Aptiv more 'intelligent' after recent upgrade

The upgrade of Aptiv Central Electric (Shanghai) Co has been completed in Jiading's Anting Town, making it the largest manufacturing base of Aptiv Group's connectors globally.

After the upgrade of its intelligent manufacturing capabilities, the Shanghai factory can produce 20 percent more products without adding more workers.

"Aptiv Central Electric is Aptiv Group's largest connector system manufacturing plant in the world. With the development of our business, we need to increase production capacity," said Shen Guoliang, general manager of Aptiv Group's Connectors China Division. "At this time, it coincides with the launch of the 'zero increase in land' reconstruction and expansion in Jiading District. The project helped us break through the land bottleneck of business development."

With the zero increase in land project, the company set up a fully automated intelligent warehouse and carried out a complete production and management upgrade to make it more intelligent.

"Take the injection and stamping process as an example. Through automation, digitization and intelligent transformation, we have reduced the manpower requirement by about 60 percent compared to the traditional manufacturing process," said Zhang Yiding, director of Aptiv's injection molding and stamping plant.

The new automated intelligent warehouse covers an area of about 8,300 square meters and is 24 meters high. It can accommodate 8,530 standard trailers and 40,500 boxes of goods.

The intelligent warehouse not only facilitates the unmanned and automated management of each link – such as warehouse entry, warehousing and delivery – but also the comprehensive intelligent management and automatic scheduling of material transportation, distribution, and finished product entry into the warehouse with each production line, as well as real-time transmission of management information systems.

"Relying on the construction of automated smart warehouses and smart factories, Aptiv has implemented a swift manufacturing strategy and created a brand-new smart manufacturing collaborative management benchmarking platform. This reduces storage and transportation costs, improves logistics efficiency and saves money. It has also provided support for the digital transformation of enterprises," Shen said.