Chery Automobile’s smart factory for customizing cars

In recent years, Chery Automobile has developed a “Digital Chery” strategy. building two smart and integrated factories in Anhui, China.

As Chery’s products become smarter, so do their manufacturing operations.

In the era of change, production technology is a competitive advantage and Chery Automobile knew that the key to greater integration and operational visibility was to aggregate and contextualize data from common business areas. On the OT side, they needed visibility into equipment, control and monitoring data. On the IT side, they needed visibility into information from MES and ERP systems.

Automotive manufacturing involves management of tens of thousands of elements. Assembly and manufacturing processes are complex, robots are used in many parts, and specialized equipment is often required to enable automated production. Collecting and aggregating data from all these sources can be problematic. Chery wanted one a platform with special industrial connectivity software. The platform should have Built-in drivers to simplify device connection. It also had to support standard protocols such as OPC UA, MQTT, REST, EFM, ODBC and SNMP.

After extensive research, Chery Automobile has chosen Rockwell Automation’s FactoryTalk® InnovationSuite IoT platform.

FactoryTalk® InnovationSuite at the core of the smart connected factory

Today, FactoryTalk® InnovationSuite aggregates and integrates data from multiple devices, applications and data sources at Chery’s main factory. The system provides a “single source of truth” that allows maintenance technicians to perform securely access data from plant farm equipment and also allow operators to access production line data.

It was also important to Chery that FactoryTalk® InnovationSuite could connect to a visual display management tool that the company uses to provide alerts and enable intervention when activities do not fall within expected parameters.

Additionally, it had to be integrated with the plant’s energy management system. Thanks for this link, Chery can now monitor the energy consumption of each production device and perform analysis on this data to improve future operations.

To better integrate production and operations, Chery also decided to implement FactoryTalk® ProductionCentre®, which improved the capabilities of the factory’s existing MES system.

A collaborative approach between technology and skills

For this project, Rockwell Automation acted as the general contractorto provide Chery with consulting, project research, system mapping design, final system performance design and complete life cycle services, such as project implementation, system development, online commissioning and testing.

Less than three months after implementing the architecture of the two FactoryTalk® InnovationSuite and FactoryTalk® ProductionCentre® systems, the production cycle time of a large factory increased by 30%, a new car coming off the assembly line every minute.

Gasoline and electric cars are produced together on the same line. This allows you to increase production capacity by 10% and simplify customization.

Fully automated production allows Chery to achieve its ambitious goals zero product defects, zero inventory in the processing phase, low energy consumption and zero emissions.

In addition to productivity gains, the elimination of paper and increased operational visibility have reduced Chery’s labor costs by more than 30%.

In this factory, digitization has made mass customization a reality. FactoryTalk® InnovationSuite has taken a leading role, enabling the Industrial Network to facilitate the automotive industry towards high-quality development. Chery Automobile’s smart factory represents a model of smart manufacturing in the entire automotive industry.

Font: Rockwell Automation