South Asia Knitting Group: How to factory achieve annual output more than 10 million pieces?

Hong Kong South Knitting Textiles (Holding) Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as South Asia Knitting group) focuses on the field of sweater weaving and knitted clothing. It is a OEM factory of PRADA、LANDS’END、TOMMY、GAP、UNIQLO and other well-known brands. Its products sell well in 30 countries and regions and are widely praised by customers. Risun and South Asia Knitting group have worked together for four years to build a "provincial Intelligent Manufacturing Pilot" based on the transformation and upgrading to seven points and the realization of an annual output of 10million pieces, so as to work together to win the future.

In 2019,  South Asia Knitting group established Hailian intelligent factory, which is the domestic production and manufacturing, command and scheduling, sample office design and logistics distribution center. It is also the benchmark for the group's sweater production enterprises to move towards informatization, automation, digitization and intelligence.

In order to cope with economic changes at home and abroad and seek greater development space, South Asia Knitting group mainly solves the following problems:

• Adapt to market changes, create a leading position in management and equipment, and improve competitiveness;

• Rapidly increase production capacity to reach an annual output of ten million;

• Ease the dilemma of recruitment;

• Realize the strategic objectives of informatization, automation, digitalization and intellectualization of the group.

  
  

How to further improve management, improve efficiency and reduce costs through flexible management? How to solve the recruitment problem? How to improve team ability? How to implement flexible and lean management in the whole production process?

In addition to the early communication and understanding of the actual demands of South Asia Knitting group and the actual situation of the factory, the plan should be implemented. Risun intelligence team also conducted multiple demonstrations of the initial plan for more than two months. Finally, the implementation of the intelligent manufacturing integration solution is divided into two steps, which will be continuously optimized and adjusted in stages and batches in 2018 and 2021, so as to truly realize the implementation of the intelligent manufacturing solution.

During this stage, the "knitted sweater flexible intelligent manufacturing project" was successfully selected as the Fujian Provincial intelligent manufacturing pilot demonstration enterprise in 2019, which was reported by many media and also attracted a large number of government and enterprise personages to visit and study.

• Unmanned handling and automatic conveying

In order to realize multi order and high-capacity assembly line operation, eliminate or significantly reduce the backlog of products in process and residence time, the role of the allocation center is very critical to the sorting and transportation of raw materials.

Through intelligent sorting technology, the data of the whole production process can be collected automatically from the order side, so as to minimize the human error rate. RSIT customized the MES system based on the production needs of South Asia Knitting group. Under the control of digital brain, RFID data acquisition, photoelectric sensors, intelligent suspension system, intelligent warehouse system and intelligent sorting system are used to realize the direct connection between digitalization and intelligent equipment. This technical means can realize the visual management of the efficiency of the production workshop, timely deal with link errors, effectively improve the production efficiency by more than 15% and the delivery speed within 4 hours.

At the same time, under the transportation of intelligent high-speed conveyor line, the raw materials and woven pieces can be transported unattended and accurately distributed to the designated check-in position, so as to realize the automatic initial pairing of scare bars and woven pieces. The effective application of Risun intelligent suspension system in the whole plant realizes the intelligent high-speed transmission of different types of products across floors and buildings in the production and post integration areas, realizes automatic batch color and code separation, and has no dead corner in the whole process of data tracking.

Compared with the use of conventional conveying equipment such as shelf cars and dehumidification cars in traditional knitting plants, the use of intelligent technology and equipment can effectively reduce the expenditure of about 2 million human equipment procurement. The goods in the whole workshop are basically transported by air, and the 5S management on the ground is more accurate and in place.

• Using man-machine collaboration to quickly increase production capacity

One of the core demands of South Asia Knitting group is to reduce the use of labor and reduce the demand for personnel dependence. If only according to the traditional production mode, the new factory of Hailian needs to spend high labor and money costs to achieve the basic capacity target of 6million pieces / year. There are still many uncontrollable factors. How to solve them?

Risun intelligent suspension system solves the basic conveying and handling action, and helps the workers in the production workshop to carry out standardized production quickly and without error. After entering the dehumidification temporary storage line, the intelligent sorting system will automatically screen all finished products and color coded semi-finished products to be packaged by matching with the flat conveyor line and intelligent high-speed sorting and packing machine through code recognition. The final finished products will be transported to the intelligent storage system by the intelligent robot. According to the order situation, the warehouse personnel will access them with one key, and the purpose of rapidly improving production capacity will be achieved by using man-machine cooperation.

After the implementation of Risun intelligent manufacturing integration solution, it cooperated with the continuous flexible and lean management system of the IE department of South Asia Knitting group to effectively help South Asia Knitting group improve and reduce costs, increase per capita production capacity, and finally achieve the goal of 10million pieces / year.

• Customized products for businesses

From the contact between the two sides, the submission of the plan to the final determination of the content of the plan, South Asia Knitting group and Risun intelligent service team carried out long-term preliminary cooperation work. In the molding plan, from the most basic sockets, lights, gas connectors to the optimization of common equipment, and even the subsequent basic training of GST, APS, IE systems, Risun intelligent customized the plan within a reasonable range and from the perspective of customers to ensure the feasibility of the system plan.

The effective application of Risun intelligent manufacturing system scheme has helped Hailian new factory effectively form the whole process automation of goods transportation, the whole process intelligence of goods distribution, the paperless collection of goods data, the informatization of goods data transmission, and the modernization of workshop layout and goods space.

Intelligent manufacturing is the tide of the times and the development direction of the textile industry. During the four years of cooperation between South Asia Textile group and RSIT, we have realized the intelligent operation and data management of the whole plant production, practically solved the problems of order management and labor gap, helped South Asia Textile group achieve the rapid improvement of production capacity, built a commercial moat from the advantages of management and equipment, moved towards a larger market, and won considerable development.