China Daily: Traditional industries embrace modernization

CHANGSHU, China, Jan. 7, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- A news report from China Daily on the transformation of traditional industries in Jiangsu province

Jiangsu province has made great efforts to promote the transformation of traditional industries and focus on intelligent manufacturing to help companies improve quality, reduce costs and increase efficiency.

Down jacket brand Bosideng based in the city of Changshu, for instance, has grown into a globally famous brand with products sold to 72 countries and regions and has more than 4,000 retail stores in China since its founding in 1976. Its operations include product research, design, development, raw material procurement, production and sales.

To promote intelligent development, the company built the Bosideng Intelligent Manufacturing Production Base in 2001, which now covers 88,000 square meters.

The plants in the base adopt the world's latest intelligent down jacket production equipment, which can help to achieve more than 90 percent of numeric control in manufacturing, testing, logistics, distribution and other core operations.

In 2019, Bosideng independently developed the industry-leading intelligent clothing manufacturing system GiMS to achieve both high-efficiency, large-scale customized production and small-batch personalized production.

The system is capable of the data collection, analysis, early warning and decision-making of the whole process from the raw material storage, automatic cutting, sewing and automatic velvet filling to automatic sorting, which improves work efficiency and product quality.

According to Lai Hedong, manufacturing manager at the production base, 53 percent of the process of producing a down jacket can be finished automatically in as fast as three hours. The system also helps to increase the qualification rate of products to more than 97 percent.

The production base was included on the national list of green factories and Jiangsu list of intelligent manufacturing demonstration factories.

Bosideng has also developed a software system and big data center to distribute products intelligently, which helps to improve the logistics efficiency, save labor costs of more than 20 million yuan ($3.15 million) annually and save 30,000 sq m of land space.

Longfengtang, a traditional Chinese medicine company based in the city of Taizhou, is another example of intelligent tools being used to promote the modernization of the TCM industry.

According to Xu Jingren, CEO of the company, they have set up 34 standardized planting bases for Chinese medicinal herbs covering more than 6,600 hectares, in an effort to control the quality of TCM from the source.

Longfengtang has set up a Chinese herbal medicine traceability system, which allows real-time monitoring of the whole process of planting, harvesting, processing and transportation.

In addition, the company has set up an integrated logistics system and robot feeding system to achieve automatic transportation and digital production of TCM products across different workshops.

From the storage of medicinal materials to the finished products, Longfengtang has achieved automatic transmission across the whole chain.

The digital tools help to reduce human errors, reduce energy consumption and any uncontrollable operation of TCM production, according to Longfengtang.

SOURCE chinadaily.com.cn