Client introduction

Hongta Tobacco (Group) Co., Ltd. is a core backbone enterprise with independent legal qualification under China Tobacco Yunnan Industrial Co., Ltd., which owns three famous Chinese trademarks of Yuxi, Hongtashan and Hongmei, and is honored as a banner of China’s national industry.

Project background

With the proposal of German Industry 4.0 and Made in China 2025 strategies, the deep integration of informatization and industrialization has been promoted to the core strategy for the development of manufacturing enterprises. From the perspective of tobacco industry, main direction of in-depth integration between informatization and tobacco industry has turned to the intelligent production process, digitalized goods circulation, and networked operation management, which is also an important support for cigarette factories.Hongta Group has an urgent need to build the enterprise into an information and intelligent factory closely around the Tobacco Industry 13th Five-Year Development Strategy.

Project challenges

By considering the continuous development of client business, bigger and bigger group structure, together with the increasing of cooperative manufacturers and suppliers, great difficulties exist in the information sharing, process supervision and control in the process of making and executing the production decision, and the isolated information island may be formed, which will directly affect the production efficiency and the enterprise operating costs.

Solutions of Chinasoft International

Chinasoft International quickly set up a project team to analyze and optimize the production decision management system of the whole group, and meanwhile carried out the project consultation and evaluation on the manufacturing execution system (MES) of the four manufacturing plants.According to the preliminary evaluation and analysis, Chinasoft International decided to help the client establish the whole supply chain production management ecosystem by applying the big data, Internet of Things, mobile internet and other emerging technologies, so as to realize the transformation of manufacturing process to market orientation, target drive, collaborative operation, refined management, intelligent control and parametric manufacturing.

In this project and even in the industry, it is the first time to apply the industrial big data analysis into production practice. During the process, a team of high-level talents from Tsinghua University was introduced to jointly build the big data analysis platform of Hongta Group by virtue of the academic ability of Tsinghua University and the professional information competence of Chinasoft International. With the combination of theory and practice, the project had successfully created several innovative applications such as intelligent material supply, quality analysis, and full 3D model equipment management, and had achieved its true value by using data, which consolidated the leading position of Hongta Group in the industry and manufacturing business.

Project highlights

• Large-scale industrial interconnection eliminates the information islands and drives the process more smoothly: by virtue of this project, Hongta Group becomes the first model in the industry to get through the information flow between the group and cooperative manufacturing enterprises, suppliers in terms of information construction, which eliminates the isolated information islands and makes the driving process more smoothly, helping to construct the large-scale industrial interconnection of Hongta Group.

• Continuous improvement of production quality: the transformation of manufacturing process and the application of big data operation and analysis enable all units to have a definite target in decision support, technology improvement and product optimization, with the production quality continuously improved.

• Continuous improvement of efficiency and continuous reduction of cost: the smooth flow of information has greatly improved the efficiency and intensity of decision-making from communication to execution, and thus greatly reduced the enterprise’s communication management and operation management costs.

Client evaluation

Leaders and experts from National tobacco Monopoly Bureau, China Tobacco Yunnan Company, Hongta Group as well as Yuxi, Zhaotong, Chuxiong, and Dali factories under Hongta Group participated in the on-line ceremony of the project held in Dali Cigarette Factory. They highly appraised the phased achievements obtained in the implementation of MES project, and believed that this project was a solid step taken by Hongta Group on the road to intelligent manufacturing!