Making Factories Intelligent, Giving Glass New Identity & Introducing Higher Production Value

Discover how smart glass factories are transforming production with intelligent systems, automation and advanced software solutions.

MAC’s smart manufacturing series — the shape of future factories_6

The deep glass processing industry is undergoing a significant transformation: from disorder to order, from passive processing to proactive management, and from risk to safety.

This evolution has led to improved product quality control, optimized efficiency, reduced energy consumption and labor involvement, enhanced production management, and upgraded safety in production.

Let us explore the intelligent production of deep glass processing and how MAC empowers smart glass factories.

Upgrading to a smart factory usually involves three steps.

The first step is upgrading its management, transitioning from traditional extensive management to one that bases investment on market analysis, analyzes capacity according to order structure, determines pricing based on actual losses, and optimizes capacity through lean processes to reduce costs.

The second step is automation upgrading, where optimizing factory logistics and achieving efficient automation and intelligence significantly improve product quality and reduce labor involvement.

This involves

Intelligent raw glass storage system, intermediate product storage and sorting system, and finished product storage system
Intelligent marking system and identification system
Intelligent furnace batching system
Intelligent sorting and pairing system
A utomated conveying mechanism

The third step is functional machines upgrading. Truly intelligent machines represent the ultimate challenge for a smart factory, requiring an in-depth analysis of processes and absolute control over production. This involves fully automatic edging and preprocessing equipment upgrades, an intelligent tempering furnace, and fully automated smart insulating glass production modules.

Based on this three-step approach, we can start a new journey towards intelligence, starting with software.

Software upgrade
ERP serves as the core database for a deep glass processing factory, covering a series of functional modules ranging from sales orders, procurement, material management, production, and dispatch to finance.

However, traditional ERP systems do not include production modules and are not able to effectively manage processing equipment. For instance, when handling complex glass orders (such as a set of insulating glass with 5mm tempered glass + 0.38mm PVB interlayer + 5mm tempered glass + 6mm Aluminum spacer + 5mm LOW-E glass), traditional ERP systems cannot define each piece of glass or material, making it impossible to achieve true order management and tracking.
In contrast, MAC’s ERP is a specialized system developed specifically for deep glass processing equipment. It seamlessly manages and tracks each piece of glass in complex orders.

A factory-wide ERP+MES system can even effectively manage each piece of processing equipment, optimize orders, and decompose them into independent equipment instructions, processing them in a language the equipment can understand.

By extracting production data from the ERP+MES system, calculating the effective capacity of each individual piece of equipment and the actual cost of each order becomes much easier.

The logistics optimization
Next is the logistics optimization stage. A typical example of this is optimizing the process from raw glass storage to cutting.

MAC’s smart manufacturing series — the shape of future factories

Every piece of raw glass begins its journey through the processing plant with cutting. Before cutting, ensuring the correct and efficient identification of the corresponding glass is one of the production steps that require improvement. Based on the order information in the ERP system, the glass is optimized and coordinated between the raw glass storage system and the cutting machine, ensuring smooth subsequent processing.

This process acts as a powerful brain for the glass warehouse, enhancing the optimization rate by 3 to 5 percent by combining online and offline glass storage information. Through an automated raw glass conveying system, the glass can be safely and efficiently transported to the cutting line.

The intelligent cutting line represents a significant evolution from the traditional cutting line. The traditional cutting line can only cut according to optimization packages, while the cutting line in an intelligent factory assigns an identity to each piece of glass. This can be achieved by adding an independent laser marking machine or replacing the traditional cutting line with a two-in-one laser marking and cutting machine.

At the same time, an intelligent connection from cutting to edging can also be achieved.

After cutting, glass pieces are usually in a disorganized state, and orders are scattered. Glass of the same thickness but different sizes must be reorganized without unloading to glass racks and directly balanced with the production rhythm of the cutting and edging machines before entering the edging machine.