Manufacturers in China urged to think smarter
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E-mail China Daily, March 25, 2016
Data show Chinese manufacturers are indeed embracing smart manufacturing with enthusiasm. Industry output value of China's smart manufacturing was about 1 trillion yuan ($153 billion) in 2015 and is expected to exceed 3 trillion by 2020, with an average annual growth of 25 percent.
A 2015 Deloitte survey showed 23 percent of the enterprises interviewed have begun to extensively apply intelligent devices in production, up from 11 percent in 2013.
But a closer look shows applications concentrate in the auto, construction machinery and power equipment industries. Only 20 percent of enterprises are constructing smart manufacturing systems and even fewer have extended the scope of smart manufacturing to value chain integration and business model optimization.
Beyond devices, it's important to invest in systems such as basic IT platforms like enterprise resource planning, Cruickshank said.
"You have to have good systems so that good data could come out of it."
Sitao Xu, chief economist with Deloitte China, said that massive supply of scientists and engineers is a strength of China. But he noted that the challenge derived from the strength of market of scale, could also be a stumbling block.
"Because smart manufacturing is manufacturing in demand. At some point the advantage of size could be less pronounced. Chinese manufacturing in the past has relied so much on scale-up and cluster effect. The very essence of smart manufacturing perhaps require less of that," Xu said.
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