COVID-19 Exposes Weaknesses, Smart Printing Factory Rollout Poised to Speed Up

Rethinking What a Smart Printing Factory Really Means

A smart printing factory is not simply an upgraded conventional plant. It is a new type of production organization created by evolving times and technology. Built on a digital foundation and powered by industrial big data and the internet, it is defined by intelligent design, intelligent production, intelligent management, intelligent logistics and integrated optimization.

Under the reference model, a smart printing factory can be divided into 22 domains: product design, process design, material procurement, planning and scheduling, production operations, quality control, safety and environmental protection, warehousing and transportation, logistics management, sales management, product service, customer service, equipment control, communication control, system control, manufacturing execution systems, system integration management, information management, data management and modeling, data mining and analysis, cognitive decision-making and collaborative manufacturing. It serves as both the execution center for printed product manufacturing and the information connection hub for the printing industry chain, while also forming the foundation for smart manufacturing in printing.

It is important to clarify that a smart printing factory is not an unmanned plant, nor is it merely robots running equipment. The core is that an enterprise uses information to drive departmental workflows and production processes. It is a key vehicle for implementing smart manufacturing, mainly by building intelligent production systems and networked distributed production facilities to make production more intelligent. Such a factory has autonomous capabilities and can collect, analyze, judge and plan different types of information. Its system components can coordinate, reorganize and expand, and machines can self-learn and self-maintain. A smart factory enables coordinated human-machine cooperation, and its essence remains human-machine interaction.

In the new era, advancing smart printing factory construction and accelerating smart manufacturing in the printing sector carries strategic importance. It supports supply-side structural reform in China's printing manufacturing, helps printing manufacturing move toward the mid-to-high end, positions the industry for the next round of industrial competition, creates new competitive advantages for China's printing industry and contributes to building a strong printing nation.

Smart Printing Factories: Where Development Stands Now

After breaking ground, exploring and starting up, intelligent development in the printing industry is now moving into a phase of sustained exploration. As a brand-new subject, smart printing factory construction is forward-looking and uncharted, with no fully mature universal solution available for direct copy. Over the past year, the industry has conducted a series of discussions and explorations around intelligent construction. Notably, printing companies are no longer following trends blindly or acting without direction; they are taking a more practical approach and thinking before moving.

As their understanding of smart manufacturing and intelligent construction deepens, printing companies no longer reduce a smart factory to advanced production lines, several sets of informatization software, a high-bay warehouse and a few AGVs. Instead, they are treating intelligent construction rationally. They recognize it as a complex systems engineering effort grounded in advanced printing processes and lean production management, with hardware and software construction as key components. Companies need to analyze their own production characteristics and current development status, use standardization as the foundation, and set plans along the digital, networked and intelligent path, implementing them step by step, in stages and at different levels. They must also recognize the long-term and arduous nature of the process, understand that intelligent construction advances in a spiral, and remain confident that the direction is right and the goals are achievable.

Because printing companies differ in their attributes, there is no one-size-fits-all model for intelligent construction that can be copied directly. Priorities and specific implementation plans vary. Each company must identify its needs through research and analysis and find a transformation path suited to its own characteristics.

Anhui Xinhua Printing Co., Ltd. has built a smart printing factory through a multidimensional “three-dimensional intelligent system”, strongly advancing integrated innovation. It has achieved notable results in textbook printing, quality management, ERP collaborative production and the development of an intelligent fire monitoring platform. Through organizational change, process reengineering, technological transformation and standardization, the company focuses on building a digital workflow control system in four areas: prepress, production processes, quality management and equipment management. For the production flow, process flow and process parameter specifications of books and textbooks, it has established quality inspection standards such as quality control requirements. By adding a standardized graphic and text visual inspection system to equipment, it has enabled mobile quality inspection and other functions, initially achieving intelligent management and control through direct equipment connection, intelligent production scheduling and energy management.

Kunshan Kewang Rapid Printing Co., Ltd. focuses on single-card boxes, fine mounted boxes, paper handbags, corrugated color boxes, instruction leaflets and similar products. Leveraging its leaders' strong automation background, the company has taken the lead by using top-tier equipment for inline operations. Through the coordinated work of many industrial robots, it automates in-plant logistics on the production floor. By interconnecting the production site, IT systems, logistics systems, customers, products and production equipment, it achieves intelligent production, networked collaboration across systems, automated logistics and personalized customer customization, forming a fast and efficient closed-loop smart production model. Through the industrial internet, it links the smart factory, smart high-bay warehouse and smart production. Its prepress model uses mobile phone 3D real-scene experiences to turn offline physical sample viewing and discussion into online simulated real-scene confirmation, integrating people, products, information, equipment and services.

