Victory Giant Technology: The Qualified Forerunner of PCB Smart Factories

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

Zhou: You are right. Currently, some of our core production facility still rely on foreign vendors. It is more difficult to cooperate and communicate with foreign vendors. Regarding these factors, we clearly state our requirement of intelligence during the equipment procurement. As a user, the most important suggestion we give our system manufacturers is “develop together, and win the future.” For the PCB industry, automation vendors of different segments should form an alliance, and take part in overall R&D and innovation together.

Gu: Prof. Tang Min, consultant of the State Council, once said that, in the future, the labor-intensive industry relying on mass production and low cost is bound to be emigrated from China to other Southeast Asia countries, and only small batch, customized flexible manufacturing would be kept in China. For some of the manufacturers, pure pursuit of automation equipment, mass production and reducing manufacturing costs oriented “using machinery to replace people” might be risky. Because the key point is how to take advantage of the industrial robots, the automated management platform, and the information technology to help the companies realize flexible manufacturing and agile manufacturing. By “using machinery to replace people” we mean realizing the flexibility of the software, agile programming, or automatic programming. Just like the quick die change in TPS. What do you think of this? And how is Victory Giant Technology doing?

Zhou: We agree that we need to combine automation and flexibility while using machinery to replace people. Purely using automation to realize mass production cannot maximize the overall benefit. In the smart factory of Victory Giant Technology, what we emphasize is intellectualization. The production line we designed can not only realize mass automated production, but also be compatible with small batch, customized flexible manufacturing. Currently, all the production equipment we planned has achieved information networking. Starting from giving manufacture order, giving process parameters, quality control of production process, warehousing and transportation, to feeding and unloading process, we have all realized digital control, and that means the whole production line could realize “Quick die change and mixed production.”

Gu: As a forerunner of the new round of Industrial Revolution, do you have some advice for the whole industry chain? For vendors, do you have any suggestion regarding what kind of model they could use to catch up to the trend of the smart factory?

Zhou: For the whole industry chain, what I would like to say is “Opening-up, interconnection, and coordination.” As a PCB manufacturer, we hope we could work together with our upstream and downstream firms. The future competition is bound to be the competition between the industry chain, so we need to work closely with each other and set up an industry sharing platform. It will be networked collaborative manufacturing in the future. Manufacturing firms need to be further transformed into firms using manufacturing platform. We need to build a company like Alibaba in the PCB manufacturing industry. Turning different demand and resources for production as a node on the platform, achieving optimum allocation and coordination of the whole social resources.

Being the forerunner of smart factories, Victory Giant Technology would like to share our experiences and model with our peers, to help the whole PCB industry improve and develop. And meanwhile, we would establish an intelligent manufacturing innovation research institute for the PCB industry, integrate resources and make sustainable Innovation.          

Figure 4: Automated solder mask printing at Victory Giant.

Gu: After reading the introduction of the Whelen factory, do you have any thoughts to share with us?                                                                        

Zhou: After reading about the Whelen factory, we have mixed feelings. We are happy that global manufacturing upgrading is a trend that cannot be halted, and we are just following the trend. In the PCB industry, Victory Giant Technology is supposed to be the first company in the world who “carries out large-scale implementation of intellectualization in full process and the whole factory.” We hope that by sharing our experiences with our peers, we can inspire the evolution of PCB industry in China. But we are also worried about the global industry competition. We are facing the challenge from our peers in U.S. Only by continuous learning and innovation, can we keep up with the times.

Gu: As a pioneer of PCB smart factories, for sure, Victory Giant Technology should take on the great task. Thank you very much for the unique insights and ideas. We believe that the PCB smart factories in China will become better and better!

Zhou: Thank you!

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