Strategic Analysis Of Intelligent Manufacturing Strategy For Manufacturing Industry In The United States, Germany And Japan

In western countries, there is such a sentence: To live well, a nation must produce well, indicating that the manufacturing industry is the most important embodiment of a country's comprehensive national strength.

After the Internet bubble and the economic crisis, countries around the world, especially the developed countries, began to realise the importance of manufacturing and reexamine their strengths and weaknesses.

The arrival of the fourth industrial revolution has provided opportunities for all countries to develop and pform, and is also facing the challenge of the changing competitive pattern. Intelligent manufacturing has become a new battleground for all countries to compete.

Countries around the manufacturing industry have put forward corresponding strategies - the United States' "national manufacturing innovation network", Germany's "industrial 4", Japan's "industrial value chain", and of course, China's "made in China 2025".

So, what are the differences between these strategies? What are the fundamental reasons for these differences?

For manufacturing, simply speaking, it is "finding problems (such as quality defects, lack of accuracy, equipment failure, high cost, low efficiency, etc.), understanding problems, obtaining information in the process, abstracting it into knowledge, and then using knowledge to understand, solve and avoid problems."

The means and methods to understand and solve problems determine the form of acquired knowledge, and the process and form of knowledge abstraction and application determine the form of knowledge inheritance.

This process can be accomplished through "man to finish", "data to complete" or "system to accomplish", which is also the most fundamental reason for a country to make philosophy.

Japan's unique culture of tolerance, obedience and collectivism also deeply influenced the manufacturing culture of Japan. Its main feature is to solve problems in the production system through continuous optimization of organization, cultural construction and human training.

It is believed that many manufacturing enterprises in China share the same feeling, because when we accept lean training, the 3 aspects we emphasize repeatedly are "company culture", "three level organization" and "talent training".

The most typical embodiment is the production management system which was put forward by Japan in 1970s as the core of "total production system maintenance (TPM)".

Its core idea can be summarized by "three full": full efficiency, full system and full staff participation.

The way of implementation mainly includes 3 aspects: improving working skills, improving team spirit and improving working environment, so that after 1990s, Japan chose "Lean Manufacturing" as its direction of pformation instead of "6-sigma quality management system".

Japanese enterprises are also sparing no effort in fostering talent, especially the "employee life long" culture, which closely links the fate of employees and enterprises, so that people's experience and knowledge can be accumulated, utilized and pmitted within the enterprise.

Japanese enterprises usually solve problems in the following ways: problems arise, personnel quickly arrive at the scene, identify things and explore reality (three present), solve problems, analyze the causes of problems, and avoid problems through improvement.

The final knowledge falls on the human body, and the ability to solve and avoid problems increases after people's skills improve.

Therefore, for Japanese enterprises, employees are the most important value, and trust in people is much better than the trust in equipment, data and systems. All automation or informatization construction is centered around helping people to work, so Japanese enterprises never talk about machine substitutions or unmanned factories.

If China wants to learn the spirit of craftsmen, the most important thing to draw lessons from is the organizational culture and system of Japanese craftsmen.

But in recent years, such a culture has encountered a very big challenge, that is, the problem of aging in Japan and the shortage of young people in the manufacturing industry makes it impossible for anyone to pass on such knowledge.

Japan is also aware of its lack of data and information systems.

This can be clearly seen in the framework and objectives of the industrial value chain industrial alliance in Japan.

7 of the 19 work items proposed by the alliance are directly related to big data.

It can be said that Japan's pformation strategy is a helpless way to deal with its population structure problems and social contradictions. The core is to solve the way of knowledge acquisition and inheritance of alternative people.

But in the process of pformation, Japan is also faced with many challenges: first, the lack of data accumulation, which makes knowledge and experience lack of basis and criteria in the process of pferring knowledge from human to information system and manufacturing system.

Followed by the conservative culture of Japanese industrial enterprises, the lack of software and IT technical talents, as expressed in the 2015 white paper published by the Japanese Ministry of production and Economics: "compared with accelerating manufacturing changes in Germany and the United States, Japanese companies now show the importance of software."

