Some time ago, I had a chat with an investor, he asked me: "I heard that system integrators are all outsourcers, is that right?"

The word "outsourcing" may not be a very friendly word for some enterprises that emphasize technology, I dare not jump to conclusions, saying that maybe before, but now we are slowly realizing the importance of increasing independent technology, through various ways to improve competitiveness, and the traditional sense of the system integrator can not be the same.

Think of a previous conversation with the boss of an automotive equipment systems integration business, he also talked about this issue, said the system integrator why not make money, is because it is essentially a trading company, the products are outsourced, there is no core technology, of course, this is the case for some system integrators.

First, stuck in outsourcing

What is a system integrator? A system integrator is actually an engineering firm of some sort. Manufacturers often rely on them to help bring together the disparate parts of an automated factory, with the systems integrator providing the time, capability, and technology needed to turn the solution into a functional automated system.

But what kind of engineering services can technically be called "systems integration"? And what kind of engineering service provider can be called a "system integrator"? These two questions are still controversial.

From a few years ago when the robotics system integrators proliferated, I have heard many industry insiders complain: take robots and other automation equipment randomly installed is a system integrator?

There are also system integrators retort: you think the system integration is no technical content? That's because some companies do not have the technical content, what do we have to do?

Embarrassing place is here, because the system integration program involves a lot of equipment, peripheral facilities, software systems, individual workstations also include a lot of core components, the project back, there is always a part of the business needs to be outsourced out, and even some companies are outsourcing even software systems. If we look at it in this sense, system integrators can indeed be said to be outsourcing, which is why many people think that system integration business is good.

The data also confirms this, GGII data shows that as of 2017, the number of enterprises involved in industrial robots in China reached 3,748, of which the number of system integration enterprises exceeded 3,100.

However, it is also because there are too many water testers, the uneven level of the industry and the disorganization of the market, which has brought about the consequences of vicious competition, in the field of system integration, the profit is getting lower and lower, and the low profit leads to the difficulty of expanding the scale of the system integration enterprises. At present, China's system integration enterprises in the revenue scale of more than 100 million yuan only about 100, the vast majority of enterprises in the system integration business revenue does not exceed 30 million yuan.

But the dilemma is not only here. At present, the domestic system integrators are still mainly to buy foreign automation equipment, product prices, not to mention expensive, but also subject to foreign enterprises, in the late service and technical support is inevitably stretched, which is one of the reasons why many integrators began to independently develop the robot body.

Because many products are subcontracted out to the system integrator is time, cost of unpredictable, the project is carried out two or three months after the discovery of "this road is not work" situation abounds, the project loss is not surprising.

In addition, from the point of view of the business model, system integrators and outsourcers, as well as its labor costs have a great impact, because in order to earn money, you need to take more projects, the need to recruit more people. Whether it is the project's preliminary program design, or the implementation of the project, the latter part of the maintenance, debugging, all need to rely on manpower, and the non-replicability of the production line once again increased the burden of labor costs. However, in the robotics industry, talent has always been a scarce resource.

Second, what are the reasons?

Caused by the system integrators trapped in the outsourcing model, it is difficult to grow bigger and stronger reasons, fundamentally speaking, there are three points.

1. Objective reasons

Objective reasons, of course, is still related to the development of the industry, no matter what the industry will naturally go through a process of germination, development, outbreak, and currently from the robotics industry, system integration is still in the initial stage of development, especially for the domestic robotics system integrators, the ability to productize the technology is still insufficient.

 External factors

The so-called automated production lines or smart factories, because there is no way to copy and reproduce, resulting in the current promotion is very difficult, only to break each part of the final string of a whole production line, which puts a lot of pressure on the integrator.

At present, in the light industrial field, there are not many system integrators have a more comprehensive strength, which also leads to system integrators in front of the end customer does not have the right to speak.

In the robotics industry, although the system integrator set a thousand favorites and a body, but high on the "no end rate" but also let the system integrator of all kinds of pain: "ran 100 projects, the last real demand for maybe only ten, and finally set the program only one, this one to the end can be Can not wrap up or a question mark."

Behind the above reasons, there are external reasons, including high production line requirements, terminal enterprises and system integrators information asymmetry, system integrators advance pressure.

 Internal reasons

Starting from the end-user's application needs, a truly excellent system integrator must be well versed in the process and familiar with automation and robotics applications. However, from the current situation, most of the system integrators are either from other industries suddenly come in, do not understand the robot and automation equipment, even if the previous automation enterprise transformation, for the industry process understanding is not a moment can be proficient.

Third, from where to break out?

Said system integrators are outsourcing companies, some industry insiders are not willing to, "the engine is good again, do not let the customer sit on the engine to travel? Integrators do not build the body, seats and so on, there is no technical content?" So, how does the competitiveness of the system integrator?

For this issue, the general manager of Ewalu Lai Guangxin believes that the core competitiveness of the system integrator is the application of expertise in a particular industry, as well as a full-featured, mature team that can realize the project on the ground.

