Revolutionary company Shangjian Intelligence offers next-generation AI solutions to streamline operations and optimize decision-making for industrial manufacturing companies. As a result, businesses that have incorporated Shangjian Intelligence's solutions improve their profitability by 25 percent, surging to the forefront of their respective sectors.
Bringing AI to Manufacturing
Ever since ChatGPT's launch in November of 2022 raised awareness of artificial intelligence's capabilities, leaders have scrambled to understand its potential applications for their own fields. However, Shangjian Intelligence's founder, Dr. Yi Liang, has been working on AI for much longer.
Dr. Yi started working with AI and deep learning algorithms as a graduate student in physics. Upon graduating with his Ph.D., he brought his expert understanding of these advancements to the realm of manufacturing.
"I noticed that companies were using outdated IT," Dr. Yi explains. "Manufacturing requires the ability to weigh multiple complex factors and make real-time adjustments. Today's AI and machine learning are perfect for this since they enable rapid, automatic decision-making that maximizes efficiency, yet manufacturers were using outdated heuristic and meta-heuristic methods that were too simplistic and took too long. They weren't exploiting cutting-edge AI for manufacturing applications, which is why I started doing it myself."
Toward that end, Dr. Yi helped numerous prestigious companies in China incorporate AI and machine learning into their processes. His efforts at Lenovo were particularly notable.
How AI Has Been a Game Changer for Lenovo
Lenovo manufactures tens of millions of PCs and laptops annually and is ranked first among the top five PC companies worldwide in 2022 and 2023. This means balancing the schedules of thousands of employees with equipment availability, inventory management, and idiosyncratic production processes, even while more orders keep streaming in. Tasks need to be assigned to each production line and machine. The more fully these are utilized, the better.
Time is of the essence, yet the company's previous planning software either struggled to keep up or quickly delivered the wrong decisions. That's why Dr. Yi led a research and development team to leverage AI and deep-learning algorithms to fix these problems.
The groundbreaking new production scheduling system they developed, the Lenovo Advanced Planning and Scheduling Solution (LAPS), improved the performance of production scheduling, reduced the planning team's workload, and responded to scheduling demands more quickly. As Dr. Yi states, "We modeled it as a very large-scale combinatorial optimization problem with massive operational constraints."
The LAPS system made a huge and immediate difference, taking an unwieldy planning process that used to take six hours and whittling it down to only 90 seconds. It also increased the order fulfillment rate by 20 percent and boosted productivity by 18 percent.
For these reasons, the LAPS system won the "Oscars" of operations research—in 2020, the Franz Edelman Prize committee awarded LAPS second place overall. Dr. Yi also published a paper on LAPs in the INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics (IJAA), the leading academic journal on operations research worldwide.
As top IT expert Charles King wrote in eWEEK, "[LAPS] reflects well on Lenovo Research and should continue to positively impact the company's production efficiency and bottom line. Just as importantly, as the System evolves, it should open new commercial opportunities for the company's service and solution-led efforts in vertical industries. In fact, it seems highly likely that other large-scale manufacturers will want to capture the same kinds of efficiency and performance benefits that the Smart Production Planning System is already providing to Lenovo."
Indeed, the good news for manufacturing companies everywhere is that they can now take advantage of Dr. Yi's AI-based solutions since he decided to head out on his own and launched Shangjian Intelligence in 2021.
The Advantages of Shangjian Intelligence
"To make manufacturing processes as efficient as possible, you need an intelligence that can comprehend massive amounts of information and adjust to real-time changes at lightning speed," Dr. Yi says. "That's what Shangjian Intelligence does."
Unlike other automated planning systems, Shangjian Intelligence's system not only mimics human experience and learns and accumulates knowledge from previous efforts but also develops strategies through interaction with its environment. The system is capable of online learning, which means it is constantly learning from new data and updating its strategies while making decisions. "This approach leads to fast and high-quality results," Dr. Yi Liang explains.
Incorporating Shangjian Intelligence's systems leads to enormous rewards. Manufacturers cut the time it takes to produce each unit by more than 15%, gaining the ability to produce more. Inventory turnover days drop by more than 20%, which decreases manufacturing costs by 15%. All told, these businesses' profitability skyrockets by more than 25% on average, and what company wouldn't benefit from 25% more profit?
Unleash Your Company's Productivity
Shangjian Intelligence's AI-based, deep-learning planning solutions are revolutionizing the manufacturing industry. Companies that take advantage of these innovations not only become leaner and more efficient but also catapult themselves ahead of the competition, while those that don't risk being left behind. For this reason, manufacturing companies of all kinds should consider how Shangjian Intelligence can unleash their productivity for the better.
