World Economic Forum Expands Global Lighthouse Network to Include Second SANY Factory

Metals and Mining Review | Tuesday, October 25, 2022

The No. 18 Factory in Changsha is the second certified Lighthouse Factory in the global heavy industry after SANY's drilling machinery factory in Beijing.

FREMONT, CA: SANY (600031: SHA) is a major high-end equipment manufacturing (GLN) company. After SANY's drilling equipment factory in Beijing, the No. 18 Factory in Changsha is the second accredited Lighthouse Factory in the world's heavy industry. The GLN, created in partnership with McKinsey, honours Lighthouse Factories, or factories that are leaders in digital manufacturing and Globalisation 4.0 and stand for the pinnacle of intelligent manufacturing (IM) and digitisation.

The No. 18 Factory now has a digital and flexible manufacturing system for heavy equipment thanks to SANY's full exploitation of flexible automated production, AI, and scale IoT solutions. This is in response to the challenges of cycle fluctuations in the heavy industry market and multi-variety yet low-volume production of heavy parts. The improvements are significant: SANY increased production capacity by 123 per cent, increased productivity by 98 per cent, and decreased unit manufacturing costs by 29 per cent.

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SANY owns the only two Lighthouse Factories in the world's heavy industry. The second accreditation validates our knowledge and highlights our outstanding accomplishments in advanced manufacturing and digital transformation, according to SANY Heavy Industry Chairman Xiang Wenbo. While its No. 18 factory is evolving into the smartest Lighthouse Factory of heavy machinery, SANY was designated one of the 50 Smartest Companies by MIT Technology.

Pump trucks, trailer pumps, and truck-mounted pumps are made in the 100,000-square-metre factory, whose market shares have consistently been the highest worldwide. 32 common production situations, and the factory's nine main manufacturing processes have reached complete automation.

Every pump made in the factory is given a unique ID card at the start of production. The MOM factory brain intelligently assigns each pump throughout the production process. In the plant, every aspect of intelligent production has been accomplished. AI robots entirely handle steel plate cutting and sorting with 3D visualisation, increasing accuracy to 1 mm, cutting processing time in half, and cutting material waste in half.

In the factory, 200 completely networked robots and 1,540 sensors generate over 30TB of big data daily. The 3.7-meter-long, 2.6-ton pump truck turntable has made fixture-free grasping and welding possible for the first time in the industry thanks to arc tracking technology. Since the Changsha Factory 18 project in 2020, SANY has invested 500 million yuan (USD 69.53 million) and creatively developed breakthroughs in 55 fundamental technologies.

With the potential to produce 263 SKUs, Changsha Factory 18's IM transformation increased its production capacity by 123 per cent, employee productivity by 98 per cent, and overall automation rate by 76 per cent. The factory's production value per person in 2021 was 14.7113 million yuan (USD 2.05 million), and its production value per square metre was 154,000 yuan (USD 21,410).

SANY's 45 more factories have swiftly adopted the Changsha Factory 18 project's unique technological and technical innovations. In the framework of the fourth industrial revolution, 46 digitally transformed firms have mapped the design of smart factories, simultaneously extending IM to the upstream and downstream links of the industrial chain.

Through continuous technical improvement and experience sharing, SANY is committed to the digital and intelligent transformation of intelligent products, manufacturing, and operations and strives to become the IM benchmark of the global construction machines industry.

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