"Four changes" of world manufacturing paradigm in the new industrial era

Manufacturing is facing a new paradigm shift.First, from "physics" to "information."In the past, whenever manufacturing was mentioned, it was probably thought that various components constituted the core of hardware products.However, with the development of packaging and digitization, the technology of parts production and processing is accelerating to the emerging market countries. As a result, the profit of parts is difficult to maintain.

Therefore, the manufacturing industry in developed countries begins to pay more attention to packaging by assembling parts, modularization of partial functions and systematization of series functions, so as to increase additional value through services.That is, the manufacturing industry of the future is not "selling products", but "selling services".

At the same time, consumers themselves will be able to put their needs into production.That is, the "mass customization" as represented by 3 d printing digital and information technology popularization of the technology innovation, barriers to entry of manufacturing will drop to the lowest, didn't have the individual also can plant and production equipment is easy to participate in the manufacturing - this will to a certain extent, "the masses entrepreneurship, peoples innovation".

Of course, the lowering of the entry threshold of manufacturing industry also means that some unexpected enterprises or individuals will participate in the manufacturing industry, which is likely to cause greater and huge changes to the business model.

The international division of labor is changing

Relatively speaking, many developing countries are in the process of industrialization, and the economic rise must rely on manufacturing first.While bringing many challenges, the "new industrial revolution" will also provide many rare "opportunities" for the new round of manufacturing development in developing countries.

Manufacturers in the manufacturing process are always pursuing to go to both ends of r&d design and brand marketing one day.In the international industrial division of labor system, enterprises of developed countries tend to occupy the high-end positions of r&d, after-sales service and other industrial chains, while manufacturers of developing countries are squeezed in the production and manufacturing links in low-profit zones.In the international industrial division of labor system, moving to the high end of the industrial chain and extending to both ends of the smile curve has become the top target that manufacturers in developing countries can't reach.

In the past, many developing countries have been at the low end of the international industrial value chain because of their low technological content.Enterprises are characterized by mass production and mass sales. Through large-scale production, they provide standardized products and obtain average profits of the industry. Each enterprise shares value according to its industrial division of labor position in r&d and design, production and manufacturing, marketing and service.Research and development, design, marketing and service at both ends of the "smile curve" are relatively profitable areas, and the profit model usually has a good continuity.And in the "smile curve" at the bottom of the middle area of production and manufacturing can only reluctantly to maintain relatively less profit, but also because of the low technical content, barriers to entry is relatively low, which is more competitive, the alternative is strong, thus further squeezed the profit space - this is the industry of international division of labor pattern of 3.0 times.

However, with the popularization of information technology, Internet and e-commerce, the new requirements of manufacturing market competition have changed.The traditional manufacturing model is product-centered, while the future manufacturing industry will start to deploy product design and manufacturing by interacting with users and according to their personalized needs.Consumers, dealers, factories, supply chains and other links use Internet technology to participate in the whole process.

"New industrial revolution", the future of industrial system in the industry, will be more technology, via the Internet to the network collaborative mode in industrial production, in order to can fully adapt to the production of product development, the adaptation will make the enterprise in the face of customer demand changes, can quickly and easily to respond, and ensure the production competitive, meet the personalized needs of customers.Manufacturing companies will no longer control production from the top down, engage in separate design and research and development, separate production and manufacturing, and separate marketing and service.On the contrary, enterprises, customers and other stakeholders participate in the process of value creation, value transmission and value realization extensively and deeply through the Internet. Customers get personalized products and customized services, and enterprises gain profits.Manufacturing enterprises from the beginning of the customer requirements, to accept orders, seeking production cooperation, procurement of raw materials, product design, production plan and put into production, the whole link all join together, through the network to communicate with each other, and messages will be along the raw material, indicating the necessary steps, to ensure that the final product meet the specific needs of customers.

"Industry 4.0" will promote the reshaping of industrial chain and value chain, guide developed countries to find new markets and development space, and encourage developing countries to carry out industrial upgrading and overtake others on curves.In other words, with the development of the "new industrial revolution", all the links in the value chain will jointly create, transfer and share value.Thus, in the era of "new industrial revolution", the inevitable trend of manufacturing industry in the future is the integration and reorganization of industrial competitive advantages.

(1) competition focuses on timely response to user demand.Based on the parallel of product differentiation strategy and low-cost production mode, timely response to user demand is crucial to the survival and development of enterprises.In this process, consumers also show different types. For example, traditional consumers pay attention to the product itself and its cost performance, experiential consumers favor the application and development of new technologies, and trendy consumers pay attention to new functions.Taking this as an opportunity, fast delivery according to different demands and efficient and high-quality market supply can add more competitive advantages.

(2) the regional division of labor of r&d, design and manufacturing shall be integrated.In the new industrial revolution, the large-scale use of intelligent robots will reduce the role of labor, especially with the large-scale application of 3d printers and related equipment, some production areas that emphasized cheap labor and focused on assembly and manufacturing will lose their competitive advantages.On the contrary, in order to get close to users and respond to the demand in time, designers and production personnel tend to concentrate in the same area and achieve "zero distance" interaction, so as to organize production anytime and anywhere, which makes a significant change in the regional distribution division of existing industries.

