When the Bordeaux red wine merchant called the Ply-Pack general manager's office, the electronic calendar on the wall showed March 28th - only 5 days left before the Qingming Festival holiday. The French side requested that the delivery time of the 12 customized wine intelligent packaging machinery systems be advanced by 21 days, coinciding with the traditional Chinese tomb-sweeping peak. This seemingly impossible task eventually evolved into a classic case of the Ply-Pack intelligent manufacturing system.
Time and space folding for urgent customer needs
The order from Château Lafite, a French century-old winery, was originally scheduled for delivery in June, but due to the sudden advance of the industry exhibition, the customer required the intelligent packaging machinery system to arrive at the Port of Marseille before April 10. What's more difficult is that the equipment needs to be adapted to 11 types of special-shaped wine bottles, the robot arm grasping error must be ≤0.2mm, and it happened that 35% of Ply-Pack employees had submitted applications to return home for the Qingming Festival.
"This is not a simple compression of the construction period, but to find a balance between cultural tradition and commercial credit." Ply-Pack production director Chen Gong knocked on the whiteboard at an emergency meeting, "Our intelligent packaging machinery system production line will race against itself this time."
Precise bite of the three major intelligent manufacturing modules
- Neural scheduling system
Ply-Pack's self-developed AI scheduling platform completed data analysis within 2 hours:
- Split the original production chain into 48 independent units
- Automatically match 7 local senior technicians to form a commando team
- Generate a 3x efficiency compensation plan for employees returning home
Quality inspector Xiao Zhao pointed to the Gantt chart generated by the system and exclaimed: "This system actually avoided the time of my cousin's wedding, and the production vacuum period on Qingming Festival was compressed to 1.8 hours."
Cross-time zone virtual workshop
In the early morning of April 2, Ply-Pack engineers wore VR equipment and synchronized debugging with the French technical team in the digital twin workshop. When the French side proposed to modify the bottle mouth positioning module, the real-time data stream allowed the Chinese workshop to complete the drawing iteration within 28 minutes. "You are debugging the equipment in Qingdao, and we are drinking coffee and supervising in Bordeaux. This is like magic!" Pierre, the French technical director, exclaimed repeatedly in the video conference.
Cultural compensation mechanism
The administrative department launched the "double emotional account" plan:
- Employees who stay in the factory can exchange 0.5 days of paid leave for every hour of overtime
- Customized 3D printed ancestral tablet models for employees who cannot return home
- Opened the "Qingming Special Train" live broadcast to allow employees to sweep the ancestors in the cloud
After completing the ancestral worship ceremony with AR glasses in the workshop, assembler Lao Li turned to the reporter and said: "The ancestors must be happier to see me make the domestic equipment proud than to receive paper money."
Delivery results and industry shocks
On the morning of April 8, the Mediterranean sea breeze had not yet blown away the morning mist in the port of Marseille, and 12 sets of silver-shining intelligent packaging machinery systems had been put into the warehouse on time. The Ply-Pack smart manufacturing system has delivered amazing data:
- The error of key processes is controlled at 0.18mm
- The cross-border collaborative response speed has increased by 40%
- Employee satisfaction has increased by 12% against the trend
The French Wine Industry Association has written this case into the "Global Supply Chain Emergency Manual", and the production schedule stained yellow by coffee stains on the bulletin board of the Ply-Pack workshop is quietly telling how China's smart manufacturing has ironed out the space-time wrinkles of the two civilizations.
