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Under the wave of intelligent manufacturing, it is an important path for manufacturing enterprises to achieve green and low-carbon transformation by improving the digital, networked, and intelligent level of production and manufacturing on the basis of Industrial automation. Through the deep integration of the new generation of information and communication technology and advanced manufacturing technology, the process of digital transformation will be accelerated to provide a strong impetus for the high-quality development of the industrial economy.

Recently, Yu Haibin, Senior Vice President of Supcon Technology, accepted an interview with the media and shared dry goods from the perspectives of industry digital intelligence upgrades, industry trends, the company’s future development, and new opportunities for smart manufacturing.

Yu Haibin, Senior Vice President of Supcon Technology

1. The source of confidence

Why is it positioned as an overall solution provider for intelligent manufacturing in the process industry

The development of central control technology has gone through more than 20 springs and autumns. However, many people in the industry still remain at the stage of “manufacturers who simply provide DCS control systems” for central control technology. In the past two years, based on market development and customer needs, SUPCON Technology has carried out business upgrading and strategic transformation in an all-round way. At present, as a supplier of overall solutions for intelligent manufacturing in the process industry, Supcon Technology provides a “package” solution of hardware + software, and its products also have diversified characteristics.

With the changes of domestic and foreign economic situation and market competition pattern, process industry enterprises are facing more and more cost and operating pressure. In addition, policies such as supply-side reform and “double carbon” are also forcing industrial enterprises to undergo digital transformation and promote lean production and smart manufacturing.

The general manager of a large refinery and petrochemical company once proposed that he hoped that Supcon Technology could provide a solution that could ensure production safety and economic benefits at low and medium loads. However, from the perspective of the design process, the safety and stability are the best when running at full load, and the economic indicators are also the best. However, now the prices of raw materials, finished product prices, and the competitive landscape are changing, and sometimes there will be “the more you drive, the more you drive.” , the more you lose”, the embarrassing situation. Therefore, more adjustments are now required.

Yu Haibin said frankly that for Central Control Technology, it was only necessary to provide the control system to ensure the safe and stable operation of basic automation, but not now. At the level of basic automation, it is also necessary to optimize the device through industrial software, so that the parts that were originally operated by humans can be operated by machines as much as possible. This is also proposed by Chu Jian, the founder of SUPCON, which requires SUPCON Technology to transform from a hardware-centric “Industry 3.0” product supplier to a process industry intelligent manufacturing overall solution provider covering “Industry 3.0+4.0”. The power of the whole industry has brought the automation of the entire industry to a higher level, and helped customers achieve safety, environmental protection, quality improvement, cost reduction, and efficiency enhancement.

Committed to becoming an overall solution provider for intelligent manufacturing in the process industry, where does Supcon Technology come from?

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In fact, the DNA of SUPCON Technology’s growth determines the foundation of its development. Yu Haibin pointed out that in the development of more than 20 years, Zhongkong Technology has been focusing on the process industry. Although many experts and customers are more optimistic about the discrete industry, Chu Jian and the management team of SUPCON agree that the process industry should be deepened and thoroughly developed. Therefore, Supcon Technology has been deeply involved in the process industries such as petroleum and chemical industry for many years. From an entrepreneurial team with only a few people, it has grown to a scale of more than 5,000 people, serving more than 26,000 process industry enterprises as an overall solution provider, and It has undertaken a series of major projects with industry influence and symbolic significance at home and abroad.

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Secondly, SUPCON Technology has also established a complete marketing and service system. Supcon Technology launched the PLANTMATE® service brand for the full life cycle management of industrial solutions, creating a “5S store + S2B platform” service model, and has built more than 150 5S stores across the country, and will expand to 300 in the next two years , to achieve full coverage of the chemical industry park. This method is similar to that of a car 4S store, deploying technical service personnel to downstream customers, coupled with the internet model combining S2B online and offline, enabling customers to quickly respond to various needs such as spare parts and value-added services. From passively meeting customer needs in the past to now proactively predicting customer needs, discovering customer problems, providing customers with targeted solutions, and then configuring hardware and software products and products from cooperative ecological partners to form an overall solution. Finally, a service network covering industries, regions and products will be formed to provide customers with 24-hour all-weather services.

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Third, Central Control Technology has a strong product line. Central Control Technology has deeply cultivated automatic control systems such as distributed control systems, safety instrument systems, and networked hybrid control systems. Industry 3.0+4.0″ product and solution architecture. In July this year, Supcon Technology launched a new generation of intelligent operation management and control (i-OMC) system. This is a system from 0 to 1. Based on the functions of the traditional distributed control system, it deeply integrates technical advantages such as factory operating system, industrial AIoT, advanced industrial network, intelligent optimization, and model prediction. It is committed to realizing the process industry from automation to The major innovation and upgrade of intelligent autonomous operation has also become a powerful booster for central control technology from following to leading.

