The city of Wuxi has implemented new development concepts in an in-depth manner to speed up its industrial transformation and upgrading with smart manufacturing as its main focus so as to shift from a manufacturing powerhouse to intelligent manufacturing from Wuxi.
Wuxi No.1 Cotton Textile Group, a conventional manufacturing enterprise that started from the scratch in the traditional textile industry, will celebrate its 100th birthday in 2019
As a manager, Deng Fangfang remembered that hundreds of workers were required for one shift when she joined the company in 2002 but now the company’s employees add up to no more than 200.
Since the beginning of last year, Wuxi No.1 Cotton Textile Group has spent 150 million yuan on the intelligent transformation of the its workshop to come up with a new model of intelligent spinning.
The centerline of the workshop is used as the dividing line. On the right-hand side is the semi-automatic winding equipment that was started in 2002 which requires manual auxiliary operations. On the left-hand side is the latest winding equipment that was introduced last year to basically realize automatic production.
Wuxi No.1 Cotton Textile Group is expected to complete the intelligent transformation of its workshop next year when only 5 to 8 people are needed per 10,000 spindles while the yield will increase by 20% to raise the product quality and various data to the international advanced level.
Like Wuxi No. 1 Cotton, more and more Wuxi manufacturing companies are relying on intelligent manufacturing to climb to the high end of the value chain.
Heilan Group has realized multi-scenario collaborative integration to become the first enterprise in Wuxi to pots more than 100 billion yuan of output value in 2017. Shuangliang Energy-saving System Co., Ltd. has been ranked as the first batch of "China's service-oriented manufacturing model enterprises" by "full life cycle management", which is the only one of its kind in Jiangsu. Wuxi Filmstrip Semiconductor Technology Co., Ltd. has developed sub-micron semiconductor plate-making lithography equipment, breaking the monopoly of foreign countries.
The strong development momentum demonstrated by Wuxi’s smart manufacturing cannot be separated from the government’s strong push. Over the years, Wuxi has successively issued policies such as the "Three-Year Action Plan for Intelligent Manufacturing" and "Operational Plan for Promoting Technological Upgrades for Thousands of Enterprises".
In the meantime, Wuxi has implemented five major projects including pilot demonstration of intelligent manufacturing and collaborative innovation by giving a reward of 8% to the intelligent transformation projects with a total investment of more than 30 million yuan, of which smart and technical equipment account for more than 50%.
This year, Wuxi allocated 80 million yuan from its municipal-level financial plan to support the development of smart manufacturing.
Wuxi's smart manufacturing has continued to gather momentum to fuel the continuous growth its brick-and-mortar economy. From January to April this year, the added value of industrial enterprises above designated size in Wuxi increased by 10.5% year on year, ranking first in the province.
(Source: Jiangsu International Channel)
