Industrial internet offers smart solutions to SMEs
BEIJING: From production and management to consumer experience, China’s industrial internet has addressed the weak links of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in industrial transformation and upgrading.
With its strength in data analysis, the industrial internet is invigorating further industrial, supply and value chains, matching demand and supply, allocating resources, and creating new business opportunities.
At a logistics company in Shenzhen, in China’s southern Guangdong province, trackless autonomous handling robots have replaced human workers in sorting goods, greatly reducing mistakes and raising work efficiency.
This emerged after the firm published its request for a technological upgrade on the cloud collaborative research and development (R&D) platform of an internet design firm called Uniorange.
Experts from that firm responded by forming a project team and offering a solution through coordinated research and design. This helped the company increase work efficiency by 30 percent in about three months.
“We have gathered nearly 400 experts from different fields at home and abroad, and more than 100 partners with overall integration capabilities,” Uniorange General Manager Zhao Yingfang said. “When SMEs post their needs, these experts and partners can invest and take part in relevant projects, providing full-chain services, from R&D to production.”
So far, Uniorange has assisted over 50,000 SMEs from 22 sectors to solve problems in production and operations, promoting digital transformation and high-quality growth.
While addressing enterprises’ weak links in production and operation, the industrial internet has expanded its reach to the supply chain, searching for more opportunities and resources for SMEs.
On the super virtual factory platform of technology firm SVFactory, the operation and real-time production data of various enterprises are constantly updated and displayed with the support of big data, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and other technologies.
Addressing the scattered production capacity of SMEs and consumer demand, SVFactory uses the platform to analyze first-hand consumer data, determine market demand and turn it into many small orders for various SMEs. It can also match such enterprises with downstream suppliers of production materials, if needed.
In one case, SVFactory analyzed the products, equipment and technology of an R&D firm making battery-power equipment. It advised the company to make certain innovative products. This helped the company use nearly 40 percent of its idle production capacity during its off-season.
Operating for about one year, the super virtual factory platform has incorporated the production capacity data of more than 700 enterprises. In 2022, it sent hundreds of orders to hundreds of SMEs, helping make use of idle production capacity worth over 400 million yuan (about $58.04 million).
Achieving a dynamic balance between supply and demand not only helps enterprises reduce costs and increase efficiency, but also facilitates their long-term and healthy development, SVFactory President Zhang Zhiqi said.
The industrial internet is empowering thousands of businesses through the construction of pan-intelligent infrastructure, which offers important support for the modernization of industrial and supply chains, said Li Wei of the China Academy of Industrial Internet.
As a key foundation for China’s digital economy, the industrial internet has facilitated the integration of the digital economy with more sectors and scenarios of the real economy, resulting in better consumer experiences.
Walking through many restaurants and corporate canteens in China, one can see live video images from the kitchens, giving an insight into their sanitary conditions. The technology employs an application called Cha Ankang, developed by JinherNetwork.
Designed as an intelligent supervision platform mainly focusing on food and drug safety, the application resolves SMEs’ difficulties in ensuring the frequency and quality of safety-risk self-inspection.
As of May, the application is being used by 3.36 million catering enterprises and 230,000 school canteens in 317 prefecture-level cities across the country, serving regulatory authorities, enterprises and consumers.
JinherNetwork President Luan Runfeng said the application helped about 3 million market entities every day in proving their qualifications in product, equipment and fire safety, covering catering, food production and distribution, and drug retail.
The development of the industrial internet at home and abroad has shown that the focus of digital transformation has turned from efficiency to value, and progress has gone beyond enterprises to the industrial and value chains, said Yu Xiaohui, head of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology.
Data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology shows that China boasts more than 3,100 Fifth-Generation industrial internet projects and over 150 platforms with strong industrial and regional influence.
China’s industrial internet has covered 45 key sectors, creating six typical application scenarios. The added value of the sector reached 4.13 trillion yuan in 2021, according to industry data.
“I am surprised that almost all of the 100 entrepreneurs who I visit or receive each year are interested in digital transformation,” said Chu Jian, founder and head of the Ningbo Industrial Internet Institute. “To them, digital transformation is not simply a popular trend of growth. It is what their companies really need.”