The market structure is changing

Industrial policy must conform to the market.From the perspective of consumer demand, the imitative wave consumption phase is basically over, personalized and diversified consumption is gradually becoming the mainstream, and it is more difficult for industry authorities to choose what consumer products should be cultivated and what should not be cultivated.And from the point of investment demand, the traditional industry investment relatively saturated, new technologies, new products, new forms and new business model of investment opportunities, but the new investment opportunities also means greater uncertainty, the industry authority is more difficult to know what kind of new products, new forms and new business models will be successful and become the dominant.From the perspective of technology and supply, with the overall technology level approaching the technological frontier, there is no mature experience of developed countries for reference in emerging technologies and industries, and they are faced with the same high uncertainty as developed countries.

In other words, the new industrial revolution will further bring a high degree of uncertainty to the future industrial and economic development in terms of new industries, technologies, markets, formats, production modes and organizational modes, etc., which makes the selective industrial policy based on the development experience of traditional industries completely lose its basic premise of function.

The G7 is the group of seven most advanced industrialized countries (the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Canada).Historical experience shows that G7 countries such as the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Canada all succeeded by seizing the opportunities of the previous three industrial revolutions.

In the G7 era, almost every manufacturing company aspired to a high-end consumer market of 600 million people.With the improvement of consumption capacity of consumers in G20 countries, a high-end market of 5 billion people is expected to be formed by 2025, and smart products and smart hardware will emerge on a large scale (figure 2).The success of smart phones and wearable devices is not only because they are new things, but also because of the following changes in consumer culture and social transformation -- industry 3.0 is the age of G7, industry 4.0 is the age of G20!

At the same time, with the diversification of markets, customers and technologies, the production efficiency and management cost are continuously reduced, resulting in the phenomenon of diseconomies of scale.

Therefore, under the conditions of market pattern, industrial policies should also be market-oriented to adjust, with reference to the changes in the structure of international and domestic markets, give play to the fundamental role of international and domestic markets in optimizing and allocating economic resources, and enhance the international competitiveness of the industry.

The industrial structure is changing

In the era of mass manufacturing, the profit space of traditional manufacturing links is squeezed more and more.Therefore, it can be seen from the strategic planning of developing advanced manufacturing in developed countries that the concept and added value of manufacturing are shifting from hardware to intangible assets such as services and solutions.Compared with the traditional manufacturing industry, today's manufacturing industry has a greater impact on product functions, control products and products through services.At the same time, unlike hardware products of the past, the demand for services attached to products or solutions based on products is increasing rapidly in the manufacturing industry.

Awareness of services, solutions businesses, has become widespread in the us, Germany, and the UK.Large U.S. companies tend to standardize their services and solutions and promote them to emerging markets.General electric's (GE) move in health care is a case in point.Germany and Britain usually make "manufacturing service" successful by consulting sales.

Meanwhile, "mass customization", with the technical innovation brought by digitization represented by 3D printing and the popularization of the Internet and other information technologies, will have the lowest entry threshold for the manufacturing industry. Individuals without factories and production equipment can easily participate in the manufacturing industry.The lowering of the entry threshold of manufacturing industry also means that some unexpected enterprises or individuals will participate in the manufacturing industry, which is likely to cause greater and huge changes to the business model.

"Individuation" was first promoted by the United States.In American culture, individuality is stronger than organization."Personalized" trend of manufacturing industry is not only the United States manufacturing regression, manufacturing return will also led manufacturing popular in big cities such as San Francisco, some focus on through informatization drive makes the production engineering highlyeffective, professional small handmade manufacturing will prevail in the urban area, they are flexible customization service according to the demands of consumers, by virtue of design, with a large number of production differentiation into competition.

The so-called service-oriented manufacturing is to increase the added value of products, expand more and richer services and solutions.Because the software, services, or solutions built into a product are often invisible, as opposed to hardware, it is called service manufacturing.

In service-oriented manufacturing, "product" production is no longer regarded as manufacturing industry, and "service" continues to play a leading role in manufacturing industry, and the services or solutions produced by products bring great impact on the value of manufacturing industry.Therefore, the manufacturing industry in the future needs to abandon the traditional "hardware" thinking mode and develop the manufacturing industry from the perspective of value-added services.In the future, services will take an increasing proportion in the entire manufacturing value chain, showing a significant growth trend.In the future, manufacturing enterprises will no longer provide customers with simple products, but with integrated solutions of various application software and service forms.

The trend is most pronounced in soft manufacturing.American enterprises such as GE and IBM began to pay attention to the role of services from a very early age. GE has jumped out of the manufacturing mode and devoted itself to software investment.GE is now a data analytics and software company.IBM is further ahead, believing that the era of managing vast amounts of data is coming, and placing a premium on the company's ability to parse mathematics.

