Today, as the foundation of a country, the tool for rejuvenation, and the cornerstone of national strength, the manufacturing industry is rapidly advancing into a new era of smart manufacturing centered on digitization and intelligence through deep integration with new technologies such as cloud computing, big data, the Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence. Especially in the context of the accelerated transformation and upgrading of traditional manufacturing, smart manufacturing, as a crucial lever for developing new types of productive forces, has become the inevitable path for traditional manufacturing to rapidly advance towards high-end, intelligent, and green development.

In 2023, China's manufacturing value-added reached RMB 33 trillion, accounting for 26.2% of GDP; China's manufacturing sector has ranked first in the world in terms of overall size for 14 consecutive years, and its share of global manufacturing has increased from 22.5% to nearly 30%. At the same time, the comprehensive strength and core competitiveness of China's manufacturing industry are also continuously improving. Amidst the wave of digital and intelligent transformation, Made in China is leveraging "data" and moving towards the "new", rapidly "transitioning from big to strong" and forging ahead towards high-quality development.

Yang Ping, General Manager of Huawei China Government and Enterprise Smart Manufacturing Systems Department

To support Made in China in achieving stable and sustainable growth on the path from "big to strong," Yang Ping, General Manager of Huawei China Government and Enterprise Smart Manufacturing Systems Department, stated that Huawei will continue to delve deeply into its own digital and intelligent transformation, technological capabilities, and ecosystem, continuously empowering manufacturing enterprises to make "digital and intelligent manufacturing readily accessible" and contributing to China's transformation from a manufacturing powerhouse to a manufacturing superpower.

As a manufacturing enterprise with strong R&D and production capabilities, Huawei is deeply integrating its innovative technologies and practical experiences based on its own innovative practices in digital and intelligent transformation. Leveraging the strength of its partners, Huawei is replicating and promoting these practices to more manufacturing enterprises, truly achieving both "teaching how to fish" and "giving the fish" in driving the digital and intelligent transformation of the manufacturing industry. This is not only Huawei's strength but also its mission and responsibility.

01

The confidence to delve deeply into manufacturing

'Jumping from your own parachute first'

After years of development, Made in China has formed unique advantages of a comprehensive system, diverse product categories, and large scale. In terms of scale, China's manufacturing value-added accounts for about 30% of the global total. On this basis, promoting new industrialization, strengthening the deep integration of technological innovation and industrial innovation, and accelerating the development of new types of productive forces have become urgent priorities for Made in China to transition from big to strong.

However, for traditional manufacturing, with the vigorous development of various digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and digital twins, as well as the continuous emergence of new concepts such as smart manufacturing, green manufacturing, and new types of productive forces, how to effectively implement these new technologies and achieve practical results, and how to correctly understand and implement these new concepts have become issues that manufacturing enterprises must consider and resolve.

Huawei is also contemplating these issues. Each year, Huawei provides services to hundreds of operators and tens of thousands of enterprises across industries including ICT, cloud, digital energy, and terminals, spanning over 170 countries and regions... To support such a vast business, Huawei must leverage the integration of AI and digital transformation to achieve comprehensive intelligent upgrades for the enterprise.

Yang Ping stated that after comprehensively launching its digital transformation in 2014, Huawei primarily focused on the following tasks: First, establishing a fully connected and real-time feedback system for all elements, achieving full connectivity for over 6 million end-side equipment in the production process; second, solidifying data governance to ensure consistent data circulation across different departments; and third, constructing a security system to ensure data security through host fencing, network fencing, application fencing, and data fencing.

Building on this foundation, in 2018, Huawei comprehensively initiated intelligent upgrades, introducing large models across various business areas such as research, production, supply, and sales to reconstruct operational models and enhance business efficiency. For example, at the R&D level, AI-assisted software development significantly reduces the software development cycle; at the production level, large models are used for intelligent perception, analysis, and decision-making, comprehensively enhancing productivity; and at the logistics level, the application of Lingkun Digital Brain enables end-to-end optimization of logistics and full-process visibility and control.

Thanks to the principle of "jumping from your own parachute first" in AI applications, Huawei has gained a deeper understanding of the integration of AI and application scenarios during the process of promoting intelligent upgrades. Through joint innovation with customers, Huawei has created exclusive large models for the manufacturing industry, covering seven levels including computing power foundation, AI architecture, AI framework, AI platform, AI model, and AI application, thereby assisting more Chinese manufacturing enterprises in their intelligent upgrades.

02

Spillover of self-practice and technical capabilities

Enabling smart manufacturing to flourish comprehensively

Over the past five years, Huawei has gradually transformed its innovative practices in business transformation, management reform, and digital and intelligent transformation into consulting services and scenario-based solutions tailored for the manufacturing industry, replicating them to an increasing number of manufacturing enterprises. However, for Huawei, its innovative practices and experience summaries are only one of the unique advantages in empowering the digital and intelligent transformation of the manufacturing industry; technological innovation and application are fundamental.

Qiu Heng, CMO of Huawei China Government and Enterprise

To enhance its technical capabilities, Huawei continues to invest heavily in R&D and focuses on strengthening the digital foundation from three dimensions: computing power, transportation capacity, and storage capacity, creating various solutions tailored to manufacturing scenarios. Qiu Heng, CMO of Huawei China Government and Enterprise, stated that Huawei hopes to provide customers with a better experience through innovations in computing power, storage capacity, and transportation capacity, ensuring that infrastructure issues do not hinder the pace of digital and intelligent transformation.

