A big data screen at a textiles company in Lanxi – a county-level city administered by Jinhua, in East China's Zhejiang province – was recently aglow, indefatigably displaying the operational status of all the machines in the workshop.
"We know when to switch the cloth and alter the production efficiency according to the data shown on the screen," said Qiu Haibin, chairman of Lanxi-based Zhejiang Xinhai Textiles Co Ltd – adding that only two years ago, there were six mechanical meter readers to keep a tally of the production figures and it took 24 hours to review the operations of each machine.
In a traditional textiles workshop, tracking production calls for the manual copying of reports, which requires high human input and materials consumption. Moreover, the data record is neither complete nor accurate, so it is difficult to achieve real-time synchronization, Qiu said.
Thanks to going digital machines, managers and workers can now monitor the production status in real time through mobile phones and wristbands that are connected to machines in the workshop via the internet. In this way, the production status can be managed instantly, the data can be recorded automatically and the reports can be organized automatically.
Qui said that as a result, the workload of statisticians can be reduced by 60 percent and the efficiency of production planning can be improved by 30 percent.
"Our purpose is to help our enterprise more easily take the first step to intelligent manufacturing with less investment, to achieve greater benefits," said Chen Fengqi, Lanxi's Party secretary.
Chen added that more than 40 textiles manufacturers in the city were now going digital.
