Upgrade to Industry 4.0: OGAWA launches Smart Factory (JiMei)

OGAWA Smart Factory (JiMei) located in Xiamen integrates the Industry 4.0 technologies for smart manufacturing. The robotic arms pack the massage chairs automatically and precisely, they robotics grab, fold and seal, getting the chairs ready for delivery to the customers.

 “This new automation line improves the production efficiency significantly, our capacity is expected to be tripled." said the factory director, “The automated production is currently in pilot run, when it is finalized, the annual output of massage chairs will reach 500,000 units eventually, as a solid support for the market expansion."

The automated production line shall provide strong support for OGAWA Group’s strategic layout for massage chair. As the leader of massage & wellness industry, OGAWA Group is accelerating its investment in the middle and low-end price products, aiming to expand business in the middle and low-end market while maintaining its leadership in the high-end range.

The OGAWA Group’s centralized procurement brings advantage regarding the material costs. In the meantime, through process optimization and lean management improvement, the stagnation, redundancy and waste in the manufacturing process are eliminated, as well as defection and other issues: the raw material management is optimized through self-made carts and slide racks, the three-tier visualization system comprising visualized color separation production line and visualized workshops is implemented for digital management with direct data access...The production capacity of middle- and low-price range massage chairs increases continuously.

OGAWA Group has been leading the health market for 20+ years, and its strong supply chain management ability is one of the important moats. The new Smart Factory Industry 4.0 leverages automation, digitalization, and intelligence while enhance lean production level, setting up a benchmark for the standardized smart scale production of massage chairs, aiming to raise the bar of competition while to ease the consumer purchase.

One key part of the factory digitalization is the QR code based material flowing management system, which allows the worker to check the material information on PDA immediately by scan the code on the box. "Building a smart factory is complex and challenging," said the director: "through information integration, all R&D, production and management processes are seamlessly integrated into a coherent solution, then the smart factory achieves production control improvement and manual intervention reduction with emerging technologies such as IoT and big-data.”

The digital transformation of Smart Factory (JiMei) is pioneering as the first massage & wellness facility implementing Industry 4.0, setting a benchmark for the industry and for the business model of Internet Era. The Smart Factory (JiMei) collaborates the data pool of workforce, raw materials, equipment, and data generated throughout the manufacturing processes, which are collected with information systems comprising ERP, MES, WMS, APS, with the automated warehouse, AGV, production lines, packing lines for precise and efficient manufacturing through the data-driven risk prediction, autonomous fast decision making, and problem tracking.