Chint Electrics offers a highly diverse product line, demanding higher efficiency and quality in mold production to accommodate product updates and replacements. Although introducing a range of high-end equipment and experienced, highly skilled personnel has somewhat improved mold production efficiency and quality, challenges persist due to management delays, operational anomalies, processing errors, and low efficiency caused by manual operations. Mold quality is highly correlated with the skill level and mental state of technical staff. The lack of high-quality talent in the market and the significant increase in labor costs pose significant challenges for enterprises pursuing production efficiency. Additionally, personnel turnover can lead to technological gaps, making labor-dependent expansion strategies unsuitable for large-scale companies like Chint Electrics. Systematically improving the mold production process and reducing dependence on human labor are critical challenges that Chint Electrics needs to address and overcome.

Following in-depth research, Chint Electrics recognized that intelligent and automated mold manufacturing is the future direction of the industry. Therefore, the company is committed to upgrading to intelligent manufacturing and establishing an intelligent mold workshop. During the selection of intelligent manufacturing solutions, Chint Electrics considered the applicability of the solution and the professional capabilities of the team, ultimately recognizing EMAN for its comprehensive product technology and over ten years of industry service experience.

In 2017, EMAN developed a tailored intelligent manufacturing solution for Chint Electrics, driven by MPS and APS, and supported by four systems: the EMoldDM Intelligent Mold Design Software, EMan Intelligent Mold Management System, EAct Intelligent Processing System, and EAtm Flexible Automation Production Line. These systems integrate and link Chint Electrics' SAP enterprise management, product structure analysis (CAE), mold design and segmentation, process design, and each workshop process through information technology, achieving organic connection between design, management, processing, and the local area network.

智能制造整体解决方案

With the goal of smart manufacturing transformation, Chint Electric has already introduced SAP in terms of enterprise management. Specialization is key, and to precisely control the scheduling of mold production plans, Chint Electric has established an integrated, secure, and controllable mold manufacturing control system using the EMAN management system by EMAN. This system provides comprehensive monitoring and analysis of production lines, workstations, personnel, and product quality, meeting Chint Electric's requirements for refined, automated, real-time, and data-driven management. It achieves flexible and transparent manufacturing management, fully automated scheduling, real-time product information tracking, and traceability of the entire production process.

Experienced mold design engineers often determine the quality of a mold, but even with appealing salaries, mold factories still struggle to fill positions. Reducing an enterprise's dependency on manual labor and perpetuating the knowledge and experience of mold design engineers became a bottleneck for sustainable development in mold factories.

EMAN's EMoldDM Intelligent Mold Design software integrates the company's design specifications and processes to establish a company-specific intelligent mold design platform. This software helps solidify design knowledge and standards, reduces reliance on experience and human intervention, significantly improves mold design efficiency and quality, and lowers error rates.

With the application of the EMoldDM system, EMAN assisted Chint Electrics in integrating standard parts, sliders, inclined tops, mold racks, and common mold standards into the system, achieving rapid extraction during mold design processes and realizing a standardization usage rate of over 80%. Tasks that previously required manual operation by mold design engineers, such as generating BOM tables and annotating engineering drawings, can now be automated through EMoldDM, freeing mold design engineers from tedious and repetitive design work, allowing them to focus on more innovative tasks.

With Chint Electrics experiencing rapid business growth, improving production processing capability effectively becomes an imminent issue. Simply increasing equipment and personnel results in resource wastage, significantly increasing operational costs and risks. To adapt to intensifying market competition, enhancing the utilization efficiency of existing equipment and personnel is crucial.

EMAN's EAct system combines standardized processes and an automated physical system, establishing an efficient, precise, and data-secure intelligent manufacturing system. It enhances design efficiency, equipment utilization, and operations efficiency, and includes modules for automatic programming detection, electrical discharge machining (EDM), electrode lifecycle management, CMM inspection management, CNC processing management, EDM processing management, and wire-cut processing management.

By implementing EMAN's semi/full automation processing system, Chint Electrics achieves standardized management for electrode design, pre-tuning, CNC processing, CMM inspection, EDM processing, and electrode warehousing. Manual tasks such as parameter adjustment, program modification, manual tool alignment, and measurement are now automated, reducing the number and skill requirements of operators, minimizing errors, and improving efficiency in various segments by 5% to 25%.

The ongoing implementation of the EMAN EAtm system at Chint Electrics will introduce an electrode automation inspection system module, enabling automated electrode detection, and integrating and managing electrode data channels.

Leveraging EMAN's intelligent manufacturing comprehensive solution, the Wenzhou and Shanghai locations of Chint Electrics' Industrial Division have realized independent business operations and unified data management, eliminating information silos. Key nodes in the mold workshop are interconnected, management, design, and manufacturing are integrated into a seamless whole, achieving alignment with SAP, seamlessly connecting each link, and realizing automated planning, automatic mold program generation, automatic detection, automatic compensation, and smart full-process production, reducing personnel dependence and ensuring manageable, traceable product quality.

Additionally, the annual production of new molds in Chint Electrics' mold workshop increased from 1,100 sets to around 1,500 sets, marking a growth of nearly 30%. Behind Chint Electrics intelligent manufacturing transformation lies a reduction in labor costs and a leap in production efficiency.

EMAN's intelligent manufacturing comprehensive solution supports Chint Electrics in advancing Chint Group's "One Cloud and Two Networks" strategy, which is core to Chint's digital transformation. "One Cloud and Two Networks" provides smart city, intelligent building, intelligent facility, and smart factory end-to-end connections for Chint's smart energy ecosystem. Meanwhile, Chint Electrics Industrial Division's mold workshop information solution falls under Chint's "Development and Application of a Digital Workshop for IoT and Energy Efficiency Management at the User End of Electrical Equipment," successfully being selected for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's Intelligent Manufacturing Project.

Chint Electrics fully leverages its strong industry benchmark status, robust technological innovation capabilities, excellent brand advantages, and comprehensive industrial chain, to gradually realize a transformation into a low-voltage electrical system solution provider. Simultaneously, it seizes opportunities in new energy development and electricity reform to achieve a leap toward becoming a global leader in smart energy solutions. In this process, Chint Electrics recognizes the importance of intelligent manufacturing for the company's future development, actively exploring new manufacturing management models to activate new growth.

With new infrastructure development in full swing, intelligent manufacturing is increasingly becoming a major trend and core aspect of future manufacturing development, accelerating the transition of development modes, promoting the industry to move towards the mid-to-high end and the construction of a strong manufacturing nation. It is also an inevitable choice to create new international competitive advantages under the new normal. More and more companies like Chint Electrics will be demand-driven, accelerating intelligent interconnectivity between businesses, relying on transformation in manufacturing methods and innovations in management models to create greater intelligent ecological value. EMAN also hopes to leverage its professional strength to keep up with the times, helping manufacturing enterprises develop intelligent manufacturing systems based on the industrial internet, assisting more manufacturing enterprises in achieving transformation and upgrading, and building international competitiveness.