Shenyang Automobile Axle has delivered results in product quality improvement of its smart and digital assembly line, which has an annual production capacity of 38,400 rear axles, and its after-sales rework rate of product has dropped to 1.1‰ from 2.8‰ of the traditional production line, marking a big step of the company towards a “smart factory” from a traditional factory.
Nowadays, the automobile industry grows fast and has become a pillar industry of the China’s national economy. China has many auto parts manufacturers competing fiercely with one another. Shenyang Automobile Axle took the opportunity of “Industrial 4.0” and made an investment in the smart digital assembly line in its Baoju Workshop in 2016.
The smart digital assembly line is a line for rear axle assembly with brake, consisting of 19 work procedures, including three automatic work procedures and 16 human-assisted semi-automatic work procedures. With functions of automatic detection, error proofing, storage, statistical analysis and quality tracing, the assembly line has a quality data management system and can carry out real-time monitoring on rear axle products.
Each rear axle finished on the assembly line is stamped with a string of digits as a permanent identifier, which is designed for after-sale tracking and comparison. In addition, each rear axle is affixed with a paper QR code for quality data tracking and failure model effectiveness analysis and use.
It is reported that the smart rear axle assembly line has gone into operation for main products of B40 series and B80 series.