Case Studies for the Establishment of the Optimized Smart Factory with Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

Abstract

In South Korea, Manufacturing Innovation 3.0 Strategy is now underway by the government since 2014. The core of this strategy is to change the existing 20,000 factories to smart factories by 2022. For this, the Korea Government established Korea Smart Factory Foundation and has being investing a large finance for the purpose of the smart factory's proliferation. As a result of this, the government expects that there will build the foundation to enable the advanced smart factory based on Internet of Things, Big Data, and Artificial Intelligence. Despite these efforts, the companies are still hesitant the construction of the smart factory because of the additional expenses caused by the construction of ICT infrastructure and the employment of ICT human resources. On the other hand, they knows the merits of the smart factory and wants some services supported by that, such as the quality test, the aggregation of the actual production, the manufacturing facility maintenance, etc. That is, the underfinanced companies requires the smart factory optimized for their works. The important point to notice is that the implementation of the smart factory can be different according to the factory environments, a type of the manufacturing facility, and data to be collected, even if the companies want same service. Moreover, because every company has its own requirements, it is necessary to design factory-optimized smart factory. Therefore, a smart factory designer must consider and analyse the requirements of company and characteristics of the factory. In this paper, we first describe the four considerations for the establishment of the smart factory in the small and medium enterprises and introduce three case studies in conjunction with the small and medium-sized enterprises that require the smart factory optimized for their business or factory rather than the high-level smart factory.