ChinaManufacturing2022 – ongoingMidea Group
AI vision and sound inspection at the Hefei washing machine plant
Midea's Hefei washing machine plant added AI vision and sound checks and reported customer-reported defects down 36%
Problem
Midea's laundry appliance plant in Hefei, Anhui, makes more than 1,100 washing machine models. Faults such as abnormal operating noise had to be caught on the line before units reached customers, at high volume and across many variants.
Approach
The plant applied AI and industrial IoT across its operations. An acoustic system recorded each running machine's sound waveform, compared it with the standard and flagged abnormal noise; AI vision checked products alongside it. The World Economic Forum named the plant a Lighthouse factory in March 2022.
Results
Takeaway
The plant combined sound analysis with AI vision to catch defects before shipment. The company's reported gains cover its whole digital programme; it did not state AI inspection's contribution separately.
Categories
- Size
- Large enterprise
- Industry
- Manufacturing
- Business function
- Production and qualityLogistics and supply chain
- Innovation type
- Process innovation
- AI technology
- Computer visionPredictive analytics and ML
- Adoption
- Built in-house
- Evidence
- Company's own claim
Sources
Source summaries
Midea announced that its Jingzhou and Hefei plants joined the World Economic Forum's Lighthouse network. For the Hefei washing machine plant, which makes more than 1,100 SKUs, it credits AI and IoT across the value chain with lead time down 56%, customer-reported defects down 36% and labour productivity up 45%.
Xinhua visits Hefei Midea Laundry Appliance, one of Midea's five Lighthouse factories. It describes a voiceprint system that compares each washing machine's operating sound with the standard and sounds an alarm on abnormal noise, used together with AI vision. The plant's digitalization director says the product defect rate fell 36% after these inspection technologies were applied.
Full details are in the original sources.