Henan Shengda Color Printing Co., Ltd. began with gang printing and enjoys a geographical advantage at the junction of Henan and Anhui. Internet technology and convenient logistics have expanded its coverage, while massive orders and huge capacity create economies of scale, making Shengda highly focused on smart factory construction. Based on a unified visualization platform, it can achieve cross-departmental collaborative control across the entire production process and promote integrated production management. It has built an enterprise information system to create an information-driven smart printing workshop. It is deepening the integration of core business systems such as manufacturing and operations management, procurement and sales, promoting the integration and sharing of internal resources and information, and advancing supply chain collaboration to improve the operating efficiency of the supply chain inside and outside the factory...

Smart Printing Factories: Existing Challenges

For printing companies, exploring smart factory construction is a long and demanding process. It improves production efficiency on the basis of broad standardization, stronger digitalization and networked coverage. Intelligent transformation is also not an isolated process; it requires cooperation from upstream and downstream supply chain partners. Companies should not pursue intelligence for its own sake, but use intelligent transformation to truly solve current pain points and difficulties. Judging from the companies surveyed, very few in China's printing industry have achieved a smart factory in the true sense. Large enterprises with higher intelligence levels have developed decision-making and control solutions or operational management informatization solutions suited to their development through practice. Printing companies with less satisfactory transformation mostly rely on imports or solution providers for software and hardware, and their application levels vary widely, each following its own path, with integration still needing improvement. Specifically, there are five main problems.

1. Intelligent management is “out of control.” This is the biggest problem facing printing companies today: the upper level makes decisions, but the lower level does not execute them, or execution falls short of requirements. For example, if the system schedules production but machines do not follow the schedule and materials are not delivered according to the scheduling requirements, it becomes empty scheduling, wasting time, manpower and material resources with poor returns.
2. Systems such as MES and ERP are difficult to popularize. Workers in small and medium-sized printing enterprises generally have lower education levels, and their ability to accept and operate new things and new machines is limited.
3. Interconnection among prepress, printing and post-press equipment is not smooth. Manual work is still needed to bridge intermediate links, and integration among design, production, warehousing and logistics is not high, making the “information island” problem relatively serious.
4. Automation levels are not high. Whether large enterprises or small and medium-sized enterprises, the design and construction of production lines and assembly lines have not reached full automation and cannot support mixed-line production and assembly of multiple product varieties.
5. Printing equipment is not highly informatized. First, data and information generated during production runs are difficult to obtain. Sensors and similar devices can only capture relatively shallow data, while more valuable equipment data can only be obtained through technical decryption or purchased from equipment manufacturers, increasing economic pressure and technical difficulty for enterprises. Second, some small and medium-sized printing enterprises lack systematic equipment information records. Equipment production information is recorded through manual measurement, and product information lacks systematic and comprehensive records, authenticity, accuracy and timeliness. This fails to provide effective data for improving production efficiency and makes it difficult to meet equipment management needs.

At the industry level, many common problems in intelligent construction for printing remain to be solved, such as factory layout plans, equipment interconnection plans, in-plant logistics plans, high-bay warehousing plans, data collection plans and data modeling plans suited to specific printing enterprises. In addition, insufficient national-level attention to the printing industry has led to a lack of theoretical research on intelligent construction in this sector. Dedicated national funding is urgently needed to support systematic research on technology and theory. Furthermore, in intelligent construction, a few printing enterprises place more trust in mature solutions from fields such as machine tools and tend to cooperate with enterprises and colleges from other fields. In reality, such choices benefit neither the company's smart factory construction nor the industry's intelligent construction. The scale of the industry limits the enthusiasm of intelligent solution providers from other fields to sustain R&D investment. It also prevents the cultivation of suppliers and R&D forces within the industry, which is not conducive to healthy and orderly industry development.

The sudden outbreak of COVID-19 fully exposed the weaknesses of traditional manufacturing enterprises. As a discrete manufacturing industry, the printing sector's labor-intensive processes, positions overly dependent on employee skills, and traditional management models became key obstacles to resuming work and production. Through this round of epidemic prevention and control, the basic idea of “machines replacing people” has become widely accepted, and printing enterprises may accelerate their intelligent construction.

The printing industry should actively follow the new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation, accurately grasp new changes in the development environment, strengthen its technological foundation and innovation capacity, accelerate the construction of new infrastructure such as artificial intelligence, digital twins, the industrial internet and the Internet of Things, enrich profit models, build competitive advantages and promote the orderly development of new business forms.

(The authors are Liu Linlin, Liu Shengjie, Xie Yixue, Han Xuelin and Zhao Tao, of Xi'an University of Technology.)

——This article is reprinted from China Packaging Network (pack.cn). Original link: http://news.pack.cn/show-356354.html