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In addition, the development of Supcon Technology is inseparable from the long-term support and trust of customers. For some core products, SUPCON maintains a relatively high market share. According to statistics, in 2021, the company’s core product, the Distributed Control System (DCS), has a domestic market share of 33.8%, ranking first in the domestic market for eleven consecutive years; the core industrial software – Advanced Control Software (APC) The domestic market share reached 28.6%, ranking first for three consecutive years. In the final analysis, this is because of the strong support of our customers, especially when the products are just launched, these enterprises can trust us and use our products, which is a great encouragement to us.

2. Pains and difficulties in the process of localization

What challenges are the process industries facing

Businesses are now under enormous pressure. There are mainly two difficulties:

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Safety is the red line. The number of safety accidents is still high. In the context of rapid economic development, in the construction process of certain projects, a lot of work is in fact operating in parallel. Some secrecy companies have particularly strict safety requirements. Due to various reasons, their schedules will be very tight. Therefore, equipment, instruments, control systems, and the entire work are often carried out in parallel. In this case, safe production is guaranteed. is even more important. This is also the reason why more and more companies are now promoting fewer and fewer people.

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The second is environmental protection. Now the “30·60” target’s requirements for environmental protection have largely constrained the production of enterprises, and saving energy and improving economic benefits have become the key. At present, Supcon Technology has set up an industrial energy-saving department, and is constantly expanding the team, and empowering the team with resources, capabilities, and technologies to help users better achieve the goal of energy conservation and emission reduction.

3. How to empower process industry enterprises to transform and upgrade

The process industry is undergoing a transformation of digitalization and intelligent upgrading

In recent years, Supcon Technology has insisted on independent innovation, and its core products mainly focus on the pain points and hot spots of the process industry. Products and solutions are widely used in oil and gas, petrochemical, chemical, electric power, pharmaceutical, metallurgy, building materials, papermaking, new materials, new energy , food and other industries, covering more than 50 countries and regions around the world.

At present, SUPCON uses “5T technology”, “factory operating system + industrial APP” and “5S store + S2B platform” to help the construction of digital intelligence in the process industry.

5T technology

5T is AT (automation technology), IT (information technology), PT (process technology), OT (operation technology) and ET (equipment technology). The Internet industry often emphasizes IT+OT, but this is not enough to fully reflect the characteristics of the process industry. We believe that only by realizing the combination of these five “Ts” can we provide corresponding solutions for the constantly changing needs of process industry enterprises. solution.

Factory operating system + industrial APP

In the process of promoting and expanding industrial software, we will also encounter many difficulties. In order to meet individual needs, the past model is often a customized solution that requires heavy manpower input. So how to advance the new model? Scenario-based and role-based requirements are the characteristics that the industrial software or solutions proposed by customers need to meet. The technology of “factory operating system + industrial APP” can be well integrated with this standardized platform, standardized modules or standardized Components to build personalized solutions for different scenarios.

5S shop + S2B platform

This business model can better approach downstream customers, discover and solve problems together with them.

In addition to these three core strategies, Supcon Technology is also actively promoting the application research and engineering exploration of new technologies such as industrial 5G, industrial Internet, blockchain, edge computing, artificial intelligence, and big data technology in the industrial field; actively exploring data-driven Typical industrial devices, equipment low-carbon energy-saving technologies and related applications; improve the intelligence of industrial equipment and the safety of industrial production, and further create an overall solution for advanced automated factories, digital twin factories, less-manned and unmanned chemical factories, and excellent operating factories .

Among them, the i-OMC system is an important product of the continuous exploration of central control technology. During the demonstration stage of a chemical company, its technological breakthrough helped the customer reduce the operation frequency by more than 90%, and the production stability rate reached more than 99%. The self-control rate reached 100%; and helped an enterprise’s ionic membrane caustic soda project to realize fully automatic and black-screen operation, one-button start and stop of caustic soda equipment, etc., reducing the number of employees from 120 to less than 40, better realizing the reduction of the enterprise. , unmanned, automation, intelligence and other needs.

4. A high proportion of R&D investment

R&D investment application and strategic planning

As a technology company, SUPCON Technology is the most critical technology. In the past four years, Supcon Technology’s investment in research and development has exceeded 10% of total revenue. In 2021, Supcon Technology’s R&D investment will reach 497 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 37.19%, accounting for 10.99% of revenue. At present, the main research and development investment of Supcon Technology is used in the construction of research and development platforms. Supcon Technology has established three major technology platforms of control system, industrial software and instrumentation, and eight categories of core technologies including high-reliability design technology for thermal redundancy of the control system. It has a national enterprise technology center, a national-local joint engineering laboratory, etc. At the same time, a high-quality R&D talent team has also formed a talent echelon for market research, demand analysis, technical research, product development, manufacturing, product testing, and system integration. As of the end of December 2021, SUPCON Technology R&D personnel accounted for 34.21% of all employees, and the core technical personnel have worked in the company for more than 15 years.

