Case III: SHANGHAI GM: The Way to Intelligent Manufacturing
In the factory of Shanghai General Motors Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as SGM), Jinqiao District, Shanghai, the leading role in the car body welding production line was rows of yellow robots. They kept busy from day to night, following instructions
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In the factory of Shanghai General Motors Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as SGM), Jinqiao District, Shanghai, the leading role in the car body welding production line was rows of yellow robots. They kept busy from day to night, following instructions in order strictly and carefully, their arms stretching out and drawing back freely. After welding, original car bodys were transferred to the end of the production line one after another, where two operators took the responsibility for checking the achievement made by the robots. Together With those robots, the operators supplied one car to the next technique production line every minute. Was this production line in SGM intelligentialized? “There’s still a gap,” one senior manager of SGM said, “The so-called intelligentialize means that the robot can make its own judgment and manufacture, but in our system, the robot’s judgment is relatively limited. Now five or six car models are produced in the shared line. We set up different programs for robots to let them judge for different carmaking.” Intelligent manufacturing was the direction that SGM strove to work for. As on one hand, it should improve the production efficiency continuously, and on the other hand, it strove to satisfy the customer’s more and more personalized customization demand. However, how would it change the present production model into the intelligentialize model, which was still a task for SGM. It needed to think about how to control cost in the model transformation, how to achieve intelligentialize through interaction between machine and machine and between machine and man, and how to improve the manufacturing efficiency through the virtual simulation.
The case is co-written by Prof. Xiaoming Zhu, Qiong Zhu, casewriter and Yifan Ren, research assistant in China Europe International Business School. During the writing, they obtained cooperation and support from SHANGHAI GM. The case aims at providing the source material for the class seminar but not illustrating whether the management of the company mentioned in the case is effective or not. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd and Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press 2018 X. Zhu, China’s Technology Innovators, Management for Professionals, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-5388-7_3
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Case III: SHANGHAI GM: The Way to Intelligent Manufacturing
SHANGHAI GM SGM was co-founded by SAIC Motor Corporation Limited (SAIC Motor) and General Motors in 1997. By the end of 2014, it had built four manufacturing plants of Jinqiao in Pudong, Dongyue in Yantai, Beisheng in Shenyang and Wuhan. There were 29 series products under three big brands of Buick, Chevrolet and Cadillac, covering various gradient markets from high-end limousines to economical cars, such as segment markets of high-performance limousines, MPV, SUV, mixed-powered and electric vehicles. In 2014, SGM achieved the sale of 1,760,158 passenger car vehicles for the whole year, ranking the second in the sale among the passenger car vehicle manufacturers in China. In 2013 and 2012, it achieved the respect
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