Finance Association, July 16 (Reporter Guo Songqiao) Currently, various regions are speeding up intelligent manufacturing, and a boom in the development of new quality productivity is surging. A reporter from the Financial Services Association recently visited the Inspur Information (000977.SZ) Industrial Park in Jinan to conduct field research on accelerating intelligent manufacturing, digital transformation, and equipment updates to explore how its recently operated intelligent three-dimensional warehouse can accelerate order delivery.

Intelligent warehouses effectively shorten the delivery cycle of products

Picking, sorting, warehousing, transportation... Traditional warehouse workers usually have a busy day, and their eyes and steps must always track every process to ensure that the product can finally be delivered smoothly.

Meanwhile, the new smart factory issued material preparation requirements for order production, and the warehouse management system (WMS) received the demand and immediately broke it down and distributed it to various operating equipment. A few hundred meters away, multiple stackers in the intelligent three-dimensional warehouse quickly started, accurately selected the required materials in 120 seconds as fast as 0.045 million materials, and then picked up the materials by an automated guided vehicle (AGV) and accurately delivered to the factory within 3 minutes.

This is a scene seen by the Finance Association reporter at Jinan Inspur Information Industrial Park, where the industry's largest intelligent three-dimensional warehouse is located — covering an area of 0.012 million square meters and a height of 24 meters.

According to the Financial Services Association reporter's on-site observation, this 0.012 million square meter vertical warehouse is no different from an ordinary factory building, but when you walk inside, you see an oversized industrial shelf warehouse. Rows of steel shelves are neatly arranged, with more than 0.05 million storage spaces, and can store more than 45,000 kinds of materials.

A reporter from the Financial Services Association saw that between the 38 rows of storage racks in the warehouse, a number of high-speed stackers were running continuously, completing the entry and exit of materials in an orderly manner. However, the channel between adjacent shelves achieves the narrowest design according to the size of the bin or tray. The minimum spacing is only 1.1 meters, making the effective storage capacity 2.2 times that of traditional shelf storage.

Chang Wanjiang, head of warehousing at Inspur Information, told the CFA reporter that the 37-layer 1.4m x 1.2m tray and the 10-layer 0.8 m x 0.6 m x 0.35 m bin are the two basic storage units in the warehouse. The former is used to carry large materials, and the latter is used to hold small-sized spare parts.

Meanwhile, in the corridor connecting the vertical warehouse to the smart factory, several AGV cars shuttled continuously to deliver materials to more than 300 regional locations of the smart factory and transported the finished products back to the vertical warehouse.

Chang Wanjiang told the Financial Federation reporter that during the picking stage, the WMS system can uniformly dispatch more than 200 sets of equipment and execute 45 delivery orders at the same time, and can accurately deliver 0.05 million or more stored materials to 63 picking points according to requirements. In the delivery and shipping stage, intelligent warehousing supports multiple production lines at Inspur Information's two factories. There are more than 300 delivery destinations, and there are more than 2,000 distribution routes for materials. Accurate selection of the required materials can be completed in as fast as 120 seconds, and the prepared materials can be delivered to the production area within 3 minutes as fast as 120 seconds, increasing the preparation efficiency by more than 4 times.

Significant increase in server sales

What impact does investment in smart warehouses have on Inspur Information order sales?

A reporter from the Financial Services Association learned in an interview that traditional warehouses require staff to receive orders, search for orders, then wait for forklifts to pick, confirm, and gather materials before finally entering the transportation process. The entire process takes about 5-6 hours.

And the new warehouse has greatly improved operational efficiency.

According to Lu Jian, general manager of Inspur Information Production Department, told the Financial Federation reporter, in terms of circulation efficiency, Inspur Information's intelligent three-dimensional warehouse has an ultra-high throughput capacity, can load and exit 1,000 boxes (or trays) per hour, can increase material preparation efficiency by more than 4 times, and can complete accurate selection of required materials from more than 45,000 materials in as fast as 120 seconds. The prepared materials can be delivered to the production area within 3 minutes. The ultra-fast entry and exit speed effectively shortens the product delivery cycle.

Speaking about why the warehouse was built, Lu Jian told the Financial Federation reporter that in fact, it is also due to the current large-scale personalized server orders and the market's compression of the delivery cycle.

With the rapid development of cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence and other technologies, demand for servers from all walks of life is growing, driving the rapid growth of the server market, and a large number of personalized orders have also appeared.

According to information, orders for the production of more than 80% of Inspur Information products are personalized. These orders involved more than 200 products, 0.115 million configurations, and required a huge variety of material support. For example, there are more than 6,000 types of hard drives alone, nearly 2,000 types of motherboards, 0.017 million types of cables, and even 4,300 types of labels.

Lu Jian said that after the introduction of an intelligent three-dimensional warehouse, the most important thing is to achieve linkage between warehousing and production lines, which can track changes in production plans in real time and flexibly adjust material entry and exit schedules, so that customers can customize more personalized server products according to their own business characteristics, enjoy more agile delivery, and truly unleash intelligent computing productivity in the digital and intelligent era.

According to Inspur Information's performance forecast for the first half of the year, Inspur Information server sales increased significantly. I believe this is highly related to investment in intelligent manufacturing and the rapid response of the supply chain.

In addition, Inspur Information is designing and implementing a new generation of intelligent production lines. The new production line will have greater flexibility and higher efficiency to enable co-production of more types of products.

Equipment updates are beneficial to Wave Information

“Since the publication of the “Implementation Plan to Promote Equipment Renewal in the Industrial Sector”, Jinan has actually responded immediately and then given these policies to the factory.” Lu Jian, general manager of Inspur Information Production Department, told reporters that we are now upgrading the original server equipment.

According to the “White Paper on China Computing Power Development Index (2023)” published by the Chinese Academy of Information and Communications Technology, from the computing equipment side, China has shipped more than 20.91 million general-purpose servers and 0.82 million AI servers in the past six years.

Lu Jian told reporters that under normal circumstances, it takes 3-5 years to update servers, but there is also a new trend in these two years. Intelligent computing technology is innovating rapidly. Depreciation of equipment technology in many intelligent computing centers has accelerated, equipment replacement cycles have gradually been shortened, and the equipment in many intelligent computing centers will have to be replaced in 3-4 years. Moreover, intelligent transformation is deepening, and the overall social economy is in high demand for data centers and servers. Regardless of the country's macroeconomic policies or market conditions, it is indeed beneficial to us.