Germany: "solidifying knowledge on equipment through continuous upgrading of equipment and production systems"

Germany's advanced equipment and automated production line is world-famous. It can be said that the strength of the equipment manufacturing industry has the pride of being qualified.

At the same time, the rigorous style of German and its unique "apprenticeship" higher education mode make German manufacturing style very pragmatic, and the combination of theoretical research and industrial application is also the most closely integrated.

However, Germany also faced the problem of labor shortage very early. In the 2015 competitiveness index report, the labour force is the only one in Germany that is weaker than the innovation driven country.

Therefore, Germany has to compensate for this shortcoming by developing more advanced equipment and highly integrated automatic production lines.

The logic of solving problems in Germany's manufacturing industry is: generating problems, solving problems by people (or equipment), solidifying the knowledge and process of solving problems into equipment and production lines, and automatically solving or avoiding similar problems.

A more intuitive example is used to compare the different ways of solving problems in Japan and Germany: if the error of material sorting often occurs on the production line, then Japan's solution is likely to improve material identification (color, etc.), staff training and setting up a duplicate inspection system.

In Germany, it is likely to design an automatic sorting system for RFID, or use image recognition and automatic arm sorting.

For example, in Germany, the methods of error compensation, tool life prediction, multi axis synchronization algorithm, spindle frequency compensation and other solutions have been solidified into machine tools in the form of functional packages, so even workers who are not skilled in manufacturing processes and operations can produce reliable products.

It is precisely this reason that has made Germany the world's largest equipment manufacturing industry.

In addition to solving the problem automatically at the production site, we can also see its efforts to reduce human factors in the management and operation of the enterprise.

For example, the best ERP, MES, APS and other software providers are from Germany. A large amount of information entry and plan generation and traceability are completed automatically by software, so as to minimize the uncertainty caused by human factors.

However, Germany also lacks the accumulation of data collection, because the zero tolerance attitude to faults and defects in the manufacturing system of Germany has been solved once and for all through the modification of the equipment terminal.

In German consciousness, problems are not allowed, and naturally no data can be generated from problems. The most direct expression is to find universities and enterprises in Germany. Almost no one is doing quality predictive analysis such as equipment pre diagnosis and health management (PHM) and virtual measurement.

In addition, due to the highly automated and integrated production line in Germany, the overall equipment efficiency (OEE) is very stable, and the space to optimize the utilization of data is also small.

Germany has gained huge economic returns from exports of equipment and industrial products, because the excellent quality and reliability of its products make German manufacturing a very good brand word of mouth.

However, Germany has also discovered a problem in recent years, that is, most industrial products themselves can only be sold once, so after selling a customer, there is a customer missing.

Meanwhile, with the rise of equipment manufacturing and industrial capabilities in some developing countries, the German market is also being squeezed.

Therefore, in the 5 years from 2008 to 2012, there was little growth in German industrial exports.

As a result, Germany began to realize that selling equipment is not as good as selling the whole solution, and even better if it can still sell services.

Therefore, behind the German industrial 4 plan, behind it is the systematic product produced by the integration of knowledge system accumulated by Germany in the manufacturing system. At the same time, German manufacturing knowledge is provided to customers as value-added services in the form of software or toolkit, so as to realize the sustainable profitability of customers.

This can be seen from the 4 design framework of German industry. The core element of the whole framework is "integration", including vertical integration, horizontal integration and end-to-end integration. This is much like the style of German manufacturing system, which is not only good at Germany but also provides a way to provide value-added services.

Therefore, the main purpose of Germany in the fourth industrial revolution is to further enhance the competitiveness of the export of industrial products and generate a direct economic return by using knowledge.

Compared with Japan and Germany, the United States attaches great importance to the role of data in the way of solving problems. It relies heavily on data, such as customer needs analysis, customer relationship management, quality management in production process, equipment health management, supply chain management, product service period management and service.

