Global Lighthouse Network Adds 18 New Lighthouse Factories
The World Economic met in Davos last month and nominated eighteen new lighthouse factories and three sustainability lighthouses. These factories have been added to our live interactive map.
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Exponential Industry has launched our YouTube channel! Journey through the future of manufacturing with our WEF Lighthouse playlist.
In this playlist, imagine your role as a supply chain strategist, tasked with finding the most efficient and sustainable factories to work with for your company's global operations. Your journey takes you across the world, to the Americas, Europe, Middle East, India, and the Far East.
As you navigate through each region, you experience location planning, ribbon cutting, and production at scale. Throughout the Americas, you exhibit digital transformation and the adoption of bleeding edge technologies transforming value chains. In Europe, you visit cutting-edge factories utilizing renewable energy sources building automobiles and pharmaceuticals while balancing strict labor regulations. In the Middle East, you find a highly efficient oil and gas facilities, but also learn about the challenges of sourcing raw materials in the region. In India, you discover a vibrant and growing manufacturing hub with a developing logistics infrastructure. Your trip ends in the Far East, where you visit a plethora of state-of-the-art factories in China, Japan, and Korea that fabricate leading products of all varieties in the face of geopolitical tensions, volcanic eruptions and typhoons. This journey will keep you intrigued every step of the way.
The 18 New Lighthouse Factories
The World Economic met in Davos last month and nominated eighteen new lighthouse factories and three sustainability lighthouses. These factories have been added to our live interactive map and tracking post. Each factory and its story is captured below.
Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (Kaohsiung, Taiwan, China): To improve productivity and reduce lead time in an increasingly complex manufacturing environment of over 100 process steps, ASE Kaohsiung's bumping factory deployed AI applications in their processes from inspection to dispatch. As a result, the site was able to increase output by 67% while reducing order lead time by 39%.
Bosch (Bursa, Türkiye): To secure future investments and resources for production of new products such as hydrogen components, the Bosch Powertrain Solutions Plant in Bursa needed to further strengthen its cost leadership. By deploying AI use cases such as close loop process control for hydro-erosion, and upskilling 100% of the workforce, they reduced unit manufacturing cost by 9% and improved OEE by 9%.
CEAT (Halol, India): To capture greater market volumes, CEAT needed to incorporate greener materials and meet stringent in-process specifications. CEAT deployed Fourth Industrial Revolution use cases like Advanced Analytics to optimize cycle times and digitalization of the operator’s touchpoints. As a result, the site reduced cycle times by 20%, process scrap by 46%, and energy consumption by 15%. Overall, this resulted in a ~2.5x increase in export and OEM sales in two years.
(2023) Halol Tyre facility of Ceat wins Lighthouse Certification from World Economic Forum
(2022) CEAT LTD Digitally Transforms with AWS IoT and Analytics
The Coca-Cola Company (Ballina, Ireland): Ballina site, the company’s largest concentrate manufacturing facility, delivers over 3,500 SKUs to 68 countries. To enable growth, build resilience, and address increasing portfolio complexity, the site implemented digital, and analytics use cases. As a result, it improved cost by 16% while expanding its SKU portfolio by 30%, and led Fourth Industrial Revolution scaling across the network of 17 sites.
(2023) Coca-Cola Ballina Recognised As Leading Advanced Manufacturer By WEF
Foxconn Industrial Internet (Shenzhen, China): In response to customers’ needs for rapid releases of new smartphone products and strict quality standards, Foxconn Industrial Internet enabled agile product introduction, quick capacity ramp-up, and smart mass production by deploying 37 different Fourth Industrial Revolution use cases at scale. This accelerated new product introduction by 29%, led to 50% faster ramp-ups, reduced quality non-conformance by 56%, and reduced manufacturing cost by 30%.
(2023) China-based Hon Hai subsidiary plant designated as 'lighthouse factory'
Haier (Hefei, China): Facing challenges in product diversity, time-to-delivery, and quality due to supplier base expansion, the site deployed 18 different Fourth Industrial Revolution use cases across their supply network, R&D, manufacturing, and customer services, leveraging their bespoke IIoT platform designed to accelerate at-scale deployment of AI, machine vision, and Advanced Analytics. Doing so cut order lead time in half and lowered on-site defect rates by 33%.
Huayi New Material (Shanghai, China): To respond to external challenges such as 30% over-capacity and higher costs due to market volatility, the company has deployed 28 different Fourth Industrial Revolution use cases, such as machine-learning-enabled process optimization and AI-enabled safety management. As a result, labour productivity increased by 33%, conversion cost fell by 20%, energy consumption dropped 31%, and recordable safety incidents reached zero.
Johnson & Johnson Consumer Health (Mulund, India): Facing a volatile demand in a highly fragmented and complex network of distributors and vendors, Johnson & Johnson India deployed Fourth Industrial Revolution solutions such as demand sensing, smart logistics, robotics, and 3D printing. As a result, they reduced OTIF losses by 66%, accelerated new product introduction by 33%, and improved cost per piece by 34%.