In addition, Supcon Technology has more than 5,000 square meters of scientific research sites, established mature software sub-centers, hardware sub-centers, reliability testing departments and other R&D and testing departments, equipped with a large number of advanced testing equipment at home and abroad; has a reliability life laboratory , industrial communication and network laboratory, information integration and factory modeling laboratory, industrial control security laboratory and other professional laboratories, and completed the construction of intelligent manufacturing laboratory to realize the simulation verification of process manufacturing environment.

In the future, Supcon Technology will insist on promoting the paradigm shift with two-wheel drive, deeply cultivate the process industry, combine technological innovation and customer needs, continue to make efforts and make overall plans, and finally realize the paradigm shift of the company’s strategic development.

5. Create a new growth curve and build a future “growth pole”

How to successfully create the development path of central control technology

The key to successfully creating a new growth curve is that SUPCON always closely focuses on customer needs.

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From the perspective of the development curve, in the first stage, the central control technology is mainly based on the domestic market, creating industrial automation products, with the control system as the core, plus instruments and meters, and several softwares to meet the needs of customers in a point-like manner. part of the demand.

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In the second stage, which is the current stage, we have established a “3+1” platform. That is, the i-OMC system, factory operating system + industrial APP, a technology platform that has not yet been released publicly, and the “5S store + S2B” business model platform. All-round and multi-dimensional support for the evolution of process enterprises from production process automation to enterprise operation automation.

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The third stage is “5T technology”. “5T technology” is very simple to understand, but the practical requirements are very high. “5” is both a real number and an imaginary number. It is a problem that cannot be solved by one or two technologies alone. We hope to solve the pain points of the process industry through five or more technologies. This requires more professional technicians and experts to join in, so we also hope to establish our technology and product platforms through open innovation and platform innovation, and build an ecosystem through these platforms to better serve customers.

In order to achieve more business growth, Supcon Technology has also accelerated the process of internationalization. In the future, we will focus on process industry users in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, and make every effort to expand the international market to provide strong support for the company’s business growth.

6. Jointly promote the development of the industry

How the Government and Enterprises Work Together to Break the Situation

As Chu Jian, the founder of Supcon, said, Industry 4.0 is a revolution driven by industrial software. Industrial software is not simple software, but the soul of the industrial manufacturing process. The growth rate of China’s industrial software market leads the world, with huge potential. However, the current scale of China’s industrial software industry accounts for only 6% of the global industrial software market, and is still in the stage of rapid penetration. On the other hand, the autonomy and controllability of industrial software is also crucial to ensuring national security.

From the perspective of the government, the development of the industry is inseparable from the support of the government.

“If possible, I hope that central enterprises and state-owned enterprises can take the lead in using domestic industrial software and set an example. Because software is better as it is used, why foreign software is easy to use is because they have been accumulated for decades or even hundreds of years , In the process of continuous iteration, a lot of experience in use has been added.

From the perspective of enterprises, it is very difficult to do a good job of industrial software, and it is even more difficult to promote it well. Enterprises in the process industry are faced with extremely dangerous environments, so unlike consumer-side software, the reliability of industrial software is particularly important.

The software of industrial software is the soul, but it is still the industry first, so we must truly reflect industrial knowledge into the software. Supcon Technology hopes to communicate with more partners, develop a series of products, and transform industrial knowledge into software in a relatively convenient and low-threshold way. The original intention of the “factory operating system + industrial APP” solution launched by Supcon Technology is to solve the problem of traditional industrial software with huge system, high price, long development cycle, heavy secondary development workload, difficult update and maintenance, and can only be deployed locally. By providing an open platform to develop ecological partners and create an industrial APP library for the entire industry chain. The APP developed by partners and the APP developed by users on the industrial Internet platform can be interconnected, and the comprehensive problems of production control, production management and enterprise operation can be solved by integrated, digital and intelligent means, so that enterprises can always firmly grasp their own development Initiatives in industrial big data and artificial intelligence. “

Supcon Technology will further increase the innovation and research and development of industrial software, and will build an open and cooperative ecological cooperation relationship, and will always be a reliable partner in the digital transformation of enterprises, helping industrial enterprises in digital transformation and high-quality development.

“We also hope that from the user side to the government side, everyone can work together to promote the self-reliance and self-improvement of our country’s industrial software.”