Flexibility, automation, and intelligence are the core of Industry 4.0. Intelligent manufacturing emphasizes the organic integration and control of all elements—man, machine, material, method, and information—through information integration and intelligent control across the entire process. Flexibility can be realized at every stage of product development, making enterprise production more adaptive and flexible, and enabling rapid response to volatile market demands.
In this regard, Siemens is the earliest and most successful example in the world; through its Siemens Industry 4.0 program, it successfully realized robotic automated control and management. At present, many enterprises worldwide are applying this technology: Japan's Panasonic once used it to develop the world's first large-scale flexible production line; the United States' General Electric produced over 10 million automotive parts within a decade; French equipment manufacturer ABB used it to successfully develop a fully automated production line for assembling high-quality aluminum engines; Germany's Siemens has realized robot-assisted welding and painting; and the United States' Ford Motor Company used it to develop a robot capable of welding and painting multiple vehicles simultaneously, as well as a multifunctional assembly center for different parts.
Today, manufacturing development depends ever more on flexibility, which has also become one of enterprises' core competitiveness factors. Flexible production is a mode of production that improves enterprise competitiveness and meets customer needs through personalized, customized production.
As market competition intensifies, manufacturing giants must raise their level of production flexibility in order to secure a foothold in fierce competition. In this sense, intelligent manufacturing is a new technology developed centering on the enterprise and around the tenet of "people-oriented." Its purpose is to create more "people-oriented" outcomes—that is, to realize "intelligent manufacturing" through "flexible manufacturing."
So-called "flexible manufacturing" refers to a production mode with high flexibility and adaptability in the product production process, capable of rapidly adjusting to and meeting customers' special needs according to market demand. Introducing a flexible production system into an intelligent manufacturing system enables an enterprise to respond quickly to market changes; it also allows products to enjoy high cost-performance ratios and competitive advantages in the market, while enabling the enterprise to rapidly adjust and adapt to new environments and changing market needs.
From the perspective of the product lifecycle, flexible production can greatly shorten the cycle time from customer order entry, order conversion to the production stage, and commissioning through to delivery to the customer—an important means of reducing enterprise risk and improving capital-utilization efficiency.
As enterprise scale continues to expand, greater reliance on scale effects is needed to reduce costs; at the same time, a series of problems—such as increasingly personalized user demands and a sharp surge in customer numbers causing ever more prominent supply–demand contradictions—all require enterprises to attach great importance to flexible production systems. Therefore, how to rapidly respond to volatile and complex market demands is undoubtedly a major challenge for enterprises.
Intelligent manufacturing places higher demands on product quality and stability.