LSIS boosts productivity with smart factory
An automated manufacturing system assembles electrical equipment parts at LSIS’ smart factory in Cheongju, North Chungcheong Province, in this file photo. / Courtesy of LSIS
By Yoon Sung-won
LSIS, the nation’s top electric equipment maker formerly known as LS Industrial Systems, has successfully installed a fully-automated smart manufacturing system at its factory in Cheongju, North Chungcheong Province.
The company pledged to add new technologies such as a cyber physical system (CPS) and the Internet of Things (IoT) to further optimize its manufacturing facilities.
“As our manufacturing lines became smarter, we have seen not only their productivity and energy efficiency greatly enhanced but also our customer satisfaction, and the working environment improved,” an official at LSIS said. “We are now upgrading the advancement level of our smart manufacturing lines and hope we can contribute to innovation of the nation’s manufacturing industry.”
LSIS began establishing smart factories in 2010 by connecting information and communication technologies to automation methods to meet not only mass production but small quantity batch production.
As a result, its smart factory in Chungju, which produces low voltage circuits and switches, has halved system standby time while improving productivity by 60 percent.
Manufacturing lines that build low voltage products, in particular, have seen a dramatic expansion of daily production volume of 38 items from 7,500 to 20,000. Energy consumption has also dropped by more than 60 percent while the product defect rate decreasing to 8 per million, the company said.
The Chungju smart factory also uses the advanced planning system (APS), which projects demand to allow more flexible manufacturing. The APS supports automatic manufacturing management from planning to materials ordering, and is also applied to the actual production processes including assembly, examination and packaging.
LSIS’s establishment of smart factory is in line with the Korean government’s drive to build more smart manufacturing facilities nationwide under its policy dubbed, “Manufacturing Innovation 3.0.”
The government has pushed for the plan as the smart factories have been highlighted as a breakthrough to enhance productivity and product competitiveness using real-time data monitoring and automatic analysis on processes.
LSIS said it has invested in the energy management system and the programmable logic controller (PLC) technologies, which are the key in establishing automated manufacturing lines.
Besides its own efforts to build smart factories, the company has also contributed to promote the government’s policy by opening its automated manufacturing facilities for its small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to share know-how and support them building their own.
Earlier in October, LSIS signed to a memorandum of understanding with three local SMEs in manufacturing management, equipment managing and process monitoring sectors to jointly push for smart factory establishment and technological cooperation.
Under the agreement, the four companies organized a consortium to bid for smart factory building projects in the future.
LSIS said it will promote its smart factory standardization model based on its PLC as well as SERVO, invertors and human machine interface solutions to target not only SMEs but also larger enterprises planning to build smart factories and automated manufacturing facilities.