenance to 50,000 different machines, but they also mastered the challenge of rolling out best practices to a site with a relatively inexperienced site team, supporting them with world-class data insights. Not imaginable before, the site is a benchmark in their network for productivity and time-to-market.”
The lighthouses have also agreed to share their knowledge with other manufacturing businesses, helping them successfully adopt the technologies of the future.
“The World Economic Forum’s Fourth Industrial Revolution lighthouse programme promotes collaboration, benchmarking and new ideas for the digital transformation of industries in a practical way that generates faster adoption of digital technologies and increases the efficiency of manufacturing,” said Peter Herweck, Executive Vice-President, Industrial Automation, Schneider Electric. “Our smart factory in Batam, Indonesia, has benefited enormously from the Forum programme and we are delighted to continue to be a part of this programme and share our learning and solutions with the wider industrial ecosystem.”
“Our Oulu 5G facility is an example for our enterprise customers to realize the vision of industrial automation in the era of Industry 4.0,” said Kathrin Buvac, President of Nokia Enterprise and Chief Strategy Officer. “Leveraging our own technology, including private wireless networks, edge cloud and IoT analytics, resulted in significant productivity gains of 30% for our factory as of today already.”
The Lighthouse programme is conducted in collaboration with McKinsey & Company. Learn more about the Lighthouses announced in January and the Lighthouses announced last September and read the white paper, Fourth Industrial Revolution: Beacons of Technology and Innovation in Manufacturing.
The World Economic Forum’s 13th Annual Meeting of the New Champions is taking place on 1-3 July 2019 in Dalian, People’s Republic of China. Convening under the theme, Leadership 4.0: Succeeding in a New Era of Globalization, more than 1,800 business leaders, policy-makers and experts from over 80 countries will participate and explore more than 200 sessions.
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