Foxconn Case Study
Foxconn Industrial Internet (Fii)’s Lights-off factory in Shenzhen, China, is only one of a select few production facilities worldwide awarded the distinction of “Manufacturing Lighthouse” by the World Economic Forum. Fii has developed and deployed a fully automated “lights-off” manufacturing process in this factory, which specialises in the production of electrical equipment components such as smartphones.
Fii’s lights-off factory utilises numerous applications connected directly to a private network in order to enable several use cases and realise associated benefits. These include an automated optimisation system for machine learning and AI devices, and an intelligent self-maintenance system and an intelligent real-time production monitoring system. Industrial robots connected to the 4G industrial private network have achieved latency below 100ms allowing for near real-time robot control and data access & feedback. Fii is developing an ultra-low latency 5G industrial private network to achieve real-time control and data access & feedback with latency as low as 1ms. In addition, implementation of an Fii Factory Management Control System (FMCS) tracks energy consumption across the plant via IoT sensors which has reduced all forms of energy consumption resulting in annualized savings of US$1.6M per facility.
In the future, a 5G industrial private network will be enabled by mobile operators to facilitate high reliability, low latency data transmission which will be utilised by Fii’s AI tools for predictive maintenance, AGV scheduling, AOI inspection, real-time data analytics and many more applications.
A 5G industrial private network will enable cost savings by increasing yield rate and reducing production downtime for missed defects, unexpected machine damage, and other process abnormalities that will be tracked with Fii’s AI tools.
The outcomes of this implementation to date have been: Production efficiency increased by 30%, inventory cycle reduced by 15%, reduced labour costs compared to semi-automated process, annualized energy savings of US$1.6M from FMCS.
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