This also led to the choice of two different manufacturing system improvements in the US and Japan after 1990s. American enterprises generally chose the 6-sigma system which relies heavily on data, while Japan chose a lean management system that relies heavily on people and systems.

The quality and management reform of Chinese manufacturing enterprises after 2000 has mostly chosen the lean system. On the one hand, because of the similarity between China and Japanese culture, it is more because Chinese enterprises are generally lack of data accumulation and information basis, and this problem has not yet been solved.

In addition to getting data from the production system, the United States also put forward the concept of "product lifecycle management (PLM)" in the early twenty-first Century. The core is to manage all product related data throughout the life cycle. The object of management is the product data, which aims at the value-added service of the whole life cycle and the data closed-loop to the design end.

Data is also the most important way for the United States to acquire knowledge, not only to attach importance to data accumulation, but also to attach importance to data analysis and the management culture starting from the facts reflected by data in enterprise decision making.

The relationship between different factors excavated from data, the causal relationship between things, the qualitative and quantitative description of a phenomenon and the process of a certain problem can be described by analyzing the model established after data analysis, which is also the process of knowledge formation and inheritance.

In addition to using knowledge to solve problems, the United States is also very good at using knowledge to make subversive innovation, so as to redefine the problem.

For example, in the US aero engine manufacturing industry, reducing the fuel consumption of the engine is an important problem to be solved.

Most enterprises will solve this problem from the perspective of design, materials, technology, control and optimization. However, the Ge Corp (GE) found that the fuel consumption of the aircraft is closely related to the pilots' driving habits and the maintenance of the engine, so they jumped from the manufacturing side to the operation and maintenance terminal to solve the problem, and the effect was even more obvious than that from the manufacturing side.

This is also the basis and confidence source of the "Power of 1%" put forward by GE when promoting the industrial Internet, which is not much related to manufacturing. 1%.

Therefore, the key word of the US in the intelligent manufacturing revolution is still "subversion". From this new strategic layout, we can clearly see that the value system of manufacturing industry is subverted by the industrial Internet, and the manufacturing mode of the manufacturing industry is subverted by digitalization, new materials and new production mode (3D printing, etc.).

The position of value chain in manufacturing is the decisive factor of competitiveness.

We analyzed the cultural differences of the three countries in Japan, Germany and the United States, and analyzed the differences in understanding, emphasis and purpose of the three countries in terms of the intelligent manufacturing revolution.

In addition, the competitiveness difference of these countries is also a key factor in the difference of their strategic direction. Among them, different countries play a decisive role in the distribution of the value chain and the future layout.

The distribution of value elements in the production activities from upstream to downstream is in turn: idea innovation and demand creation, raw material and base make technology, key equipment and core components, production process and production system, product and service.

In the distribution of the whole value element, China has two advantages in the production process and the production system (mainly in the aspects of labor cost and production capacity), but they are at a disadvantage in all the other links.

What is the position of the world's major countries in the production activities and the layout of future reforms if horizontal comparisons are made?

The United States: "firmly occupy the upper reaches of production factors, and strive to extend to the downstream".

In the distribution of production factors, the United States has obvious advantages in terms of innovation and demand creation, raw materials and enabling technologies, and value-added service providers.

The core competitiveness of the American industrial system is mainly derived from the "6S ecosystem":

(1) Aerospace: it has accumulated a large number of technical dividends for the US manufacturing industry, and has become the most important source of the basic enabling technology in the American industrial system.

(2) semiconductor: in recent years, R & D investment in low energy consumption semiconductor materials is huge, and has obvious advantages in the core of intelligent technology in the future, low energy consumption and high performance chip technology.

(3) shale gas: the layout of the future new energy and clean energy sector has become the most important alternative energy in the United States.

(4) intelligent services create the economy: with the advantage of the United States in the field of computer and information technology, the layout of the most profitable manufacturing service providers is made.

(5) the spirit of innovation represented by Silicon Valley: the blue ocean of constantly gaining new potential market and business opportunities by constantly innovating the potential needs of users.

(6) sustainable human resources.