In European industrial policy, it was also recognized very early that the root of global competitiveness of manufacturing industry in the future was software.The eu framework includes spending up to 2.7 billion euros on basic research projects (Artemis) for embedded software.Siemens, Bosch and other large enterprises have transformed themselves into it enterprises.

In the manufacturing industry in developed countries, there is a great emphasis on after-sales service, customer service and solution business response.In the future, the business model of manufacturing industry will not only sell hardware, but obtain more added value through after-sales service such as maintenance of hardware products and providing various follow-up services. Its business model will focus on solving customer problems continuously.

(1) industrial boundary blurring.From the top of the pyramid will be born service providers and custom chemical plants, thus forming the hourglass industrial institutions.On the one hand, producer services have evolved into the main industry of manufacturing, whose main business covers r&d, design, logistics and distribution, marketing services and so on, and the two have been deeply integrated.In addition, for the employment structure, the use of new equipment in the production instead of manual labor, labor demand of manufacturing link corresponding decreases, at the same time, with the content of service industries become the leading manufacturing, manufacturing group will focus on the main employment can provide the corresponding service support for the professional personage, as a result, the second and third industry is relatively employment structure will change.Under this condition, the importance of low-end production workers decreases significantly, and the role of high-end professional service providers increases.

(2) industrial organization networking.On the one hand, enterprises separate the production process from the internal vertical chain, and turn to external suppliers to supply needed products, supporting services or application activities, thus forming the vertical separation.On the other hand, the original competitors form a collaborative network relationship due to the horizontal contact of products, business and technology.The blurring of the enterprise's external boundary makes the industrial organization and the external market integrate and extend to all directions of the internal market.In contrast to networking, there is a flattening trend in the internal organizational structure of enterprises, which is manifested by simplified structure and hierarchy, and the grade difference in the organization is diluted. As a result, the overall organization is more elastic and tense, which is conducive to multiple transmission of information.

(3) virtualization of industrial clusters.Based on the comprehensive effect of multi-information, rich communication means and broad network platform, the agglomeration scope, form expression and content structure of industrial clusters will change, and the spatial limitation of geographical clusters in the traditional sense will be gradually broken through and evolved into network agglomeration.By making full use of the advanced information and technical support system created by the network economy, all kinds of products and services can be recreated in the virtual environment.The enterprises in the virtual industrial cluster are particularly sensitive to the response, and can integrate various resources in a short time with low cost and high efficiency, with very high openness and flexibility.This new way of resource allocation affects the internal organizational structure of the industry to some extent. Small and medium-sized enterprises and individual practitioners can break the dilemma of resource and raw material dependence through virtual industrial clusters, so as to promote the manufacturing of new products at a lower cost and with high efficiency.

Product attributes are changing

In the past, whenever manufacturing was mentioned, it was probably thought that various components constituted the core of hardware products.However, with the development of packaging and digitization, the technology of parts production and processing is accelerating to the emerging market countries. As a result, the profit of parts is difficult to maintain.Therefore, the manufacturing industry in developed countries began to pay more attention to packaging by assembling parts, modularization of part functions and systematization of series functions to enhance added value.

Modularity is the assembly of standardized parts to design products.Therefore, it can quickly respond to the diversified demands of the market and meet the diversified demands of consumers.In the past, the production process requires a lot of time and cost. If complex products are assembled through several modules, the problem of diversification and efficiency can be solved at the same time.

However, American enterprises have been acquiring added value in the upper part of the value chain such as research and development and design, which reflects the system-oriented thinking mode.Companies at the top of the value chain should not focus on components, but on systems to capture added value.GE's core technology is systems. The company transformed itself into an energy systems company in the 1980s.

In the "industry 4.0" strategy proposed by Germany, the core is the physical information system (CPS). Large German enterprises such as Siemens and Bosch have also had a high degree of understanding of systematization.Among them, Bosch has launched a packaging system based on autosar international standard and is expanding into emerging markets such as India and China.

For example, general electric's "industrial Internet" in the us and industry 4.0 in Germany generally hope to "visualize" the whole manufacturing process to greatly improve the production efficiency of the manufacturing industry.From the perspective of industrial policy changes, developed countries, represented by Japan, begin to attach importance to improving capital operation efficiency through market competition, and attach importance to competition policy.The main purpose is to adopt policies to encourage enterprises to participate in the market and compete with each other within the same market to improve the capital efficiency of the market and the industry as a whole.

However, in the era of the fourth industrial revolution, even without market competition, capital efficiency can be improved through "visualization".Through "visualization", enterprises can compare their past and future, and surpass their future through benchmarking analysis.That is, firms can improve capital efficiency by competing with their old selves.In traditional market competition and competition, it is indispensable for other enterprises in the same industry to own production equipment. Therefore, from the perspective of the industry as a whole, having surplus capital is an indispensable factor to improve capital efficiency through competition policy.In the new industrial revolution of "visualization", production equipment of other enterprises is no longer needed, capital is leaner, and capital operation will improve efficiency from the perspective of market industry.