In Lai Guangxin's view, the survival of system integrators lies in the following points: big (customers, platforms, funds), core technology, non-standard standardization, business model entrepreneurship, professional knowledge, globalization, etc. It is important that system integrators have their own things and accurate positioning.

Looking at the current situation of the system integrator enterprise, almost no company can export the technology in a large-scale, product-oriented way. "System integration is actually the most difficult is the ability to productize, who can make the system integration into a product, more difficult than building airplanes and automobiles, there are a large number of know-how, software, technology, algorithms, and some original things." Yao Weibing, general manager of Guangzhou Mingluo Intelligent Equipment, said. "If we can achieve complete standardization, the effect and non-standard at least 10 times worse, the whole production quality, efficiency and cycle are completely different."

System integration is frankly the ability of product capability, supply chain integration capability and the ability of the entire ecological connection, and the difficulty is to turn all non-standard products into standardized. The same integration, how to design to procurement to delivery, acceptance and then finally after-sales, so that the user becomes foolproof application, and then the delivery period to do shorter, lower cost, higher reliability, better service, which is the competitive advantage of the system integrator.

How to make the non-standard production line to the extreme, so as to make it closer to the standardization. Starting from the supply chain, Guangzhou Mingluo chooses the lean production method to deepen the supply chain and subdivide it into the production process of each component, so as to control each supply link and minimize the cost. Longshen Robotics from the process, the choice is to plough into the white goods industry, today, Longshen has created a series of robotic applications in the home appliance industry in a mature case.

And Liyuanheng chose the modularity of process standards to achieve the standardization of non-standard products. Liyuanheng has established its own cloud platform, gathered the content precipitated by thousands of cases in the past and continuously optimized and consolidated, and carried out standard modularization of various processes in various industries, so as to shorten the development cycle and avoid repetitive work. At the same time, Liyuanhen is very willing to participate in the establishment of industry or process standards by virtue of some of the top customers in Europe, America, Japan and China, as well as a variety of case bases in the industry.

For system integrators, the integration capability of the whole supply chain ecosystem is very important. It is the ultimate goal of integrators to build a system that connects everything, connecting information technology, knowledge experts, etc. in a closed-loop ecosystem.

Fourth, finally what?

Traditional systems integration is a subcontracting model of the project, to the back of the emergence of a system integrator like Komar, do more deep, technology, program, project management are doing their own, and the manufacturing and commissioning part of the subcontract out, but this way in the increasingly low-profit market conditions are gradually eliminated.

Now there are a lot of system integration companies have not defined themselves as system integrators, there are a lot of similar to the "digital solution provider", "smart factory one-stop solution provider", "data service provider There are many new "identities" such as "digital solution provider", "smart factory one-stop solution provider", "data service provider", "comprehensive service provider", etc. It can be seen that system integrators are also slowly becoming more and more sophisticated.

We can see that the system integrator is also slowly changing ideas, which is more typical of the enterprise when the top of the Star, from the listing, the top of the Star has claimed that it is no longer a simple system integrator, the top of the Star's President Wu Fengli pointed out that the top of the Star to build a comprehensive ecosystem of intelligent manufacturing, which includes the body manufacturers, application integrators, core components, servo control systems, financial leasing, training units and other main bodies. .

 At present, focusing on the integration of body welding production line Demeco, in addition to providing hardware production line, but also actively doing two things in the field of services - based on the digital design of the virtual debugging and intelligent operation and maintenance system based on big data. In fact, Demeco virtual debugging technology has been in the domestic leading position, Demeco technology center director Ding Yudong said very optimistic about the big data technology, China is a big country of data, the future will certainly be through the big data technology to help the development of all walks of life.

Bozhong and Siemens jointly developed based on digital twin technology, mainly to cell phones as a model, to show the future of the electronics industry product assembly process, to achieve flexible production.

In Li Yuanheng's view, the core of the digital factory, that is, ERP, PLM, MOM, WMS, DCS five systems fully integrated, and MOM / MES (Manufacturing Operations System) for the pivotal core, the formation of intelligent manufacturing innovation platform.

Recently, Speed Metal has launched an intelligent manufacturing demonstration line with the theme of "Internet + Intelligent Production", which will be based on more than a decade of profound accumulation in the field of motion control, integrated with self-developed software technology, and provide enterprises with one-stop automation solutions through the fusion of Internet technology, informatization, and intellectualization.

It is foreseeable that the future system integrators will appear in a new form, and how to stay up to that point need to break through two points: application and technology.

Furunda Relay

Ltd. is a NI alliance, agents, system integrators, mainly NIGPIB, NILABVIEW, NIDAQ, NI boards, NI data acquisition cards and other products. The company has a full set of hardware and software for product testing should be run solutions, the development scope includes ICT, Boundary Scan, functional testing, system testing. Business covers Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Zhuhai, Foshan, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Xiamen, Xi'an, Chengdu, Wuhan, Chongqing, Beijing and other places.

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