By applying smart factory to its battery-making facilities, SK Innovation has successfully streamlined and upgraded its manufacturing processes ranging from packaging and quality checks to analyzing defects, according to the company a week ahead of the Manufacturing Tech Conference.
Encouraged by the success, the South Korean company plans to widen the scope of application to its battery plants in China, Hungary and the US.
In 2017, SK Innovation was the first among the local energy chemical companies to apply ICT to create a Smart Plant. For this, they decided to pursue four key initiatives.
One of them is the Smart Work Permit, which allows most permit approval to be done online to cut the time. What used to take an hour, now takes less than 30 minutes. Another is the Real Time Gas Checks, which involved installing gas detectors to take the checks, instead of the employees. This helped cut the working time, and also helped keep people safer.
SK Innovation is also working on new initiatives involving big data, IoT and AI to apply them to the work sites to minimize human-made mistakes.
“We placed the highest priority on improving productivity and making all processes safer,” said one SK Innovation official.
SK Innovation will talk more about their smart factory evolution on Oct. 8 when The Elec co-hosts Manufacturing Technology Conference with another IT media outlet, Byline Network.
The Elec is South Korea’s No.1 tech news platform.