Lenovo (Hefei, China): Facing fierce competition, significant demand fluctuation and growing product customization, Lenovo Hefei, as the world’s largest single PC factory, deployed over 30 Fourth Industrial Revolution flexible automation and advanced analytics use cases, improving labor productivity by 45%, reducing supplier quality issue by 55%, while managing small size yet numerous customer orders (80% of them being less than five units).
(2023) Lenovo Recognized for Global Manufacturing Leadership at World Economic Forum 2023
(2021) Lenovo stepping up to meet surging demand
LG Electronics (Clarksville, United States): Following establishment of a plant in the U.S. two years ago to be closer to customers, LG encountered various human resource risks and a lack of production know-how. By adopting Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies such as deep learning, automation, and digitalization, LG was able to strengthen its strategic production base in the US, increasing sales by 68% and growing net profit by 703%.
MantaMESH (Fröttstädt, Germany): With cost leadership being critical to compete as a SME in a highly competitive commodity market, MantaMESH developed a Fourth Industrial Revolution online manufacturing business model that connects customers to an automated fulfillment system. All online interactions are processed in real time, with a seamless connection to smart manufacturing plants. The result is a 261% increase in customer activity and 73% growth in production volumes while reducing energy consumption / kg produced by 32%.
Mondelēz (Suzhou, China): To quadruple retail channels in China, double store coverage to 4 million retail outlets, and address the impact of double-digit inflation related to labour and logistics costs, the company invested in multiple Fourth Industrial Revolution solutions. This allowed it to transform a linear supply chain into an integrated supply ecosystem, with OTIF improved by 18%, lead times reduced by 32%, and secure growth in market share from 23.4% to 28.3%.
(2013) Mondelez International to expand biscuit manufacturing facility in China
Procter & Gamble (Takasaki, Japan): To address a 2-3% YoY business growth with limited footprint expansion potential, the site implemented Fourth Industrial Revolution use cases such as data flow integration, digital twin, and machine learning across the end-to-end value chain (from R&D to customers). As a result, the innovation lead time accelerated by 72%, shutdown days for trial were reduced by 21%, and the order horizon from customers improved 14-fold.
Unilever (Indaiatuba, Brazil): Facing a shrinking market, Unilever’s site in Indaiatuba, the largest powder detergent factory in the world, top in productivity, and second in cost efficiency globally, but biggest contributor of Unilever to GHG emissions, implemented use cases such as digital twin and AI to improve cost leadership and agility to the market, while minimizing environmental footprint. As a result, Indaiatuba reduced innovation lead time by 33%, production costs per ton by 23%, and nearly eliminated GHG emissions.
Unilever (Tianjin, China): Having navigated COVID-19 uncertainties in the catering industry in the past three years, Unilever accelerated market penetration in low tier cities by deploying over 30 Fourth Industrial Revolution use cases, such as tailor-made 24/7 digital selling, optimal end-to-end advanced planning, and AI-enabled quality control. As a result, the number of customers served doubled, order-to-delivery lead time shrank by 40%, and customer complaints fell by 62%.
(2023) Unilever sites join network of world’s most digitally advanced factories
(2023) How Is Unilever Readying for Industry 4.0? With 2 New Lighthouse Awards
Western Digital (Laguna, Philippines): To build resilience in the face of volcanic eruptions, typhoons, long lead time for materials, volatile demand, and tightened product specifications, the Laguna site deployed over 25 use cases at scale, such as event anomaly detection by Advanced Analytics and end-to-end production variation compensation by machine learning. As a result, the site was able to reduce unplanned shutdowns by 82% and production cost per unit by 54%.
Western Digital (Bang Pa-in, Thailand): Bang Pa-in is producing cost sensitive consumer hard disk drives (HDDs). Facing material cost increase caused by supply chain uncertainty and with the goal to limit capital deployment due to market shifting to solid-state drives (SSD), Bang Pa-in implemented diverse Fourth Industrial Revolution use cases to reduce factory cost by 33% while reducing energy consumption/PetaByte by 40%.
Wistron (Zhongshan, China): Faced with the pressure to deliver 60% of orders in less than 72 hours, the company needed to accelerate end to end processes without compromising quality. Wistron transformed its entire value chain via 33 in house-built use cases. Despite supply shortages, productivity was enhanced by 32%, defect rates were reduced by 55% and delivery times shortened to 48 hours. Ultimately, manufacturing unit costs were reduced by 22%.
The Global Lighthouse Network is excited to announce a new partnership with major manufacturing companies in 2023 to scale the network and its impact of enhancing sustainability, workforce empowerment, and productivity in the manufacturing sector. This collaboration will broaden insights from the industry and unlock many more learning opportunities for the successful transition towards using advanced technology. More details about this partnership will be shared in the coming months.
(2015) HP and Dell suspend use of interns in Chinese factories
I'm starting learning about Industry 4.0, and all the examples in this post feels like a world I never knew existed. So Cool.