5G Drives Digital Transformation of Manufacturing

WISION, which has provided home design solutions for more than six million families, says the only way to achieve large-scale flexible production of customised products is through digitisation. “We believe that the home should be personalised and customised,” says Gan Li, General Manager of WISION. “We have always believed that 5G-enabled digitalisation can promote the progress of the decoration industry and bring visible implementation to users.”

In the WISION Furniture Technology Centre, customer orders from all over China are uploaded to the order management cloud. Then, the company’s production scheduling system will automatically digitise the order based on the length, width, height data and description of the product requirement. A virtual manufacturing assembly system translates the front-end order and picture information into data with manufacturing processing attributes.

The orders are uploaded to the production planning and scheduling centre, which scans thousands of orders to select products that match in colour, material utilisation, delivery time, logistics direction and other conditions to create a production batch. The system also calculates the optimal order production time and order combination for batches. In this way, WISION says it achieves a material utilisation rate of 93%, compared with 75% rate in traditional woodcraft.

As well as supplying customised furniture, WISION offers home decoration services. Using its BIM (building information model) system and 5G connectivity, WISION is able to perform digital management of customers’ construction sites, conducting unified scheduling, distribution, supervision, and quality inspection jobs simultaneously. At the same time, householders can monitor the progress of their home decoration in real time via their mobile phones.

Gan Li says that there are about 600 construction sites in operation every day. “Our existing digital capabilities are not only used by ourselves, but also used to enable other decoration enterprises,” he adds. “This is actually a symbiotic system, in which all the enterprises in the industry chain work together to expand the subdivision fields.”

Gan Li explains that Unicom Guangdong’s 5G connectivity supports WISION in four key ways. The first is through the efficient collection of data. Whereas Wi-Fi connectivity would frequently lose data packets and 4G networks are not sufficiently responsive, with 5G, “the production process in WISION is well synchronised,” he says. The second way is through support for machine vision, which allows WISION to automatically inspect the quality of components.

WISION also uses 5G to access the cloud computing needed to support large-scale flexible production. Guixin Pan, president of Unicom Guangdong 5G Innovation Centre, says the industrial clusters in Foshan each require powerful storage and computing power in the cloud. “5G is required to upload and download a large amount of data in real time,” he adds.

The fourth scenario is 5G intelligent robot. Enter any WISION decoration site, you can find a 5G intelligent robot. It is responsible for ordering and dispatching on customers’ construction sites through 5G intelligent connections. The large screen of the robot also displays a rotating 3D model of the currently renovated house. On-site personnel can click into any construction node to view the related information of the current construction progress. At the same time, homeowners can control the movement of robots at will, and through 5G HD live streaming to view the decoration site in real time from different positions and angles.

In the future, WISION plans to work with Unicom Guangdong to explore how a combination of 5G and MEC can support other manufacturing application scenarios. They are also planning to build a digital twin (a dynamic digital model) to support customised furniture production lines.

Foshan is hoping the digital economy will add 20% to GDP by 2025, paving the way to boost the value of the city’s digital economy to two trillion yuan (US$300 billion) by 2035.

To support the digital transforma- tion of Foshan’s manufacturing sector, Unicom Guangdong and Huawei launched Foshan Manufacturing City in June 2022 as part of the U-Joy Cities programme - a joint 5G network innovation initiative to better serve people and facilitate the transformation of smart industries in Guangdong and the Greater Bay Area. Together with major enterprises in Foshan, such as Midea, Country Garden, FAW-Volkswagen, and Haitian, Unicom Guangdong has built a number of digital factories and workshops.

“Although large enterprises have become the pioneer of the digital and intelligent transforma- tion in manufacturing industry, the large number of SMEs are the decisive players of this digitalisation game,” says Guixin Pan, General Manager of Network Product Innovation Centre of Unicom Guangdong. “SMEs have disadvantages in capital, talents, and technology in digital transformation. However, more and more SMEs in Foshan realise the great value of digital and intelligent transformation and devote themselves to it with the help of Guangdong Unicom’s 5G U-Joy Cities programme.”

For example, Guangdong SIMCHENG Plastics Machinery Co. has digitalized all paper drawings and manual programming links, thereby avoiding errors from human operations, refining the production process, and also improving efficiency. The company says its overall capacity increased by 20%, the average order lead time was shortened from 240 days to 200 days, and profit increased by 64.3%, compared with the previous year.