In the strategic layout of the fourth industrial revolution, the White House proposed the "national manufacturing innovation network plan" in March 2012, and set up 9 research and innovation centers in the 4 major fields of manufacturing industry (the following chart).

Analyzing the US "6S" ecosystem and the strategic layout of manufacturing development, we can easily find that the United States is trying to firmly grasp the most valuable parts of the industrial value chain on the basis of the most basic raw material end of the production system (energy and materials), the service end of industrial products (Internet technology and ICT services), and the constantly innovated business mode, so that even if Germany's manufacturing equipment is advanced and China's manufacturing system is more efficient, it can ensure the core competitiveness of its competitiveness from the source and value delivery side.

Germany has obvious technical advantages in the two links of key equipment and core components, as well as the production process and production system. This is mainly due to the invisible champion enterprises centered on small and medium-sized enterprises and the dual education of Germany's pragmatic apprenticeship, which provides a solid foundation for Germany's industry and is a foundation which is hard to shake in Germany.

Germany's invisible champions are hardly concerned by the outside world. They are not big in scale, but occupy a high market share in their field, ranking the top three in the world.

These small and medium-sized enterprises account for 70% of the total German exports, and their sales return rates are two times higher than that of ordinary German enterprises. They have high R & D capability and technological innovation capability, attach importance to product value and customer fit, high quality and efficient manufacturing capability, and lean and flexible global efficient operation system. A large part of them have been inherited for hundreds of years.

High quality skilled workers and engineering professionals have always been regarded as the support of German economic development and the quality guarantee of "made in Germany" products.

Vocational education aimed at training professional and technical workers plays an important role in the development of German society, and has formed a relatively complete and constantly adjusted legal system to ensure long-term and stable development of vocational education characterized by dual system.

Apprentices should not only learn practical skills in the workshop, but also learn the necessary theoretical knowledge in school.

In Germany, about 600 thousand young people begin to receive dual vocational education every year, accounting for about 2/3 of the same age.

Germany is an export-oriented country with industrial products. Because of its small domestic market and weak demand, its industrial products are almost exclusively used for export, which has made Germany's manufacturing equipment export the largest power.

However, as the emerging economies represented by the BRICs have basically completed their industrialization, the new growth engine of Southeast Asian and African countries has not yet been fully opened, leading to the stagnation of demand for industrial equipment in Germany.

There has been little growth in Germany's total industrial exports over the past few years, which has also affected Germany's economic development to a certain extent.

It can be seen that Germany's industrial 4 has two main purposes:

First, enhance the competitiveness of Germany, and develop new markets for German industrial equipment exports.

The two is to change the state of selling only equipment and the smaller proportion of service income, and shift the focus from product end to server side to enhance the sustained profitability of German industrial products.

In the past, the core competitiveness of Japan was mainly in the production process and production system, products and service providers.

In the past two years, the two most powerful traditional industries in Japan, the market share of automobile manufacturing and consumer electronics industry, has been occupied by Korea, the United States and China.

However, in the list of the top 100 enterprises in 2015, Japan has become the most innovative country in the world with 40 shortlisted companies.

Meanwhile, in the 2015 report on the global manufacturing competitiveness index, Japan also rose to fourth place from tenth in the previous year.

In fact, behind Japan's decline in the consumer electronics sector is the change in direction of Japan's innovation.

And enabling technology and key equipment and key parts and components to have more voice.

For example, Panasonic is losing electricity.

After its advantages, it has found new development opportunities in the fields of automotive electronics, residential energy and business solutions. It has also become the most advanced battery manufacturer in the world. Tesla electric vehicle uses Panasonic 18650 batteries.

After losing its dominant position in the field of consumer electronics, SONY has made breakthroughs in the medical field, occupying over 80% of the global medical endoscope.

SHARP has also shifted its core business to smart medicine, smart homes, food, water, air safety and education.

In the 2015 white paper on manufacturing, Japan will focus on the field of artificial intelligence and robotics, and will also invest in materials, medical, energy and key components.