A Japanese-invested home appliance group: a decade of partnership-based production line digitalization

Customer background

A Japanese-invested home appliance group's Shanghai plant, manufacturing white goods. Many production lines, equipment spanning many brands and eras, and strict group IT governance — every project must pass a business case review, and systems must be able to evolve continuously with the line plan.

Challenges

• Line status relied on people watching and shouting out; anomaly detection and response lagged
• Data from multiple machines was disconnected; quality issues could not be traced to the step where they occurred
• Legacy line retrofits could not stop production; construction windows were extremely short
• Once built, systems had no one to look after them and became information islands within three years

Our solution (the ten-year evolution path)

Starting from single-line LED visualization around 2015, we expanded year by year along the customer's IT roadmap:

1. Line visualization: LED boards with unified OPC data integration
2. Whole-line MES: zone PLC aggregation + HDMI large-screen mapping, all-Ethernet + SQL Server; a monitoring system of 6 rolling screens + 2 event pop-up screens, with riveting pass rate judged automatically by the host PC per machine model
3. Motor assembly line management system: three types of heterogeneous equipment unified on one network — Omron controllers connected via couplers over ModbusTCP to zone PLCs, winding machines via touch-screen adapters, stator/motor inspection equipment directly connected to the database, with inspection data automatically reported
4. Facility and performance management: facility energy management, complete-unit performance management, office production progress collection
5. Infrastructure and maintenance: server renewals using backup, migration and verification mechanisms; an annual maintenance system executed on a rolling basis year by year to this day

Implementation highlights

• Retrofitting inside production windows: multiple rounds of retrofits carried out during production gaps; downtime impact and project scope follow on-site records
• Heterogeneous networking: some equipment without communication ports can be connected via couplers / touch-screen adapters; legacy equipment must have its interfaces and compatibility confirmed machine by machine
• Knowledge accumulation: a complete set of delivery documentation including user manuals, training materials and year-by-year rolling maintenance checklists

Results

• Anomaly response shortened from hours to minutes; test data moved from manual transcription to automatic archiving
• Over the decade the system evolved with the production line, prioritizing compatibility with existing investments; specific retrofit scope follows on-site assessment and project records
• Annual maintenance makes system health quantifiable and assessable

Technology stack