Introduction

Recently, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released the 2026 list of Excellence-Level Smart Factories. Shanghai Highly (Group) Co., Ltd.'s "Headquarters Digital-Intelligence-Driven Mass Customization Smart Factory for Compressors" was successfully selected, marking national-level recognition of the enterprise's group-wide collaborative intelligent manufacturing practices in the discrete manufacturing sector and providing a replicable practical model for China's equipment manufacturing industry in advancing new industrialization and developing new quality productive forces.

The Excellence-Level Smart Factory is a high-tier benchmark within China's tiered cultivation system for smart factories. Its assessment criteria are stringent, requiring enterprises to connect the entire chain from R&D and manufacturing to supply chain and quality control, and to deeply integrate next-generation information technologies such as digital twins, artificial intelligence, and the industrial internet, so as to achieve a systematic transformation of production models. As a globally leading state-owned enterprise in the R&D and manufacturing of core components for cooling and heating applications, Highly has addressed the industry pain points of the compressor sector — "multiple product varieties, small batch sizes, strong demand for customization, and distributed production across multiple bases" — by building a headquarters digital-intelligence-driven mass customization smart factory for compressors and establishing an innovative intelligent manufacturing model featuring "headquarters digital-intelligence-driven, multi-factory collaborative implementation, and full-chain closed-loop."

The project establishes the Shanghai plant as the Group's intelligent manufacturing hub and builds a unified Group-wide digital foundation that connects core business systems such as PLM, ERP, MES, and QMS. This resolves the challenges of fragmented systems, disconnected data, and duplicated development across multiple plants, enabling "optimization at one site, benefit across the entire Group." The factory has implemented 25 smart manufacturing application scenarios, 12 of which involve artificial intelligence, deeply embedding AI technologies throughout R&D and design, production operations, and management. On the R&D side, it has developed an AI design agent for compressor blade springs, intelligent visual inspection for oil surfaces, and a cloud-based acoustic quality diagnosis system, driving a shift in the R&D model from "experience-driven and repeated physical trial-and-error" to "data-driven and simulation-first," significantly shortening new product development cycles. In production, innovative applications such as machine vision online inspection, AI motion recognition, and AI-based acoustic and vibration diagnosis for finished products have been deployed, addressing industry challenges in quality control on high-speed precision manufacturing lines and frequent production changeovers, and enabling large-scale mixed-model flexible production. At the management level, the factory has built a multi-factory collaborative intelligent scheduling system, a full-process digital quality traceability system, and a predictive equipment maintenance system, coordinating capacity resources across manufacturing bases nationwide and overseas to efficiently respond to differentiated order requirements from 165 countries and regions worldwide.

Following implementation, the factory has achieved simultaneous improvements in quality and efficiency: overall labor productivity increased by 12.16%, sales per capita rose by 18.02%, operating cost per unit of output value decreased by 11.36%, and the on-time order delivery rate reached 95%. The project has distilled a paradigm for group-wide intelligent manufacturing driven by headquarters empowerment. It not only supports Highly's efficient production of more than 1,600 machine models but also offers mature experience for domestic general equipment manufacturing enterprises undertaking smart factory development.

Next, Highly will continue to deepen the integration of digital-intelligent technologies with its manufacturing operations, further refine its group-wide collaborative intelligent manufacturing capabilities, fully leverage the exemplary and leading role of an Excellence-Level Smart Factory, and drive synchronized digital upgrading across the upstream and downstream industrial chain, contributing through concrete action to the building of a manufacturing powerhouse.