Schneider Electric will invite small- to mid-sized enterprises (SME) to its factory in Iksan, South Korea to showoff its smart factory success.
The company said it will began supplying its smart factory solutions to South Korean SMEs. They will be invited next month to its Iksan factory for demonstrations and show its Internet of Things (IoT) goods.
Schneider said it has successfully lowered the defection rate and increased productivity at the factory.
The Iksan factory was founded in 1981 and produces electronic overload relays (EOCR). The company applied its Schneider Performance System to the factory for supply chain management in 2013, which resulted in improvements in performance, efficiency and productivity, it said.
It later applied its integrated architecture platform EcoStruxure to the factory as well. Schneider expects defect rate, energy consumption and document work to decline by 10%, 5% and 60%, respectively. The Iksan factory will also have 100% increase in production output within the next three years, the company said.
Lee Chang-keun, the plant manager for Schneider’s Iksan plant, said the smart factory upgrade started in October last year. The plant lost employees through retirements but productivity has actually increased since then, Lee said. The plant had 75 workers in 2011, but his has been reduced to 40 as of this year. But productivity in the same time period increased from 12,507 EOCR units per year to 24,475 units, a 95% increase.
Schneider plans to reduce human personnel further at the plant. Automated process such as robots will be applied for product packaging. It will hire temporary workers flexibly when at times when there are more orders.
EcoStruxure allows managers to view how many workers are in a line or if there is a defect via monitors, smartphones or smartwatches. Managers can also use it to view status of the whole plant and can use software to solve problems.
It also supports energy management and automation. It has remote management, augmented reality, predictive maintenance and security.
Meanwhile, Schneider is currently operating 11 smart factories worldwide. It has six in Asia __ in South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam.
