Ma Zhaoyuan, the chief researcher of the future laboratory of Tsinghua University and professor of intelligent manufacturing at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, wrote a book called “Intelligent Manufacturing China”. At the beginning, he put forward a common problem faced by some countries in recent years, such as China, the United States and Europe, that is, after the completion of early industrial modernization, with the outflow of early industries characterized by high energy consumption, high pollution and labor-intensive, relevant jobs will be lost, If this process takes too long and is not supplemented and filled by emerging industries, it will lead to stagnation of economic and social development.
The book points out that the arrival of the era of knowledge economy and the era of mobile Internet actually means that information has become cheap and easy to obtain to a large extent. Therefore, the value of the service industry as the tertiary industry will decline, and the value of social activities will return to the manufacturing industry. This is why industrial countries and emerging market countries have emphasized revitalizing the manufacturing industry in recent years.
Revitalizing the manufacturing industry is not to continue the past industrial development mode, but to take industry 4.0 as the guide, introduce digital production and flexible manufacturing, maximize the matching of production and consumption, reduce cost, resource consumption and waste, and finally realize on-demand production.
To revitalize the manufacturing industry, we must promote the transformation of enterprise organization mode from the past tree structure to Octopus structure. This is an important argument put forward in this book, because the latter structure can better realize the independent processing of each business unit, drive the overall interconnection, and well adapt to the complex production under the background of informatization. The whole system will form a market-oriented configuration through transactions and reduce transaction costs, so that individuals in the organization can obtain higher returns, work more safely in the same organization and deeply study skills.
However, the industrial operation of post industrialized society also faces unique challenges, that is, enterprises need to carry out complex cooperation with upstream and downstream suppliers and partners. In this process, because the volume of innovative enterprises is small, embedding market-oriented cooperation is bound to disclose a large number of technical and product details, which itself may lead to the cooperative enterprises occupying the above details.
The common misunderstanding in the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries and the development of innovation lies in the separation of design and production. Separating innovation and manufacturing from regions will make it impossible for enterprises to obtain all the benefits brought by the combination of the latest technology and manufacturing. The author emphasizes that “the separation of design and engineering makes most of the projects of innovation and entrepreneurship stay in the innovation of business model, and the industry has been transformed into making cars behind closed doors”.
This book introduces the innovative mode of Intelligent Manufacturing Upgrading: AMRC, the advanced manufacturing research center tried by the University of Sheffield in the UK After more than 10 years of development practice, the center has led to the revitalization of Sheffield, an old British Industrial City in decline, the return of a large number of high-end manufacturing industries, and Boeing, McCarran and other enterprises set up factories locally.
In fact, the core of AMRC model is to support the development of research institutes through the academic system of universities, provide R & D services for industrial enterprises, and attract excellent manufacturing enterprises to invest and build factories around the surrounding areas. Therefore, universities have the specific ability of technical knowledge engineering, which can be used to effectively cultivate the labor force needed in reality, which makes the British population and new immigrants have the opportunity to transform into high-value labor force.
AMRC mode is to get through the transformation of industry, University and research, so that it is in the same physical space without regional isolation, so as to provide the most comprehensive conditions for the landing of technical knowledge. This model forms a comprehensive system composed of effective production, knowledge integration, technological innovation and even regional brand development, which is also conducive to attracting talents, attracting investment and solving financing problems for innovative enterprises. The implementation of AMRC model, driven by the support policies of the British government, has built a platform for universities and research institutes to support industrial enterprises and their suppliers and partners, reduced the cost and uncertainty of enterprise technology R & D, and solved the dilemma of knowledge protection and opening of innovative enterprises.
The manufacturing industry needs to be continuously developed and the level of talents needs to be revitalized. The book introduces that AMRC mode provides practical and academic training for apprentices for local enterprises in Sheffield. This training covers the processes and capabilities of additive manufacturing, precision casting, composite manufacturing, design and prototype manufacturing, integrated manufacturing, precision machining and other aspects, so as to greatly reduce the practical experience of enterprise employment and training costs.
This book points out that universities are the starting point rather than the end point of intellectuals. Higher education in the post industrial era should be based on meeting the requirements of quality education and vocational education at the same time.
To effectively transform the experience of the UK AMRC model and improve the development level of smart Manufacturing China, we should focus on building a high-level and globally competitive new engineering education in China. The author believes that the new engineering education should cultivate engineering thinking. The book talks about the subdivided elements of engineering thinking, including safety, developing accumulated habits, verification, testing, adjustment and so on. At the same time, industrial innovation originates from collaborative innovation, which requires a large number of engineers from different industries to cooperate together and deeply understand each other’s technology and process, so as to better improve the process and design to achieve the overall goal. Therefore, while cultivating engineering thinking, we should also pay attention to learning interdisciplinary thinking.
Artificial intelligent industrial design not only emphasizes the intelligence of machines in the production process, but also emphasizes the intelligence of people in the production process. The industrial design of smart Manufacturing China needs to cultivate new industrial designers who can adapt to industry 4.0, so that they can get training and learning in Shenzhen New Industries Biomedical Engineering Co.Ltd(300832) and constantly find new learning requirements in practice. Through communication with users and industrial practice, they can constantly obtain innovative ideas and design ideas and gain experience through training in various types of work.
According to this book, China’s new engineering education should solve the problem of completely separating science from engineering in the traditional sense. “Engineers should be hands-on scientists, and scientists should be brain engineers.”. The training goal of engineering is engineers. Engineers are not only skilled, but also able to deduce the source of problems, avoid double-blind interpretation, and explore the hidden models and mechanisms behind things. Conversely, scientists should also be able to have considerable operational ability and often carry out hands-on training.
From the experience of AMRC model, vocational schools play a very important role in serving the transformation of traditional industries and the innovation and development of Shenzhen New Industries Biomedical Engineering Co.Ltd(300832) development. Therefore, it should be promoted to improve the training quality through in-depth integration and cooperation with university science disciplines.
