Customers Overview
Litens Automotive Parts (Suzhou) Co., Ltd. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Canada-based Litens Automotive Group. It specializes in the manufacturing of automotive engine tensioners and shock absorbers, and has many invention patents. Its clients include Audi, Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, GM, Ford Motor and Toyota.
Walking into Litens, you will see that it is a modern, well-organized factory, bringing to mind the futuristic societies depicted in sci-fi movies. But under this exterior, the factory boasts intelligent manufacturing, as redefined by Suzhou Litens, that supports efficient operations and helps create production miracles.
Applied value
Building a corporate virtual alliance
In the production process for tensioners and shock absorbers, many orders involve multiple product categories and small batches. During its intelligentization transformation, Litens was faced with the overarching problem of how to quickly develop product plans and production based on these orders, and improve on-time delivery rates.
o solve this problem, it first needed to improve its ability to process order information. In order to reduce the number of errors arising from manual information processing, Litens achieved direct connection with customer systems via Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), and can automatically receive orders from customers. With connections via EDI and ERP, order information can flow into the ERP system, and production plans can be developed quickly so as to respond to customer demands in a timely manner.
After ensuring the rapid and agile production process capability, the next step is to efficiently connect the entire supply chain system, especially the firm control of distributors. “Through the SRM (Supplier Relationship Management System), we have realized information sharing with suppliers on inventory, plans, and orders, and automatic scanning and warehousing of suppliers’ delivery. Suppliers can also keep abreast of Layton’s information through the SRM system. Production and order planning.” During the whole process, Layton requires suppliers to print labels according to the order when delivering goods, and use the standard turnover boxes provided by Layton to realize automatic receipt. In this way, the supplier’s supply information can be directly entered into Layton’s system, avoiding problems such as system docking and cargo code conversion, and greatly improving the efficiency of the supply chain. Customer order information is shared in the industry chain in real time, so the on-time delivery rate reaches 100%.
Building a transparent factory
Traditional factory workshop management models have many management problems due to the large number of manual records of operations and paper documents. As a result, factories operated like a back box, and production processes were not transparent. Quality inspection staff were not able to promptly monitor products, and business departments would only get information about production situations after it was too late. In such conditions, it was obviously unrealistic to talk about improving production efficiency by implementing effective management.
One of the key features of smart manufacturing that distinguishes it from traditional manufacturing is that under smart manufacturing, factory production is transparent. Litens is commited to achieving intelligent collection and accurate tracking of factory production information, enabling automatic entry of all production details into the information system. By leveraging the MES dashboard, managers can easily monitor production progress and spot abnormal production situations. The unmanned quality inspection of equipment that we often see in sci-fi movies has also been realized here. The production process of each component is automatically detected by cameras installed on the equipment. Once a defective product is detected, the production line will stop automatically and will not resume operation until the infrared sensors note that workers have put the defective product in the relevant box for collection of such products. The intelligent detection system has zero-tolerance for sub-standard parts, enabling Litens to assure its clients that the percentage of sub-standard products is less than 10PPM (0.00001%). In fact, the figure is 2.3PPM at Litens, a world-leading quality level compared with its peers.
Fewer and fewer workers
Now, automated equippment has replaced a large number of workers at Litens, efficiently enabling automation for the collection of product data, reporting of production-line tasks and transfer of materials. Intelligent technology has been adopted across the entire production process, helping Litens build factories with only a few workers, and even unmanned factories. By renovating traditional equippment, Litens has enabled equippment panels to automatically collect equippment processing data and send it to the ERP system. “It eliminates the need for workers to report relevant data, enabling us to achieve intelligent collection and automated circulation of production information.” This change has not only affected the production process, but has also had a positive effect on planning, quality control, finance, sales and management. For example, planning staff can promptly check on the dashboard the production status of each batch, and so respond swifty.
Sophisticated production methods are also one way that Litens implements intelligent manufacturing. It carries out small-batch production by arranging production based on demand. “At Litens, the amount of material supply is determined by calculating material demand based on the products currently being made by the production equipment and the production speed. With material demand automatically shown on the dashboard of warehouse staff, they can deliver materials based on the information in an orderly and accurate manner.” The automated flow of information has helped reduce workload and improve efficiency. Daily work scenarios show us that we are not far from realizing the imaginative scenarios we see in sci-fi movies. Many wonderful things have already been achieved right in front of our eyes.
mart factory built by Litens in partnership with Kingdee K/3 WISE not only represents higher efficiency in the production process, but also signifies the evolution and transformation of the entire management system and process. Intelligent equipment, smart materials, smart products and smart services are redefining industrial products and services. Suzhou Litens, which has already adopted intelligent technologies, is positioned to better adapt to the needs of modern economic management in future competition, and to better respond to the demands of the market and customers in the Internet era.