Among them, at the computing power level, Huawei focuses on innovations and adaptations in fields such as Ascend, Kunpeng, and Euler; at the storage capacity level, Huawei has won the Gartner "Customers' Choice" award for both all-flash storage and distributed storage and has achieved leading performance and capacity in high-performance storage related to artificial intelligence; and at the transportation capacity level, through innovations in areas such as Wi-Fi 7 and F5G all-optical networks, Huawei has helped numerous manufacturing enterprises achieve a comprehensive upgrade of their network infrastructure.

During the construction of Changan Automobile's smart factory, Huawei, on the one hand, empowered Changan with its years of digital transformation theories and experiences, becoming the methodology for Changan's digital transformation; on the other hand, Changan Automobile adopted Huawei's new architecture for smart factory solutions, "One Cloud, One Network, One Platform," constructing a solid digital foundation for the smart factory, assisting Changan Automobile in realizing the interconnection of engineering data flow, production process flow, and business information flow, thereby building an industry-leading flexible manufacturing capability.

In promoting the digital and intelligent transformation of R&D, Huawei has also established an independently innovative industrial software system for leading automotive companies, integrating data from over 30 industrial software and over 10 R&D data management systems used in R&D through the construction of a data governance platform, thereby promoting efficient collaboration in the R&D process and reducing the new vehicle model development cycle from the original 36 months to 24 months.

In addition to the automotive industry, Yang Ping also stated that Huawei is continuously delving into numerous sub-sectors such as equipment manufacturing, new energy, electronics, home appliances, light industry, and pharmaceuticals, enabling more manufacturing enterprises to reap the enormous technical dividends released by smart manufacturing. For example, in the biopharmaceutical industry, Huawei is leveraging the powerful scientific computing capabilities of AI large models to assist in new drug development, shortening new drug development cycles and reducing costs; in the machinery industry, Huawei is helping robotics enterprises reshape their R&D processes through Integrated Product Development (IPD), enabling collaborative management of R&D and production, thereby enhancing R&D efficiency and reducing R&D costs.

03

'Partner + Huawei' system

Making digital and intelligent manufacturing readily accessible

Currently, China possesses all industrial categories in the United Nations Industrial Classification, including 41 major industrial categories, 207 medium-sized categories, and 666 small categories; among the 500 major industrial products, China ranks first globally in production volume for over 220 products. Faced with such a vast industrial system and diverse product categories, as Huawei continues to delve deeply into manufacturing, it is also collaborating with more industry partners to jointly create intelligent solutions.

To better support the digital and intelligent transformation of the manufacturing industry, Yang Ping stated that Huawei will focus on its strengths in complex software and hardware infrastructure. For manufacturing sub-sectors, Huawei will collaborate with partners to complement each other's capabilities, jointly completing tasks from underlying infrastructure construction to upper-level application development, thereby providing more scenario-based solutions for the digital and intelligent transformation of manufacturing enterprises and driving the prosperity and development of the entire smart manufacturing field.

In the manufacturing industry, Huawei has collaborated with industry, academia, and research partners, including partners from the automotive, electronics, pharmaceutical, heavy industry, and new energy sectors, as well as 72 universities participating in the "Intelligent Base" program, over 30 standards/association organizations, and over 2.5 million developers, to jointly combine scenarios, capabilities, projects, and aspirations. This collaboration has served the digital and intelligent transformation of over 7,500 manufacturing enterprises nationwide.

In fact, Huawei does not only adopt this approach for the manufacturing industry. To help various industries bridge the "digital divide," Qiu Heng emphasized that Huawei China Government and Enterprise's solution is to "leave the complexity to ourselves and bring simplicity to customers" and proposed the goal of "making the digital world readily accessible" in 2023. This means that whether it is for large government and enterprise customers or small, medium, and micro-enterprise customers, by choosing the "Partner + Huawei" system, they can leverage Huawei's independently innovative technologies, in-depth scenario-based solutions, marketable and easy-to-use products, along with the attentive service team by your side and Huawei's rich experience in its own and industry benchmark transformations for easy access to the digital world. Simply put, "Choose Huawei to easily digitize your enterprise."

To this end, Huawei has established an open, tight-knit, and growing "Partner + Huawei" system and supports customers in easily achieving digitalization through consultation, solution development, operation and maintenance, and other key capabilities throughout the entire digital lifecycle. For example, in the commercial market, Huawei will continue to adhere to a partner-centric approach and provide comprehensive empowerment to partners through research, marketing, supply, sales, service, and management.

Conclusion: Nowadays, new technologies represented by artificial intelligence are accelerating their integration into the manufacturing industry, becoming the core driving force for the digital and intelligent transformation of manufacturing. Faced with this trend, Yang Ping suggested that manufacturing enterprises should first clarify the positioning of their digital and intelligent transformation and make a good plan; second, they should conduct data governance in advance to solidify the data foundation for digital and intelligent transformation; and third, they should focus on deepening rather than expanding intelligent applications, exploring in-depth applications with a one-centimeter incision and achieving a one-kilometer depth of application.

At the same time, to help more manufacturing enterprises embrace smart manufacturing and develop new types of productive forces, Huawei will continue to promote independent technological innovation based on its own digital and intelligent transformation practices, delve deeply into the creation of scenario-based solutions, create more model customers, and provide attentive services to customers through partner collaborations, achieving widespread replication of industry benchmarks.

In Qiu Heng's view, "Although different industries are like mountains apart, the principles are universal." The methodology formed through Huawei's own practices and customer service is applicable to different types of customers; moreover, the support system for the entire methodology requires collaboration between "Partners + Huawei" to more accurately grasp customer needs, promote the integration of technology and business scenarios, thereby serving the entire lifecycle of customers' digital and intelligent transformation and empowering the development of new types of productive forces in the industry to achieve high-quality development.