How Many Steps to Create a 'Smart Brain' for Production Experiments?
After the Smart Lab System is deployed in TCL CSOT's five facilities in Shenzhen and Guangzhou, it is expected to increase experimental personnel efficiency by approximately 40%, significantly reduce production capacity loss, lower the risk of misoperation, shorten new product validation cycles by about 30%, and generate an estimated annual cost-saving and efficiency benefit of 8 million yuan.
*TCL Technology COO Wang Cheng and GETECH CEO He Jun awarded the first prize to the winning team at the inaugural TCL Industrial Geek Competition.
As an industry-first and self-developed Smart Lab System, it integrates new product experiments and mass production process experiments, achieving remarkable results during the trial phase and winning the first prize in the development track of the 2022 inaugural TCL Industrial Geek Competition.
Let’s step into the project team and explore the "digital power" behind it.
1
Innovation Breakthrough
Digital Technology Brings New Perspectives
Continuously launching innovative products is crucial for maintaining corporate competitiveness, especially for TCL CSOT. However, there is a significant gap between technological R&D and mass production for new products. This is where experiments play a vital role in bridging the ideal with reality:
First, in a small-scale setting, the stringent experimental conditions from the R&D environment are gradually transformed into production conditions in the real world, then replicated on formal production lines for mass production, achieving a smooth transition from R&D to mass production with minimal risk.
In the past, production line experiments faced numerous challenges. From 2020 to 2021, misoperations during TCL CSOT's production line experiments resulted in losses amounting to millions of yuan, not to mention issues like high personnel consumption, slow new product mass production speeds, and innovation paces lagging behind corporate development.
As TCL CSOT's digital transformation efforts intensified in recent years, frontline engineers troubled by experimental execution issues turned to digital solutions. Thus, the Smart Lab project team was formed, consisting of TCL CSOT's business team, digital team, and GETECH's development team, committed to achieving the "Four Modernizations": systematic experimental production, streamlined personnel workflows, automated production operations, and digitized experimental results.
*In November 2022, the TCL CSOT Smart Lab project, a strong collaboration between three parties, officially launched.
2
Forged Through Challenges
Collaborative Efforts to Build a "Smart Brain"
From manufacturing and product to development, the project team involved 13 departments and nearly 60 personnel, operating at full capacity. The first step after project initiation was research. Typically, research would cover departments involved in new product experiment execution, such as finance, procurement, warehouse, manufacturing, and equipment. Given TCL CSOT's scale, this scope expanded fivefold, covering five facilities in Shenzhen and Guangzhou.
Faced with a large research group and complex需求 relationships, the project team established a clear project management mechanism, conducting detailed research across 31 departments and identifying key requirements. To ensure correct development direction and timely error correction, the team maintained a strict bi-weekly meeting schedule: project progress meetings every Wednesday for internal updates, and user需求沟通会 every Friday to gather feedback and refine the project direction.
This mature and stable project management and communication机制 provided clear guidance for subsequent system functionality, ensuring comprehensive, rigorous, stable, and reliable system architecture and features.
*Experimental process梳理 discussion meeting.
3
Foundation Strength
t-work Safeguards the "Smart Brain"
Beyond team collaboration, the innovation and success of the Smart Lab project relied on its technical foundation—t-work.
t-work originated from the "Digital Intelligence Platform" project initiated by TCL CSOT's Digital Promotion Office in 2019, with the initial goal of "saving one duty engineer for each engineering team at CSOT." After two years of exploration and practice, in 2021, TCL CSOT's Smart Manufacturing Group, Digital Promotion Office, and GETECH jointly launched the t-work project, led by GETECH's digital experts and technicians, aiming to save manpower for the large-size manufacturing center through digital means and empower TCL CSOT's digital construction.
By the end of 2022, phase one of t-work was successfully completed, implementing modules like automatic line switching,异常单跟踪处理, engineering handover, and experiment execution. It not only saved manpower for TCL CSOT but also reduced major anomalies by 62%, with monthly visits exceeding 200,000, engineering coverage at 91%, creating tangible benefits of nearly 20 million yuan and intangible benefits over 10 million yuan.
For the Smart Lab project, t-work served as the critical technical foundation.
Take the "automatic presentation of experimental results" function as an example. Since each engineering team had different requirements for image effects in results, and one factory alone had about 14 engineering teams, the t-work team needed to develop 70 different logic customizations for automatic presentation—a massive task. This function was the core module of the project, significantly reducing the workload for business teams. Despite extensive efforts, the team struggled to fully meet all user needs, leading to frustration and even thoughts of abandonment.
Persistence paid off. During a casual discussion, a smart manufacturing engineer realized: before the Smart Lab System, business engineers used Excel for automatic result presentation. Could t-work integrate with Excel to achieve rapid data extraction and automatic presentation?
A GETECH product manager quickly validated this idea. The t-work team seized this "spark of inspiration," pursued innovation, and successfully implemented customized automatic presentation功能,推广 across engineering teams. It also empowered business departments with new data processing skills: tasks that took hours now completed in seconds. The beauty of OT and IT integration emerged.
In December 2022, the Smart Lab project, based on the t-work platform, stood out among over 160 entries and won the first prize at the inaugural Industrial Geek Competition. Additionally, the automatic analysis project for measurement results based on t-work won the second prize, with the innovative concept and application effects of empowering business digitalization receiving unanimous recognition from judges.
4
Spreading Sparks
Painting a Digital Canvas with Pure Hearts
By the end of 2022, as the Smart Lab System achieved阶段性胜利, all project members felt a mix of emotions: satisfaction from turning "castles in the air" into reality, and anticipation for future digital development directions.
As close partners on the digital transformation journey, TCL CSOT and GETECH had many experiences and insights to share:
She Bihai, Head of TCL CSOT's Digital Transformation Center, stated:
"Digital projects come from and go to business; they must be based on挖掘 business scenarios to solve real pain points. The Smart Lab project is a典型代表 of manufacturing scenario挖掘, breaking traditional management methods and finding the direction for combining digital solutions with business pain points. Smart manufacturing transformation has挖掘 many similar projects over the past two years, greatly supporting efficiency improvement and cost reduction in manufacturing."
Cai Cong, Director of GETECH's CSOT Development and Delivery Center, said:
"The vitality of digital transformation comes from the frontline. As long as the business dares to imagine and change, and the digital project team has responsibility and resilience, tangible results can be achieved. The two award-winning projects based on t-work in this Industrial Geek Competition fully demonstrated the geek spirit from the frontline. We hope more frontline teams will be inspired by this spirit, spreading from points to areas, driving the vigorous development of CSOT's digital transformation."
Today, as an integrated management platform, the Smart Lab System enables online setup of experimental conditions and automated operation; information sharing to enhance experimental efficiency; and code reuse based on GETECH's Poros industrial process engine embedded in t-work, improving application development efficiency. For example, the system is preparing for deployment in Guangzhou factories, with Suzhou factories also planned; additionally, the project team is considering expanding the system's business scope.
This "smart brain" canvas, under digital strokes, becomes increasingly华丽丰满.
The road ahead is long and challenging; we will explore tirelessly. Digital transformation is not achieved overnight; only through persistence can we meet at the summit. With many hands making light work, the flames of digitalization will grow ever brighter, illuminating everyone.
