With Thailand today scrambling to upgrade its manufacturing sector towards the Industry 4.0 era, Tencent Cloud is urging locally-based organisations to increase their competitiveness with cloud technology and artificial intelligence.
“The manufacturing industry is a crucial sector to the overall economy of Thailand. To brace for changes with the application of technology in business operations will be inevitably necessary for the entrepreneurs in the manufacturing industry,” said Chang Foo, chief operating officer, Tencent Thailand.
Chang has been touting his company’s smart solutions for Industry 4.0 in the Southeast Asian country for some time now, saying that “an intelligent manufacturing system is an important cog to drive an effective transformation of the Thai manufacturing industry into Industry 4.0”.
Indeed, Tencent Thailand has been tapped by Foxconn Industrial Internet (FII) to deliver the end-to-end cloud-based solution that would help the world’s largest contract electronic equipment manufacturer to build, deploy and operate its industrial internet.
FII has adopted a “smart manufacturing + industrial Internet” strategy using sensor technology, smart logistics and automated industrial control systems. Most of its production lines and factories are fully automated, including several “lights-off” factories that are run entirely via robots. Enabled by the industrial internet and cloud computing, lights-out factories reduce costs, improve manufacturing quality, cut down on energy use and increase data and production safety, among other notable benefits.
FII’s industrial internet connects brilliant machines, big data, and people at work to enable person-to-person, person-to-machine, and machine-to-machine communication.
Tencent Cloud and FII worked together to bring FII’s manufacturing strategy to life with a highly effective industrial cloud platform. The Foxconn Industrial Cloud Platform (FII Cloud) combines operations technology and information technology to create a secure connection between manufacturing plants and the FII Cloud, using the Tencent Internet ecosystem. FII deployed various components and applications of its platform product BEACON on Tencent Cloud, making seamless access between multiple locations a reality.
“As a business enabler, we help all organisations transform into digital systems efficiently,” Chang said. “With these smart cloud solutions, businesses can increase the production capacity to meet changing market demands successfully. Furthermore, they can elevate their business operations and the production system, leading to an increase in competitiveness in the global market.”
